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breathless interval they held him savagely in mute interrogation, causing him to squint and toss his head; then with the stroke of a scimitar the curved beak carved the air. And with its wingspread thrusting upward, the feathers of its white-tipped tail flexed fanlike between feathery, wide-spread thighs, the eagle was no longer scrutinizing his face, but staring blandly in the direction indicated by its taloned clutch of sharp-pointed arrows.
    Alarmed by the image’s stubborn persistence, the Senator feltimprisoned in an airless space from which he viewed the placid scene of the chamber as through the semitransparent scrim of a theatrical stage. A scrim against which the heraldic symbols in whose name he served flashed and flickered in wild enigmatic disarray. And even as he forced himself to continue his address, he was aware that his voice was no longer reaching him through the venerable chamber’s acoustics but now, sounding muted, metallic and stridently strange, through the taut vibrations of his laboring throat. Leaning forward and controlling himself by grasping the lectern, he recalled the famous cartoon which presented a man struggling desperately to prevent a huge octopus from dragging him into a manhole while a crowd thronged past unnoticing. For despite the disorder within his vision, the chamber appeared quite normal. Listening attentively, his audience was apparently unaware of his distress.
    In whose name and under what stress do they think I’m speaking? the Senator thought. For whose hidden interests and by what manipulation of experience and principle would they hang the bird on me? But now, upon a flash of movement from above, the eagle appeared to leap aloft, reducing the rich emblazonment of the Seal to an exploding chaos of red, white, blue and gold through which the Senator’s attention flashed to the distant gallery where with the amplified roar of his echoing voice he became aware of a collectivity of obscure faces, staring down.…
    Anonymous, orderly and grave, they loomed high across the chamber, receding upward and away in serried tiers, their heads protruding slightly forward in the tense attitude of viewers bemused by some puzzling action unfolding on a distant screen which they were observing from the tortured angle provided by a segregated theater’s peanut gallery. And as the Senator’s words sped out across the chamber’s solemn air the faces appeared to shimmer in rapt and disembodied suspension, as though in expectation of somecrucial and long-awaited revelation which would make them whole. A revelation apparently even now unfolding through the accelerating rhythms, the bounce and boom of images sent flighting across the domed and lucid space from the flex and play of his own tongue, throat and diaphragm …
    The effect upon the Senator was electric. Reassured and pleasurably challenged by their anonymous engrossment, he experienced a surge of that gaiety, anguished yet wildly free, which frequently seized him during an oration, and now, with a smooth shifting of emotional gears, he felt himself carried swiftly beyond either a concern with the meaning of the mysterious vision or the rhetorical fitness of his words onto that plane of verbal exhilaration for which he was notorious. And thereupon, in the gay and reckless capriciousness of his virtuosity, he found himself attempting to match that feat, long glorified in senatorial legend, whereby through a single flourish of his projected voice the orator raises his audience to fever pitch and shatters the chamber’s windowpanes.
    Do that , the Senator thought, and without a single dissenting Heh-ell-naw! the gentleman from Little Rock will call for changing the outlandish name—of Arkansaw!
    Stifling an upsurge of laughter the Senator plunged ahead, tensing his diaphragm to release the full resonance of his voice. But as he did so it was as though his hearing had been thrown out of phase. Resounding through the acoustics of the