better against next visit the swallows give us.






THE FIFTH BOOK.


Chapter 5.I.

How Pantagruel arrived at the Ringing Island, and of the noise that we
heard.

Pursuing our voyage, we sailed three days without discovering anything; on
the fourth we made land. Our pilot told us that it was the Ringing Island,
and indeed we heard a kind of a confused and often repeated noise, that
seemed to us at a great distance not unlike the sound of great,
middle-sized, and little bells rung all at once, as 'tis customary at Paris,
Tours, Gergeau, Nantes, and elsewhere on high holidays; and the nearer we
came to the land the louder we heard that jangling.

Some of us doubted that it was the Dodonian kettle, or the portico called
Heptaphone in Olympia, or the eternal humming of the colossus raised on
Memnon's tomb in Thebes of Egypt, or the horrid din that used formerly to
be heard about a tomb at Lipara, one of the Aeolian islands. But this did
not square with chorography.

I do not know, said Pantagruel, but that some swarms of bees hereabouts may