Availability: Usually ships within 48 hours. Ships from and sold by Babblebooks.com.Running time: 11 hr 27 min
The unabridged classic on MP3 audio, narrated by Anais 9000. Three playback speeds on one disk; etext edition included. Running time: 11.4 hours (slow), 10.4 hours (medium), 9.5 hours (fast).
PART I / CHAPTER I
No such throng had ever before been seen in the building
during all its eight years of existence. People were
wedged together most uncomfortably upon the seats;
they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the galleries;
at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries,
they formed broad, dense masses about the doors,
through which it would be hopeless to attempt a passage.
The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles
of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling,
fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some framed
in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned
with shining baldness--but all alike under the spell
of a dominant emotion which held features in abstracted
suspense and focussed every eye upon a common objective point.
The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row
of countenances, was visible in every attitude
--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated atmosphere itself.
An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces
and noting the uniform concentration of eagerness
they exhibited, might have guessed that they were watching
for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly absorbing
criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers
in a great lottery. These two expressions seemed
to alternate, and even to mingle vaguely, upon the
upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the hope
of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse decree.
But a glance forward at the object of this universal
gaze would have sufficed to shatter both hypotheses.
Here was neither a court of justice nor a tombola.
It was instead the [...]
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