49
" To Bob these artifacts were only moderately strange, and he learned to overlook them after a few moments’ nervous glancing around the room. What really paralyzed him was the omnipresent noise—not because it was loud, but because it wasn’t. The room contained at least two dozen clocks, or sub-assemblies of clocks, driven by weights or springs whose altitude or tension stored enough energy, summed, to raise a barn. That power was restrained and disciplined by toothy mechanisms of various designs: brass insects creeping implacably around the rims of barbed wheels, constellations of metal stars hung on dark stolid axle-trees, all marching or dancing to the beat of swinging plumb-bobs. "
― Neal Stephenson , The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World
50
" Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life. He stood at attention in the middle of the big room, hands in his pockets, blowing steam from his mouth and darting his eyes to and fro. These clocks were made to tell time precisely and nothing else. There were no bells, no chimes, and certainly no cuckoos. If Bob was waiting for such entertainments, he’d wait until he was a dusty skeleton surrounded by cobweb-clogged gears. "
― Neal Stephenson , The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World