“Fa! lal!” said the king.

“’One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. {*22} Another of these magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year. (23} But a still more wonderful conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was neither man nor beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with a black matter like pitch, and fingers that it employed with such incredible speed and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in writing out twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour, and this with so exquisite a precision, that in all the copies there should not be found one to vary from another by the breadth of the finest hair.  This thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or overthrew the mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were exercised equally for evil and for good.’”

“Ridiculous!” said the king.

“’Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in his veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of sitting down to smoke his chibouc in a red-hot oven until his dinner was thoroughly roasted upon its floor. {*24} Another had the faculty of converting the common metals into gold, without even looking at them during the process. {*25} Another had such a delicacy of touch that he made a wire so fine as to be invisible. {*26} Another had such quickness of perception that he counted all the separate motions of an elastic body, while it was springing backward and forward at the rate of nine hundred millions of times in a second.’” {*27}

“Absurd!” said the king.

“’Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody ever yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish their arms, kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance at his will. {*28} Another had cultivated his voice to so great an extent that he could have made himself heard from one end of the world to the other. {*29} Another had so long an arm that he could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad —­ or indeed at any distance whatsoever. {*30} Another commanded the lightning to come down to him out of the heavens, and it came at his call; and served him for a plaything when it came.  Another took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence.  Another constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights. {*31} Another made ice in a red-hot furnace. {*32} Another directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did. {*33} Another took this luminary with the moon and the planets, and having first weighed them with