Prayers, led by a man with a pair of cymbals, started as slow chanting then accelerated and intensified as the sound of the cymbals rose from a tinkle to a crash before falling silent again.
There may well be a man or two concealed somewhere in the vast expanse of the Royal Albert Hall, but if there are indeed any members of the weaker sex present, they had better not hear the urgent tinkle of nature's call.
From outside came the reassuring tinkle of teacups, promising that a break neared.
One tinkle of the temple bell, one whiff of incense, or one sip of rancid yak-butter tea, and they lose their critical faculties.
Mostly these seem to be working; a handful is even making surpluses, says Hilary Boulding, the music director for the Arts Council of England.In the great cacophony of government spending, £30m is a mere tinkle.
WHERE the evening air used to hum with the murmur of prayer and tinkle with temple bells, an eerie silence, punctured only by the piercing cawing of crows, now hangs around the Shwedagon, Myanmar's holiest Buddhist pagoda.
Jimmy Carter conducting foreign policy has always looked a bit like a man playing a fruit machine: he would pull the lever, the machine would tremble, oranges and lemons would whirr and flash, and that would be that; perhaps, occasionally, a coin would tinkle out, but usually not.
SOGGY days at Wimbledon, the tinkle of ice-cream vans and now a terrorist plot: a typical summer in Britain.
Reserved, elegant, self-contained, Maryam wants to belong, yet is unable to relinquish her outsiderness; after four decades in America she still yearns for Iran the homely chatter of her long-dead aunts, the tinkle of the fountain in the family courtyard.
But the Israeli-Lebanese border has remained remarkably quiet since Israel's army retreated to its side of it on May 24th, ending a 22-year occupation.The most persistent sound on the border these days is not Wagner's martial bombast but the plonk and tinkle of vans bringing ice cream to merry-makers.
She cannot laugh with anything but a childlike tinkle, and a twinkle is never far from those cool pools of blue.
