lemn gesture to gaze at his performances; he then
cast off his white robe and began all kinds of tricks with the snakes.

He allowed them to bite him, till the blood trickled down his cheeks;
compelled them by the notes of his flute to assume an erect position
and perform a kind of dancing evolution; by spitting into their jaws
he transformed them to all appearance into motionless rods; and then,
dashing them all on to the earth, performed a wild dance in their midst,
yet without once touching a single snake.

Like one possessed, he contorted his pliant limbs until his eyes seemed
starting from his head and a bloody foam issued from his lips.

Suddenly he fell to the ground, apparently lifeless. A slight movement
of the lips and a low hissing whistle were the only signs of life; but,
on hearing the latter, the snakes crept up and twined themselves like
living rings around his neck, legs and body. At last he rose, sang a
hymn in praise of the divine power which had made him a magician,
and then laid the greater number of his snakes in one of the chests,
retaining a few, probably his favorites, to serve as ornaments for his
neck and arms.

The second part of this performance consisted of clever
conjuring-tricks, in which he swallowed burning flax, balanced swords
while dancing, their points standing in the hollow of his eye; drew long
strings and ribbons out of the noses of the Egyptian children, exhibited
the well-known cup-and-ball trick, and, at length, raised the admiration
of the spectators to its highest pitch, by producing five living rabbits
from as many ostrich-eggs.

The Persians formed no unthankful portion of the assembled crowd; on the
contrary, this scene, so totally new, impressed them deeply.

They felt as if in the realm of miracles, and fancied they had now seen
the rarest of all Egyptian rarities. In silence they took their way back
to the handsomer streets of Sais, without noticing how many mutilated
Egyptians crossed their path. These poor disfigured creatures were
indeed no unusual sight for Asiatics, who punished many crimes by the
amputation of a limb. Had they enquired however, they would have heard
that, in Egypt, the man deprived of his hand was a convicted forger, the
woman of her nose, an adulteress; that the man without a tongue had been
found guilty of high treason or false witness; that the loss of the ears
denoted a spy, and that the pale, idiotic-looking woman yonder had been
guilty