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