I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a
thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal cutter betrayed himself by his
most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that
unspeakable crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as high as he
could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now I knew how
fire--spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at ease. The
business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to
raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the
girls shrieked at the jet of fire, and the head dropped, chin down on the
floor, with a thud; the whole body lying then like a corpse with its arms
trussed. There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the
blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets,
while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms.
Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo's _huqa_, and she slid it
across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall
were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped paper frames, of the Queen
and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and, to my
thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.
Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and
rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach
up.
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