saw at Batavia. Passing over the basket-murder trick, which Houdin and others
have made familiar to the English public, we come to “a thing which surpasses
all belief;” which, indeed, Mr. Melton would scarcely have ventured to relate
had not thousands witnessed it at the same time as himself.
One of the gang took a ball of cord, and grasping one end in his hand hurled the
other up into the air with such force that it was entirely lost to sight. He then
climbed up the cord as rapidly as a sailor up his ship’s rigging, and to such a
height that he became invisible. Melton stood full of astonishment, and at a loss
to know what next would happen; when, behold, a leg tumbled out of the air! A
conjuror who was on the watch for it immediately snatched it up, and threw it
into a basket. Down came a hand, and then another leg, and, in short, all the
members of the body successively fell from the air, to find shelter in the basket.
The last of the ghastly shower was the head; and no sooner had it touched the
ground than the man who had gathered the limbs and stowed them in the basket,
turned them all out again topsy-turvy. Straightway they began to creep together,
until they composed a whole man, who stood up and walked about just as before,
having sustained apparently no damage! “Never in my life,” says Melton, “was I
so astonished as when I beheld this wonderful performance, and I doubted now
no longer that those misguided men did it by the help of the Devil. For it seems
to me totally impossible that such things should be accomplished by natural
means.”[38]
The Emperor Jahángir in his “Memoirs” (cited by Yule) describes the exploits of
some Bengali jugglers, who exhibited before him. Two of them bear a close
resemblance to the foregoing. Thus: they produced a man whom they divided
limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. These mutilated
members they scattered along the ground, where they remained for some time. A
sheet or curtain was extended over the spot, and one of the men placing himself
under it, in a few minutes reappeared, in company with the individual supposed
to have been so roughly dissected, in such perfect health and condition, that one
might have safely sworn he had never received the slightest wound or injury.
Again: they produced a chain, fifty cubits long, and one end of it threw towards
the sky, when it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then
brought forward, and being placed at the lower end of the chain, ran up it to the
other end, and immediately vanished. In the same manner a boy, a panther, a
lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain to disappear, in their turn, at
the other end of it. And, lastly, the chain was taken down and put away in a bag,
without any of the spectators discovering in what manner the different animals