SPELLS OF EGYPT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 15 November 1924, Page 14

SPELLS OF EGYPT.

A MASK EL YNI AN MEMOBY. (From a Covrespondent in the London Tinifes.) It was a ray of sunshine, darting through a' clumsily curtained window into the black recesses of the cabinet, that- betrayed to the Areliimage John Nevii Maskelyne the trickery of the Spiritualist Brothers Deavonport. It would have needed more than a sunbeam to expose oiie of • his own illusions. Yet light is the natural foe to the most honest magician. Like Bacon when reproaching the plain truth, the wizard deprecates “naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so Stately and daintily ascandlelight.” The words would come to mind in these latter years, as one sat in the gay cleanliness, of St. George’s Hall to watch the Maskelyne family offering new lamps for old. .They may have been twice as clever, but they lacked the ancient impressive murkiness.. Had not the sorcerers, the onlooker was tempted -to cry, one trick more in their wallets —the trick that just abolishes 30 years —back to boyhood? One flick of your wand only, Mr. Maskelyne! Thank you! In a dark passage in Piccadilly’the packed crowd of us surges to and fro. Nurses, aunts, grandmammas are getting a trifle red, and spilling halfcrowns from their purses. Harsh voices proclaim, like a knell, “Five shilling seats' all sold! Standing room only!” One cold and sickening moment, and then She-who-must-be-obeyed beckons from the steps, waving the precious blue slips. (Wonderful woman! How did she do it ?.) We clatter up winding stairs, charge down sepulchral corridors, slap swing-doors behind us. We are in! It seems too marvellous to be true, but at least there is no deception about this musty smell of the sarcophagus, this air that fills our agitated lungs with the impalpable dust of dead Pharaohs, those footlights -?? corpselights rather—that .gleam pallidly on the painted colonnade of Karnak, those disquieting outlines of drums and gohgstieks, afloat, it would almost seem, in tire dimness overhead.

It is as well, perhaps, that the first tinkle of the hell, and upward leap of pictured Karnak, herald nothing more, alarming than the suave, phlegmatic presence of David Levant. How they wriggle for delight, the small boy and girl he lias fetched from the audience to -help him, and how loud it still sounds, the thud of great cahnon-hall (which you said must be indiarubber to sprout out of, a champagne glass), as he drop's it, like a languid epigram, oil the hoards. And now the Vast full moon of Mel. B. Sburr’s face, at the piano, or hanging .haggardly oyer the zither, as the. pathos of )‘The Old Mill Wheel” splashes like a tidal Wave across the footlights, and now, perhaps, Some blur fed and dancing photographs on a sheet, a queer new invention Worked by long reels of gelatine— Mr. Maskelyhe holds up a strip of stuff to show how it is. dbne.

Thtis you had become, more at home by the time the Organist clambered up •into his seat ' for the symphonic entr’acte, and then you,really had need of all your nerve. For, ‘ while he laboured With hands aiid feet, ripples of piano music and the blare of ghostly trumpets blended With the peal of the organ; and presently, as the “storm at sea” developed, purple lightning zig-zagged over the proscenium, thunder crashed from the kettle-drums -on the ledge of the gallery,, a distant Clock oii land chimed midnight from nowhere at all, and .the bell of the. Incheape Bock clanged- Suddenly between. your feet. Then you knew that the spirits were . taking a hand, and that this dingy, dun-eoloured room was haunted ground. So at last the curtain drew up on the country road,, and the tall cabinet qri its skeleton trestles in the centre. Bland Mr. Maskelyne, with his long wand and exquisite shirtfront, has done his tanping and' explaining; the fabulous offer of £SOO to the discoverer of the trick has been reiterated; the “committee” from the audiehce are seated in a semi-circle round the cabinet. And now—inbment of moments!—music strikes iip. the scolding voice’of the old Watch Officer is heard far off, and he coiries, hirsute, nautical, enigmatic, he comes, Cook himself (I abhor the spelling Cooke), the dximb enchanter of the sea. He speaks no word while they load him with idle manacles, while they bar and padlock him into the coffin-shaped cell. Fools! Will such bonds as yoUrs hold the Super-Vanderdecken? There! The doors are open again, and the cage is empty. No, it is hot! See that crawling black thing on the floor, that enorrabus, sinister monkey! Let iis, ratherqveft o'ur eyes, and dream we are with Cbok, who has dropped through, a spiral to the other side of the globe, and already sweeps along under piled white canvas, through foaming sapphire seas How did he get away? Through the walls, the roof, or the floor? How often will the problem revolve in our minds, till the Livy before us melts away into the limbo of the lost decades. Only think! Five hundred pounds if we could guess it ... six possibilities four walls, floor and roof, and £ooo. . . . What was that ?• . . . Five hundred times the sentence “I must not dream in form.” ... Oh> Sir' (They would never dare do that to Cook.)