The ringing, subdivided, sharp, discordant note he struck was swallowed instantly in a sea of noise that seemed not only to have color but even smell to it; you could smell Calcutta! But that, of course, was mere suggestion--a trick of the senses of the sort that makes your mouth water when you see another fellow suck a lemon.
You could even hear the crows that sit on the trees in the park and caw at passers-by.

You could hear the organ in a Christian church, and the snarl of a pious Moslem reading from the Koran.

There was the click of ponies' hoofs, the whirring and honk of motor-cars, the sucking of Hoogli River, booming of a steamer-whistle, roars of trains, and the peculiar clamor of Calcutta's swarms that I can never hear without thinking of a cobra with its hood just ready to raise.
In the sea of noises in the dome one instantly stood out--the voice of a man speaking English with a slightly babu accent.

For exactly as long as the reverberations of those two tuning forks lasted, you could hear him declaiming, and then his voice faded away into the ocean of noise like a rock that has shown for a moment above the surface of a maelstrom.
"That is a member of the legislature, where ignorant men in all-night session make laws for fools to break," said the Gray Mahatma.
Signing to King and me to remain seated, he himself crossed the floor to where the master-tuner sat, and squatting down beside him began picking up tuning forks and striking one against the other.

Each time he did that some city sound or other distinguished itself for a moment, exactly as the theme appears in music; only some of the vibrations seemed to jar against others instead of blending with them, and when that happened the effect was intensely disagreeable.
At last he struck a combination that made me jump as effectually as sudden tooth-ache.