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.
Pages:
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684