At one moment, apropos of nothing and disconnected from all other sounds, you could hear a man or a woman speaking as distinctly as if the individual were up there under the dome; then a chaos of off-key notes would swallow the voice, and the next might be a dog's bark or a locomotive whistle. The only continuously recognizable sounds were a power station and the thunder of waves along the harbor front, and it sounded much more thunderous than it should have done at that season of the year.
The tuning of an orchestra does not nearly approximate the confusion; for the members of the orchestra are all trying to find one pitch and are gradually hitting it, whereas every sound within that cavern seemed to be pitched and keyed differently.
"This is our latest," said the Mahatma. "It is only for two or three hundred years that we have been studying this phenomenon. It may possibly take us two or three hundred years more before we can control it."
I wanted to ask questions, but could not because the cursed inharmony made my senses reel. Nevertheless, you could hear other sounds perfectly. When I struck my hand on the rock floor I could hear the slap at least as distinctly as normal; possibly a little more so. And when the Gray Mahatma spoke, each word was separate and sharp.
"Now you shall hear another city," he said. "Observe that the voices of cities are as various as men's. No two are alike. Sound and color are one and the same thing differently expressed, and the graduations of both are infinite."
He caught the eye of one of the men.
"Calcutta!" he said, in a voice not exactly of command, yet certainly not of deference.
Without acknowledging the order in any other way, the man got on his knees and picked up an enormous tuning fork, whose prongs were about three feet long, and he made some adjustment in the fork of it that took about five minutes. He might have been turning the screw of a micrometer; I could not see. Then, raising the fork above his shoulder, he struck the floor with it, and a master-note as clear as the peal of a bell went ringing up into the dome.
The effect was almost ridiculous. It made you want to laugh. Everybody in the cavern smiled, and I daresay if the truth were known we had discovered the mother-lode of comedy. That one note chased all the others out of the dome as a dog might chase sheep—as the wind blows clouds away—as a cop drives small boys off the grass. They actually scampered out of hearing, and you couldn't imagine them hiding close by, either; they were gone for good, and that one, clear master-note—the middle F—went vibrating around and around, as if scouring out the very smell of what had been there.
"That is the key-note of all nature," said the Mahatma. "All sounds, all colors, all thoughts, all vibrations center in that note. It is the key that can unlock them all."