INDIAN ROPE TRICKS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2353, 10 November 1921, Page 4

INDIAN ROPE TRICKS.

THE TELL-TALE CAMERA

AN INTERESTING EXPERI-

MENT.

The Indian rope trick is one of the most discussed illusions in the world. Lord Frederic Hamilton offers an explanation in his book, “Here, There and Everywhere” (Plodder and Stoughton).• The story was told him by Colonel Barnard, at one time Chief of Police in Calcutta. Invited to see the trick performed, the colonel took with him one of his English subordinates and a camera loaded with a new rojl of films. Here are their experiences:—

“They arrived at a poor house in the native quarter, where they were ushered into a small courtyard thick with the dense smoke arising from two braziers burning mysterious compounds. The juggler, naked, except for his loin-cloth. . . • produced a long coil of rope, which began paying away, as sailors would say, out of the juggler’s hand of its own accord, and went straight up into the air.

“Colonel Barnard photographed it. It went up and up, till their eyes could no longer follow it. Colonel Barnard photographed it again. Then a small boy commenced climbing up this rope. He was photographed. The bby went up and up, till he disappeared from view. The smoke from the herbs smouldering in the braziers seemed almost to blot out the courtyard from view.

The juggler, professing himself angry with the boy for his dilatoriness, started in pursuit of him up this rope. He was also photographed. Finally the man descended the rope, and wiped a blood-stained knife, explaining that he had killed the boy for disobeying orders. He then pulled the rope down and coiled it up, and suddenly the boy reappeared, and, together with his master, began salaaming profoundly. The trick was over.

'That the photos prove. “Then Colonel Barnard went into his dark room and developed his negatives, with an astounding result.

“Neither the juggler, nor the boy, nor the rope had moved at all. The photographs of the ascending rope, of the boy climbing it, and of* the man following him, were simply blanks, showing the details of the courtyard and nothing else. Nothing whatever had happened, but how, in the name of all that is wonderful, had the impression boen conveyed to two hard-headed, matter-of-fact Englishmen ? Possibly the braziers contained cunning preparations of hemp or opium, unknown to European science, or may have been burning some more subtle brain-stealei', possibly the deep salaams of the juggler masked hypnotic passes: but somehow he had forced two Europeans to seewhat he wished them fb see.”