1892] A Moorish Magician 7 1 



into the air, the second to make a plant grow, and the third to show 

 the face of a person thought of, in a globe of ink. It was already late, 

 and the performance was put off until the following morning — the 

 magician remaining the night in the camp, and in the morning when 

 the tents were struck he was invited to give his performance. It was 

 an open place, uninhabited, and without trees or bushes. Middleton 

 chose the ground at some little distance from where the camp had 

 been. The magician first took from his wallet a large ball of string, 

 large enough to need both hands to lift it, and having made a long 

 incantation he tied the end of the string to one finger of his left hand, 

 and then with a great exertion threw the ball upwards, which unravelled 

 as it went, and, growing less and less, disappeared in the air. He then 

 let go of the string's end, which continued to hang from the sky. The 

 magician and his boy sat at a little distance, and Middleton went to 

 the string and pulled it downwards, as you would pull a bell-rope. It 

 stretched to within about two feet of the ground, but he felt the re- 

 sistance strongly from above, so much so that he cut his fingers with 

 the string, the mark remaining for several days afterwards. The five 

 men whom he had with him also touched the string, three of these were 

 Moors, one a Berber, and the other an interpreter. It was clear day- 

 light at the time, about half an hour after sunrise. When they had all 

 satisfied themselves that the string was suspended as it appeared to 

 be, the magician came forward, and in his turn pulled it, when it fell 

 down from the sky in coils on the ground ; he then rolled it up again 

 into a ball, and put it back into his wallet. 



" The magician next took from his wallet a seed, and when Middle- 

 ton had chosen a bare place, planted it in the ground ; he then as'i ed. 

 for some palm branches which they had with them, and which had been 

 cut the day before, and he made an arched covering with them over the 

 seed and heaped horse rugs upon the hoops, and then sat apart and made 

 incantations. At the end of a few minutes he invited them to undo 

 the covering, and there, in the ground, a plant was growing, set firmly 

 in the earth, the first time a few inches high, but when he had covered 

 it up again and built the hoops higher, it at last became three feet eight 

 inches high. Middleton measured the plant, found it firmly rooted, and 

 cut off and kept some of the leaves ; the nature of the plant seemed 

 to resemble that of the Indian rubber tree, and it had some fifty leaves. 

 It was fresh and healthy though the weather was very hot, it being the 

 month of October. In the third incantation Middleton was made to 

 look into a globe of ink. He desired to see the face of a friend, but 

 instead saw persistently and very vividly a certain landscape he knew 

 well on the river Severn, near Tewkesbury. The magician when asked 

 whether he could climb the string and disappear in the air (like the 

 magician Marco Polo tells of), stated that his grandfather had had the 



