l
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 center revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water the dried, shriveled,
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 reads 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 "_Ash nahin!
Fareib!_" scornfully under h