202 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



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 per- 

 manently 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 mel- 

 ancholy, 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, per- 

 sisting 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 al- 

 together if I stayed too long in the belfry. 



