apidly subsided and receded; for the composer had so
cunningly scored it that groups of instruments were withdrawn without
losing the thread of the musical tale. The tone, spun to a needle
fineness, rushed up the fingerboard of the fiddles accompanied by the
harp in a billowing glissando and--then on ragged rims of wide thunder
a gust of air seemed to melt lights, men, instruments into a darkness
that froze the eyeballs. With a scorching whiff of sulphur and violets,
a thin, spiral scream, the music tapered into the sepulchral clang of a
tam-tam. And Pobloff, his broad face awash with fear saw by a solitary
wavering gas-jet that he was alone and upon his knees. Not a musician
was to be seen. Not a sound save dull noises from the street without. He
stared about him like a man suffering from some hideous ataxia, and the
horror of the affair plucking at his soul, he beat his breast, groaning
in an agony of envy.

"Oh, it is the Fourth Dimension they have found--my black abysm! Oh, why
did I not fall into it with the ignorant dogs!" He was crying this over
and over when the doors were smashed and Pobloff taken, half delirious,
to his home....

III

The houses of Balak are seldom over two storeys high; an occasional
earthquake is the reason for this architectural economy. Pobloff's
sleeping apartment opened out upon a broad balcony just above the
principal entrance. As he lay upon his couch his thoughts revolved like
a coruscating wheel of fire. What! How! Where! And Luga, was she lost to
him in that no-man's land of a fourth dimension? He closed his weary
wet eyes. Then pricked by a sudden thought he sat up in jealous rage.
No-man's land? Yes, but the entire orchestra of fifty-two men were with
her--and he hated the horn-player, for had he not intercepted poisonous
glances between Luga and that impertinent jackanapes? In his torture
Pobloff groaned aloud and wondered how he had reached his home: he could
remember nothing after the ebon music had devoured his band. How did it
come about? Why was he not drawn within the fatal whirlpool of sound? Or
was he outside the fringe of the vortex? As these questions thronged the
chambers of his brain the consciousness of what he had discovered,
accomplished, flashed over him in a superior hot wave of exultation. "I
am greater than Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton!" he raved, only stopping for
breath. Too well had he calculated his trap for the detection of a third
dimension in Time, a