The silence in the Gallery of the Hanging Bells was an ancient, suspended thing that possessed physical weight.
Entering Entry hall 150 through the heavy bronze portal, Qiao Ming stepped onto a stone floor of dark, unpolished red stone flags whose joints were filled with lead packing. The hall stretched five hundred paces into the gloom, flanked by twin aisles of fluted giant pillars that soared eighty arm-lengths into a vaulted ceiling of pale, sound limestone. Suspended from the ribs of the vault by chains of green-patinated sea-bronze hung nine thousand eight hundred and forty bells and chime-rods, arranged in nested octaves that mirrored the movements of forgotten planets.
The bells ranged from tiny cups of cast bell-metal no larger than an acorn to huge inverted bronze cooking pots the size of hayricks, each bell cast with raised trigrams of the ancient water registers.
They had hung in the darkness for seven thousand years without ringing. In the dead, dry air of the high vaults, the clappers hung suspended by oiled rawhide cords, hovering barely a finger’s breadth from the bronze sound-bows. The slightest shaking traveling through the bedrock—a distant sea-quake, the passage of a deep whale through the outer straits, or the heavy stomp of an iron boot—caused the entire ceiling to hum with a low, sub-bass shaking that made the skin on the back of the neck prickle with cold deep ring.
