It took but a moment to loosen this and raise the cover, when, to my utter astonishment, I discovered an ordinary telegraph instrument clicking away within.
As I sat gazing at my remarkable find, which was tick-ing and clicking away there in the silence of the desert night, trying to convey some message which I was unable to interpret, my eyes fell upon a bit of paper lying in the bottom of the box beside the instrument.
I became almost frantic as I let my imagination run riot among the possibilities for which this clicking instrument might stand.
Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing clicking, now and then moving the sending-key just to let the other end know that the instrument had been discovered.
Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking of that unfathomable enigma out there in the vast silences of the Sahara has so wrought upon my nerves that reason refuses longer to function sanely.
Had it not been for the chance that caused Cogdon Nestor to throw down his sleeping rug directly over the hidden instru-ment, it might still be clicking there unheard--and this story still unwritten.
Downes interrupted the clicking with his sending-key.
The
clicking of the sheaves in the blocks as the sails ran down, head- sails first, was music to her; and she detected on the instant the jamming of a jib-downhaul, and almost saw the impatient jerk with which the sailor must have cleared it.
Very similar is his reference to seasons through what happens or is done in that season: `when the House- carrier, fleeing the Pleiades, climbs up the plants from the earth', is the season for harvesting; or `when the artichoke flowers and the
clicking grass-hopper, seated in a tree, pours down his shrill song', is the time for rest.