Chapter LV: Mystery and Mummery; Or, Houdin and the Arabs

BY JOHN NEVIL MASKELYNE, OF THE EGYPTIAN HALL.

The famous French conjurer, Robert Houdin, was engaged by the French Government in 1856 to proceed to Algiers, and there demonstrate to the natives that the Marabouts, whom the ignorant Arabs believed to possess supernatural powers, were only very clumsy tricksters. Never had conjurer a higher mission than this--to erase a debasing superstition from the minds of these children of the desert!

At the Algiers theatre were assembled all the leading chiefs and a large audience of minor natives. Houdin, skilled in all the sleight-of-hand, the scientific knowledge, and the _finesse_ of the French school of magicians, was equal to any emergency. He was as cool and collected as on his own stage at Paris, and addressed his strange audience in a few well-chosen words, which were translated to the Arabs by interpreters provided by the French Government of the town.

In this little speech he told the natives that his art was simply the outcome of science and dexterity: that if his feats excelled those of the Marabouts, his audience could judge for themselves whether they had not been the victims of imposture for many years at the hands of very clumsy jugglers indeed; and that in the end he hoped to leave those poor wizards without a leg to stand on--professionally of course!

The conjurer commenced his performance with a few ordinary sleight-of-hand tricks sufficiently puzzling to create great wonder in the native mind, and then proceeded to bolder and more ambitious efforts. Carrying a small box down to the ‘practicable’ or ‘rake,’ running from the stage to the pit, he declared that though a little child might lift it, he could defy the strongest man in that assembly to do so if he willed otherwise. This being interpreted, an Arab of middle height, but well built and muscular, ventured to the test.

‘Are you very strong?’ asked Houdin.

‘Oh, yes,’ replied the son of the desert, carelessly, not heeding the Frankish magician’s assertion that he could deprive him of his strength.

Houdin allowed the man to pick up the box easily, as if it were a toy, and return it to the ‘rake,’ smiling to think that _he_ could be made as a little child. But Houdin now made some mystic passes over the box, and requested the dusky Hercules to raise it once more. He tried; but tug and strain as he would, the box was immoveable. He stopped at length, panting, and was on the point of leaving his task, when pride overcame a desire to escape from this enchantment, and he made one final effort, cheered by his compatriots in front. All in vain: and just as he was on the point of giving in once more, he sank, with a terrible yell, upon his knees.

The reason of this was that the conjurer had given a signal, and the poor man had received the shock of an electrical current, transmitted to the handles of the box. By similar means had the box been held to the stage when the conjurer willed it, for a bar of soft iron underneath the ‘rake’ was converted into a magnet by passing an electrical current in coils round it. When the current was suspended by Houdin’s assistant behind the scenes, the bar was demagnetised, and the box could be lifted up. Of course this was a mystery to the natives, and as the beaten Arab retired, murmurs of ‘Shaitan’ and ‘Djenoum’ running round the startled audience told that, notwithstanding the assurances of the interpreters, the natives gave Houdin credit for having dealings with one who shall here be nameless.

The skilful professor had been informed that the most startling of the supposed miracles of the Marabouts was their standing in front of a loaded gun, which, though pointed at them and the trigger pulled, producing sparks in plenty from the flint, would yet not go off. The cabalistic jargon of the Marabout was supposed to place his sacred person in safety; and this was one of the tricks the French Government was anxious to prove an imposture.

Houdin, though the guns would not go off, soon exploded the marvel. He saw at once that the mystery was of the simplest, the Marabout merely stopping up the vent of the firearm with grease while handing it to the experimentalist. Accordingly this was the next feat Houdin called the attention of his audience to, declaring himself invulnerable (by trickery alone), and defying even the ‘crack shot’ of the district to hit him.

An Arab, delighted to have a human target, bounded upon the stage with the words, ‘I will kill you!’ This was a Marabout jealous of a sorcerer greater than himself. Houdin gave him a cavalry pistol to examine. The man blew down the barrel and into the nipple, and then loaded it with powder and ball. To add to his other precautions, he had previously _marked_ the bullet.

The French _prestidigitateur_ placed an apple upon the point of a knife, and holding it up, said, ‘Aim straight at my heart!’ Though the Arab firmly believed the weapon to be really deadly, he took careful aim and fired point blank at Houdin. There was a pause. The conjurer fell not, but calmly advanced to the man, and presented him with the apple, in the heart of which the marked bullet was found, instead of in Houdin’s.

You see, the Frenchman had dexterously changed the marked bullet for a similar one in appearance, but composed of an amalgam of tinfoil and quicksilver, which is about the same weight as lead, and disperses on the firing. Into a hole previously made in the apple, on the side kept from the view of the audience, Houdin dropped the marked ball before placing the fruit upon his knife, and had closed the aperture with a round piece of apple afterwards, just as a cheesemonger makes his Stilton whole again after you have tasted from his scoop. When the apple was cut open, and the bullet fell out, attention was at once directed to the marks upon it, and, of course, so drawn from any scrutiny of the _débris_ of the ball that had been fired from the pistol.

Houdin’s powers were put to another test subsequently to his public performance. A deputation of the _élite_ of Algiers and its neighbourhood waited upon him, headed by Bash-aga Bou-Allem, the African Rothschild, to still further test the gun-trick. Houdin was prepared. From beneath his snowy-white _burnous_ an aged Arab produced two richly-chased pistols. These the Frankish conjurer loaded, previously handing round the bullets for inspection. Then he passed one pistol to the chief, who, at six paces, fired, and the ball was apparently caught between Houdin’s teeth. Dropping this from his mouth to prove its solidity, Houdin now took up the other pistol and fired at the stone wall of the apartment, when--great wonder to the chiefs, and dismay to the impostors--the bullet apparently drew blood from the stone. One of the defeated Marabouts actually put his finger on the blood and tasted it; then he collapsed.

This trick was ‘worked up’ very cleverly by Houdin. He ‘palmed’ both the real bullets, substituting one made of wax (hollow) and lampblack for the pistol he gave to the Arab, and crushing it as he rammed the charge home, so that it would not injure him at such short distance. The pistol he used himself had a hollow leaden ball dropped into it, and the cavity in the bullet was filled in with blood, so that when the lead was crushed against the wall the interior contents were splashed upon it.

Houdin was the finest political agent the French Government ever sent out, and the most civilising withal; for the clumsy tricks of the Marabouts, which he exposed, had very little effect upon any but the very lowest class afterwards.

Gun and pistol tricks are so much a part of the conjurer’s art that it may be well to describe some others, to show the ingenuity of these whilom ‘diverting vagabonds’--the wizards--who are now frequently to be found in very good company indeed.

One of the old gun-tricks was somewhat like Houdin’s device for nonplussing the Arab impostors. In this a fowling-piece was used, and loaded by any one in the company, the professor of mystery only taking the liberty of placing the ball--previously examined to prove its genuineness--into the barrel himself. Of course that real ball never went out of the magician’s possession, but a duplicate composed of blacklead was substituted for it, which could be readily reduced to powder by a vigorous ramming home of the charge, and so rendered harmless.

But modern magic goes far beyond so simple a trick, and has elaborated this kind of business until some apparently marvellous results are achieved.

To explain these it will be necessary, in the first place, to notice the peculiar construction of the wizard’s firearm. This consists of two parts, the outer of which is a conical tin funnel like the mouth of a trumpet, and tapering down to a tube, which fits the barrel of an ordinary pistol. This tube runs inside the cone, and affords a free passage for the loading and discharge of the pistol, and between the tube and the outer case any object supposed to be fired therefrom reposes in perfect security. Sometimes the performer borrows two or three watches and places them in a drawer, while he sends his assistant for a plate. To this the watches are transferred, and as the youth advances to the conjurer’s table, he purposely slips and falls, when the plate is smashed, and the watches roll all over the stage. The wizard makes much ado in rebuking this clumsiness, and picks up the fragments of delf and the watches, all of which he finds more or less injured. Never mind; he will soon find a way out of _that_ difficulty, he says, so he proceeds to load the pistol and ram all the _débris_ of the (not silver) plate and the timekeepers into it, keeping them firm in their places with a wad of paper. Now the (supposed) clumsy assistant places a picture frame on the stage, at which the magician takes aim and fires, and at the same instant the plate and watches are seen in the frame (which up to this time apparently rejoiced in a plain black backboard only), all perfect save the plate. This appears with a piece out of it, and the conjurer seems chagrined that he has made a mistake, especially before his unskilful assistant. Looking about the stage he finds the missing piece, and is again equal to the occasion. Standing some distance from the frame, he appears to throw the piece he has found at the ‘willow pattern’ whose other component parts have been so unaccountably welded together. Lo! as the fragment seems to leave his opened palm the plate, whole as when it left the potter’s hands, is ready to be examined by the audience: and the watches, ticking as lively as ever, are restored to the pockets of their respective owners quite unscathed, notwithstanding the fearful trials they seemed to have passed through.

The explanation of this is simplicity itself. When the watches have been collected by the professor they are placed in what appears to be an ordinary drawer, but which is in reality a tricky arrangement that can be made to appear full or empty at pleasure. The conjurer has, of course, shown an empty drawer, but this has a false bottom wherein lie several ‘dummy’ watches, and it is these that are transferred to the plate and afterwards rammed into the pistol. The real watches are carried off the stage by the skilfully-clumsy assistant and attached to the frame (in a manner yet to be described), together with a duplicate of the broken plate before it is introduced to the view of the audience.

This picture-frame is a marvel of deception. Notwithstanding that it appears as if it possessed a plain black backboard only, it is in reality a shallow box, with a spring blind in front of it. Behind this screen the articles are suspended, on a background also black. When the professor fires, the assistant (out of sight) pulls a cord releasing a spring, and the curtain flies up with such rapidity as to be imperceptible from the point of view of the audience. The ‘click’ of the curtain is unheard in the noise made by the pistol, and the effect is as if the watches and plate had been fired from it.

But we have yet to explain how the broken plate is made whole. Our readers will have guessed, probably, that it never was broken at all, and such is the fact. A piece of black cloth lies over one edge of the plate, which makes it appear as if it is broken, and as the magician seems to throw (though he really retains) a piece of the plate actually smashed, the assistant again pulls a string smartly, which is attached to the bit of black cloth, and the plate instantly appears in a perfect state of preservation. That is more than can be said for the contents of all picture-frames after they have been ‘restored.’ Of course these tricks cannot be performed when an audience is very close to the wizard. ‘’Tis distance lends enchantment’ to many things in the conjurer’s art, as in others outside.

Sometimes this trick is ‘worked’ in other ways; say, after a borrowed watch has (apparently) been pounded to bits in a mortar, it is fired from a pistol at a magic target. In this there is no roller-blind illusion, but the ‘bull’s-eye,’ provided with a little hook (hook and eye should go together), revolves perpendicularly on its own axis. The back of the bull’s-eye is precisely similar to the front, but on the hook there the real watch is secretly hung. When the pistol is fired, the pulling of a string releases a spring, and the centre of the target flies round. The mortar employed has a movable bottom, so that the performer can extract the real watch at pleasure. The _débris_ which the conjurer pounds away at, and afterwards loads his trick pistol with, is obtained from the hollow pestle, the performer unscrewing the end of it against the bottom of the mortar as he appears to grind away at the borrowed watch.