Out Of The Silence by Erle Cox — Read

DUNDAS rose slowly to his feet, and then stood staring straight before him. After the first cry he made no sound, remaining rigid and motionless, so that he might have appeared to an onlooker as if turned to stone. He was standing on the threshold of a great gallery fully two hundred feet in length. It was ablaze with light from end to end, and at first his confused senses could grasp no detail from the glorious mass of form and colour that confronted him. Then, out of the chaos, came slow order. With faltering, half-fearful footsteps, he went forward, oppressed with a sense of awe he had never felt before. Inside the gallery he paused again, while the real meaning of what he saw impressed itself on his mind. "My God! How wonderful! Surely they have gathered here all the beautiful in the universe." His low-whispered words echoed away in the weird silence. Turning slightly, he looked behind him. The light that poured through the open door seemed concentrated on the sculptured figure in the vestibule. With outstretched hand it seemed commanding him to go forward. The thought came to his mind that it was no effect of chance that had placed that figure where it stood. They who had fashioned the wonders around had surely set it there to speak their behest ages on countless ages after death had struck them into silence. Again Alan's eyes turned to his immediate surroundings. He realised that the gallery he had entered was indeed a gallery of art. Everywhere his eyes fell they encountered some new and unexpected beauty.

From floor to gorgeously decorated arched ceiling the height was about forty feet. One of the first peculiarities of the gallery that struck Alan was the fact that the walls, instead of being parallel, were divergent, so that from a width of not more than twenty-five feet at the entrance, at the farther end they were quite double that distance apart. From the walls about halfway up sprang a wide balcony, which was self-supported, for no pillar broke the splendid vista. The whole floor space was taken up by tables and cabinets, arranged with gangways between them in order to give free access from every side, and each and all was the resting-place for some exquisite work of art. From the roof hung festoons and clusters of globes, each blazing with the same splendid white radiance that had flashed from the lens in the vestibule. Along the walls on every side stood statues, singly and in groups, bearing aloft jewelled vessels of exquisite design that radiated the same glorious light, and wherever it fell it was flashed back and forth from table and cabinet in a myriad splendid rays. It shone on vase and goblet, and flashed from burnished metal, and turned dull gold to glowing fire. It was reflected a thousand fold from the polished splendour of the walls of coloured marbles.