It was scarcely vivid;
for in everything that is vivid there seems to be something small, the
point to which wonders converge, the intense spark to which many fires
have given themselves as food, the drop which contains the murmuring
force of innumerable rivers. It was more than vivid. It was reliantly
dim, as is that pulse of life which is heard through and above the crash
of generations and centuries falling downwards into the abyss; that
persistent, enduring heart-beat, indifferent in its mystical regularity,
that ignores and triumphs, and never grows louder nor diminishes,
inexorably calm, inexorably steady, undefeated--more--utterly unaffected
by unnumbered millions of tragedies and deaths.

Many sounds rose from far down beneath the tower, but at first Domini
did not hear them. She was only aware of an immense, living silence, a
silence flowing beneath, around and above her in dumb, invisible waves.
Circles of rest and peace, cool and serene, widened as circles in a pool
towards the unseen limits of the satisfied world, limits lost in the
hidden regions beyond the misty, purple magic where sky and desert met.
And she felt as if her brain, ceaselessly at work from its birth,
her heart, unresting hitherto in a commotion of desires, her soul, an
eternal flutter of anxious, passionate wings, folded themselves together
gently like the petals of roses when a summer night comes into a garden.

She was not conscious that she breathed while she stood there. She
thought her bosom ceased to rise and fall. The very blood dreamed in her
veins as the light of evening dreamed in the blue.

She knew the Great Pause that seems to divide some human lives in two,
as the Great Gulf divided him who lay in Abraham's bosom from him who
was shrouded in the veil of fire.

BOOK II. THE VOICE OF PRAYER

CHAPTER VII

The music of things from below stole up through the ethereal spaces to
Domini without piercing her dream. But suddenly she started with a
sense of pain so acute that it shook her body and set the pulses in her
temples beating. She lifted her arms swiftly from the parapet and turned
her head. She had heard a little grating noise which seemed to be near
to her, enclosed with her on this height in the narrow space of the
tower. Slight as it was, and short--already she no longer heard it--it
had in an instant driven her out of Heaven, as if it had been an angel
with a flaming sword. She felt sure that there must be s