文档介绍：THE RED ONE
THE RED ONE
by Jack London
1
THE RED ONE
THE RED ONE
THERE it was! The abrupt liberation of sound! As he timed it with
his watch, Bassett likened it to the trump of an archangel. Walls of cities,
he meditated, might well fall down before so vast pelling a
summons. For the thousandth time vainly he tried to analyse the tone-
quality of that enormous peal that dominated the land far into the strong-
holds of the surrounding tribes. The mountain gorge which was its
source rang to the rising tide of it until it brimmed over and flooded earth
and sky and air. With the wantonness of a sick man's fancy, he likened it
to the mighty cry of some Titan of the Elder World vexed with misery or
wrath. Higher and higher it arose, challenging and demanding in such
profounds of volume that it seemed intended for ears beyond the narrow
confines of the solar system. There was in it, too, the clamour of protest
in that there were no ears to hear prehend its utterance.
- Such the sick man's fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound.
Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a
thrummed taut cord of silver - no; it was none of these, nor a blend of
these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and
experience with which to describe the totality of that sound.
Time passed. Minutes merged into quarters of hours, and quarters of
hours into half-hours, and still the sound persisted, ever changing from its
initial vocal impulse yet never receiving fresh impulse - fading, dimming,
dying as enormously as it had sprung into being. It became a confusion
of troubled mutterings and babblings and colossal whisperings. Slowly it
withdrew, sob by sob, into whatever great bosom had birthed it, until it
whimpered deadly whispers of wrath and as equally seductive whispers of
delight, striving still to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret, some
understanding of infinite import and value. It dwindled to a ghost o