For we not only saw the water, but we heard it !⁠ ⁠… We heard it flow, we heard it ripple!⁠ ⁠… Do you understand that word “ripple?”⁠ ⁠… It is a sound which you hear with your tongue! ⁠ ⁠… You put your tongue out of your mouth to listen to it better!

Lastly⁠—and this was the most pitiless torture of all⁠—we heard the rain and it was not raining! This was an infernal invention.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I knew well enough how Erik obtained it! He filled with little stones a very long and narrow box, broken up inside with wooden and metal projections. The stones, in falling, struck against these projections and rebounded from one to another; and the result was a series of pattering sounds that exactly imitated a rainstorm.

Ah, you should have seen us putting out our tongues and dragging ourselves toward the rippling riverbank! Our eyes and ears were full of water, but our tongues were hard and dry as horn!