No More Learning

Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his
most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that
unspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as
high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now, I
knew how fire-spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at ease.
The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without
trying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have
thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head
dropped, chin down, on the floor with a thud; the whole body lying then
like a corpse with its arms trussed.

There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the blue-green
flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets, while
Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms.
Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo's huqa, and she slid it
across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall,
were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped paper frames, of the
Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and,
to my thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and
rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach
up. There was a faint "plop" from the basin--exactly like the noise
a fish makes when it takes a fly--and the green light in the centre
revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, the dried,
shrivelled, black head of a native baby--open eyes, open mouth and
shaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling
exhibition.
We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man,
and you will realize less than one-half of the horror of that head's
voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort
of "ring, ring, ring," in the note of the voice, like the timbre of a
bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes
before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me.
I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the
hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing
to do with any man's regular breathing, twitching away steadily. The
whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphin that
one read about sometimes and the voice was as clever and as appalling a
piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head
was "lip-lip-lapping" against the side of the basin, and speaking. It
told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and of
the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always
shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time
of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were
night and day watching over the man's life; and that he would eventually
recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in
the basin, were doubled.

Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for
twice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used
when he rose from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman of
masculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say "Asli
nahin! Fareib!