impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved
him. It was like being sick.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire
blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much
louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking
to himself:

"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another
manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a
fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."

I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire
and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the
sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything
was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.

"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."

Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time,
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.