Then we all sat down in line.
It was actual physical torture until you were used to it, and I doubt whether you could get used to it without somebody to educate you--some scientist to show you how to defend your nerves against that outrageous racket.

For the sounds were all out of adjustment and proportion.
Nothing was in key.

It was as if the laws of acoustics had been lifted, and sound had gone crazy.
At one moment, apropos of nothing and disconnected from all other sounds, you could hear a man or a woman speaking as distinctly as if the individual were up there under the dome; then a chaos of off-key notes would swallow the voice, and the next might be a dog's bark or a locomotive whistle.

The only continuously recognizable sounds were a power station and the thunder of waves along the harbor front, and it sounded much more thunderous than it should have done at that season of the year.
The tuning of an orchestra does not nearly approximate the confusion; for the members of the orchestra are all trying to find one pitch and are gradually hitting it, whereas every sound within that cavern seemed to be pitched and keyed differently.
"This is our latest," said the Mahatma.

"It is only for two or three hundred years that we have been studying this phenomenon.