- end_line
- 8602
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.413Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 8562
- text
- through the timidity of the ill-starred workman—should be rung upon the
entrance of the bier into the cathedral. The most robust man of the
country round was assigned the office of bell-ringer.
But as the pall-bearers entered the cathedral porch, naught but a
broken and disastrous sound, like that of some lone Alpine land-slide,
fell from the tower upon their ears. And then, all was hushed.
Glancing backwards, they saw the groined belfry crashed sideways in. It
afterwards appeared that the powerful peasant, who had the bell-rope in
charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed
down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking
metal, too ponderous for its frame, and strangely feeble somewhere at
its top, loosed from its fastening, tore sideways down, and tumbling in
one sheer fall, three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried
itself inverted and half out of sight.
Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started from
a small spot in the ear; which, being scraped, revealed a defect,
deceptively minute in the casting; which defect must subsequently have
been pasted over with some unknown compound.
The remolten metal soon reassumed its place in the tower’s repaired
superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically
in its belfry-bough-work of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the
first anniversary of the tower’s completion—at early dawn, before the
concourse had surrounded it—an earthquake came; one loud crash was
heard. The stone-pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown
upon the plain.
So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew
him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too
heavy for the tower. So the bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood
had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.
- title
- Chunk 11