standing by the juggler, commenced climbing up this rope, suspended to
nothing, supported by nothing. He was kodaked. The boy went up and up,
till he disappeared from view. The smoke from the herbs smouldering in
the braziers seemed almost to blot out the courtyard from view. The
juggler, professing himself angry with the boy for his dilatoriness,
started in pursuit of him up this rope, hanging on nothing. He was
kodaked, too. Finally the man descended the rope, and wiped a
blood-stained knife, explaining that he had killed the boy for
disobeying his orders. He then pulled the rope down and coiled it up,
and suddenly the boy reappeared, and together with his master, began
salaaming profoundly. The trick was over.

The two Europeans returned home absolutely mystified. With their own
eyes they had seen the impossible, the incredible. Then Colonel
Barnard went into his dark room and developed his negatives, with an
astounding result. _Neither the juggler, nor the boy, nor the rope
had moved at all_. The photographs of the ascending rope, of the
boy climbing it, and of the man following him, were simply blanks,
showing the details of the courtyard and nothing else. Nothing
whatever had happened, but how, in the name of all that is wonderful
had the impression been conveyed to two hard-headed, matter-of-fact
Englishmen? Possibly the braziers contained cunning preparations of
hemp or opium, unknown to European science, or may have been burning
some more subtle brain-stealer; possibly the deep salaams of the
juggler masked hypnotic passes, but somehow he had forced two
Europeans to see what he wished them to see.

On one occasion in Colombo, in Ceylon, there was an unrehearsed
episode in a juggler's performance. I was seated on the verandah of
the Grand Oriental Hotel which was crowded with French passengers from