THE LAKE VILLAGE 199 



In less than three minutes it became unendurable, 

 and I then slipped out on to the roof to save myself 

 from some tremendous disaster. In a minute I was 

 back again, and with intervals of escape to the roof 

 I remained till the ringing finished. I could not have 

 stood it otherwise, and as it was, I feared every 

 moment that it would deafen me permanently so 

 that I would no more hear birds sing. That, to me, 

 would be the end of all things. Pollock, in the article 

 mentioned above, has described the sensations I 

 experienced in a sentence or two. "It is not like the 

 voice of any single singer nor like the voices of a 

 trained choir," he wrote. "It is more the speech, 

 resolved into musical sound, of a vast crowd half 

 perhaps rather than wholly human, whose accents 

 vary from the highest joyousness to the deepest 

 melancholy, from notes of solemn warning to cries of 

 terrifying denunciation and all that of course with an 

 infinity of half and quarter shades of expression." 



Probably the St. Cuthbert bells were larger than 

 those he heard, and perhaps I was closer to them — 

 I was in fact in the belfry with them — as I found no 

 joyous expression in the sound at all; it was all 

 terrible, and the worst thing in it, which he does not 

 mention, was a continuous note, a single loud metallic 

 sound, persisting through all the shrieking, crashing, 

 and roaring, like the hum of a threshing-machine so loud 

 and sharp that it seemed to pierce the brain like a steel 

 weapon. It was this unbroken sound which was hardest 

 to endure and would, I imagined, send me out of my 

 senses altogether if I stayed too long in the belfry. 



