The very possibility of sound seemed to have ceased to exist.

You could not believe that there could be sound, nor remember what sound was like.

A whole sense and its functions had been taken from you, and the resultant void was dead--so dead that no sense could live in it, unless fear is a sense.

You could feel horribly afraid, and I'll tell you what the fear amounted to: There was a feeling that these men were fooling with the force that runs the universe, and that the next stroke might be a mistake that would result like the touching of two high-tension wires, multiplied to the _nth_.

You could not resist the suggestion that the world might burst in fragments at any minute.
Meanwhile the fellow with the tuning fork fiddled again with some adjustment on the thick portion of its stem, and presently whirling it around his head as the old-time warriors used two-handed swords, he brought it down on one of a circle of small anvils that were arranged around him like the figures on a clock-face.
You could almost see Calcutta instantly! The miracle was the reverse of the preceding one.