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 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 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.