"
"The Rhamda!"
"Yes. The Rhamda Geos."
XXX
THE PLUNGE
The woman left him. For a while Chick reflected upon what she had
said. In full rush of returning vigour his mind was working
clearly and with analytical exactness.
For the first time he noticed a heaviness in the air, overladen,
pregnant. He became aware of a strange, undercurrent of life; of
an exceedingly faint, insistent sound, pulse-like and rhythmical,
like the breathing undertones of multitudes. He was a city man,
and accustomed to the murmuring throbs of a metropolitan heart.
But this was very different.
Presently, amid the strangeness, he could distinguish the tinkle
of elfin bells, almost imperceptible, but musical. The whole air
was laden with a subdued music, lined, as it were, with a golden
vibrancy of tintinnabulary cadence--distant, subdued, hardly more
than a whisper, yet part of the air itself.
It gave him the feeling that he was in a dream. In the realms of
the subconscious he had heard just such sounds--exotic and
unearthly--fleeting and evanescent.
The notion of dreams threw his mind into sudden alertness. In an
instant he was thinking systematically, and in the definite
realisation of his plight.
The woman had spoken of "the Rhamda." True, she had added a
qualifying "Geos," but that did not matter. Whether Geos or Avec,
it was still the Rhamda. By this time Watson was convinced that
the word indicated some sort of title--whether doctor, or lord, or
professor, was not important.
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