aning out over the precipice, he discerned beneath him a formidable
array of bells hanging from oak supports lined with iron. The sombre
bell metal was slick as if oiled and absorbed light without refracting
it. Bending backward, he looked into the upper abyss and perceived new
batteries of bells overhead. These bore the raised effigy of a bishop,
and a place in each, worn by the striking of the clapper, shone golden.

All were in quiescence, but the wind rattled against the
sounding-shutters, stormed through the cage of timbers, howled along the
spiral stair, and was caught and held whining in the bell vases.
Suddenly a light breeze, like the stirring of confined air, fanned his
cheek. He looked up. The current had been set in motion by the swaying
of a great bell beginning to get under way. There was a crash of sound,
the bell gathered momentum, and now the clapper, like a gigantic pestle,
was grinding the great bronze mortar with a deafening clamour. The tower
trembled, the balcony on which Durtal was standing trepidated like the
floor of a railway coach, there was the continuous rolling of a mighty
reverberation, interrupted regularly by the jar of metal upon metal.

In vain Durtal scanned the upper abyss. Finally he managed to catch
sight of a leg, swinging out into space and back again, in one of those
wooden stirrups, two of which, he had noticed, were fastened to the
bottom of every bell. Leaning out so that he was almost prone on one of
the timbers, he finally perceived the ringer, clinging with his hands to
two iron handles and balancing over the gulf with his eyes turned
heavenward.

Durtal was shocked by the face. Never had he seen such disconcerting
pallor. It was not the waxen hue of the convalescent, not the lifeless
grey of the perfume-or snuff-maker, it was a prison pallor of a
bloodless lividness unknown today, the ghastly complexion of a wretch of
the Middle Ages shut up till death in a damp, airless, pitch-dark
_in-pace_.

The eyes were blue, prominent, even bulging, and had the mystic's
readiness to tears, but their expression was singularly contradicted by
the truculent Kaiser Wilhelm moustache. The man seemed at once a dreamer
and a fighter, and it would have been difficult to tell which character
predominated.

He gave the bell stirrup a last yank with his foot and with a heave of
his loins regained his equilibrium. He mopped his brow and smiled down
at Des Hermies.

"Well! well!" he said,