No More Learning

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was
stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my
wrist round his forehead, a salmon-colored loin-cloth round his middle,
and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was
the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-gray in the first
place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only
see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face of
a demon--a ghoul--anything you please except of the sleek, oily old
ruffian who sat in the day-time over his turning-lathe downstairs. He
was lying on his stomach, with his arms turned and crossed behind him,
as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only
parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the
body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre
of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin,
with a pale blue-green light floating in the centre like a night-light.
Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How
he did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine
and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion.

The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow
curl and uncurl of the laboring back-muscles.
Janoo from the bed was
breathing seventy to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes;
and old Suddhoo, fingering at the dirt that had got into his white
beard, was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the creeping,
crawly thing made no sound--only crawled! And, remember, this lasted for
ten minutes, while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo
gasped, and Suddhoo cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a
thermantidote paddle. 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.