They ceased their
interruptions, and the old man, Arius, took up the debate. For a time
all those impassioned faces were intent upon him; they listened as
though they sought occasion, and suddenly as if by a preconcerted
arrangement they were all thrusting their fingers into their ears and
knitting their brows in assumed horror; some were crying aloud and
making as if to fly. Some indeed tucked up their garments and fled. They
spread out into a pattern. They were like the little monks who run from
St. Jerome's lion in the picture by Carpaccio. Then one zealot rushed
forward and smote the old man heavily upon the mouth....
The hall seemed to grow vaster and vaster, the disputing, infuriated
figures multiplied to an innumerable assembly, they drove about like
snowflakes in a gale, they whirled in argumentative couples, they spun
in eddies of contradiction, they made extraordinary patterns, and then
amidst the cloudy darkness of the unfathomable dome above them there
appeared and increased a radiant triangle in which shone an eye. The eye
and the triangle filled the heavens, sent out flickering rays, glowed
to a blinding incandescence, seemed to be speaking words of thunder
that were nevertheless inaudible.
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