I liked not the avaricious gleam in his little
slits of eyes.

The bells clanged and clashed as they would break from their fastenings
and drop upon us, and my brain reeled with the discord. On they beat and
boomed, as if they would never stop. No melody was now apparent, though
down below it had seemed as if their sweetness was all too brief. Up
here in the tower they were not at all melodious; they were rough,
discordant, and uneven, some sounding as though out of tune and cracked.
All of the mystery and glamour of sweet tenderness, all their pathos and
weirdness, had quite vanished, and here amid the smell of lubricating
oil and the heavy, noisy grinding of the cog wheels, and the rattle of
iron chains, all the poetry and elusiveness of the bells was certainly
wanting.

All at once just before me a great hammer raised its head, and then
fell with a sounding clang upon the rim of a big bell; the half hour had
struck. All about us the air resounded and vibrated with the mighty
waves of sound. From the bells above finally came the hum of faint
harmonics, and then followed silence like the stillness that ensues
after a heavy clap of thunder.

Cerberus now beckoned me to accompany him amongst the bells, and showed
me the machinery that sets this great marvel of sound in motion. He
showed me the huge "tambour-carillon," with barrels all bestudded with
little brass pegs which pull the wires connected with the great hammers,
which in their turn strike the forty-six bells, that unrivaled chime
known throughout Flanders as the master work of the Van den Gheyns of
Louvain, who were, as already told, the greatest bell founders of the
age.

The great hour bell weighing, as already noted, nearly a ton, required
the united strength of eight men to ring him. Cerberus pointed out to me
the narrow plank runway between the huge dusty beams, whereon these
eight men stood to their task. The carillon tunes, he told me, were
altered every year or so, and to do this required the entire changing of
the small brass pegs in the cylinders, a most formidable task, I
thought. He explained that the cutting of each hole costs sixty
_centimes_ (twelve cents) and that there were about 30,000 holes, so
that the change must be quite expensive, but I did not figure it out
for myself.

The musical range of this carillon chime of Malines may be judged by the
fact that it was possible to play, following on the hour, a selection
from "Don Pasquale,"