floating in the center 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.