the automatic chessplayer, which a
year before my visit had gained suddenly a reputation for playing at
times with the skill of a fiend. I faced the mechanism that afternoon
for the first time, little realizing the intimacy, if I may use the
word, which was to spring up between it and me.

The representation of a squatting Arab, robed in red Oriental swathes
and with a chessboard fastened to its knees, sat cross-legged on a
box-like structure. Upon dropping a coin into a slot in the flat top,
two folding-doors in front of this box would open for a few moments,
showing a glass-covered interior, which, as far as the back of the box,
was filled with a tangle of wheels and pulleys, seeming to preclude the
possibility that a human being could hide therein. As soon as these
doors closed, a flat space in the chest of the Sheik opened, with a
faint purr of machinery to expose internal organs of metal levers and
gears.

The effect of this last exposure was extraordinary, and in all the time
I knew the Sheik, I never got over it. The moment this cavity in his
chest opened, he was an impersonal piece of mechanism; the moment it
closed, however, the soul, the personality of a living being returned,
and it seemed to me that the brown, wax skin of his nodding head, the
black hair of his pointed beard, the red of his curved, malicious lips,
the whites of his eyes, which showed when he moved with a squeak of
unoiled bearings in his neck, and even the jointed fingers of his hand,
with which he moved the pawns in short, mechanical jerks about the
board, all belonged to a human body, containing an individual
intelligence.

This was my feeling as the Judge arranged the chess problem on the board
above the gilt-and-red Turkish slippers on the feet of the thing's
shapeless cotton-stuffed legs, and briefly described the point to be
gained by the Sheik in the series of moves which he was to begin and the
success of which I was to combat. The creature made its first move in
its deliberate manner and then I stepped forward.

I ask you to believe me that, as I did so, the whirring of wheels within
the contrivance stopped, and at that moment I heard a human throat
inhale a long breath with a frightened gasp! It was as if the balanced
glass eyes of the figure had recognized me or seen in my coming an event
long expected.

For a moment I hesitated, then made my move. The figure hesitated, made
another. I studied the situation before my second