Chandu, or Xanadu, and its palace, suggested to Coleridge one of his most
exquisite passages of description:—
“In Xanadu did Kubla Kaan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
By caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground,
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests, ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.”Xanadu has disappeared, and so has its palace, but the superstitions practised in
it are still in vogue among the Mongolian peoples. The word “Bakhshi,”
however, has come to have a different meaning in different districts; among the
Kirghiz Kazzaks it is applied, as Marco Polo applied it, to a conjuror or
medicine-man; among the modern Mongols it signifies “a teacher,” and is
bestowed on the oldest and most learned priest of a community; in Western
Turkestan it means “a bard;” in our Indian army it is “a paymaster.”
The jugglery of the goblets, to which Marco Polo refers, was not uncommon in
Mediæval Europe. Colonel Yule cites[37] the Jesuit Delrio as lamenting the
credulity of certain princes, otherwise of pious repute, who allowed diabolic
tricks to be played in their presence; as for instance that things of iron, and silver
goblets, or other heavy articles, should be moved by bounds from one end of a
table to the other, without the use of a magnet or of any attachment. The pious
prince appears to have been Charles IX., and the conjuror a certain Cesare
Maltesio. In old legends this trick is one of the sorceries ascribed to Simon
Magus. “He made statues to walk; leapt into the fire without being burnt; flew in
the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once,”—
an accomplishment not confined to conjurors,—“converted himself into a pillar;
caused closed doors to fly open of their own will; and made the vessels in a
house seem to move of themselves.”
Colonel Yule asserts that the profession and practice of exorcism and magic in