‘Many people,’ I said to myself, ‘would take that bird to be the nightingale, but I know it is only a black-cap.’
The words were hardly out of my mouth when a saucy little head with a bright bead of an eye peeped round the corner of a twig at me.
‘Only a black-cap!’ said the owner of the head and the eye. ‘I’d have you know, sir, that we black-caps, as you call us, are of a far older family than the nightingales, and that they first learned their wild notes from us, and not we from them!’
‘You know a deal, I dare say,’ I replied. ‘Can you explain this, then? There is a streak of light creeping in from a point among the boughs up there, and falling on my foolscap, and whenever a pigeon, or hawk, or rook flies past away overhead, his image appears on the paper and crosses it, only in a contrary direction.’
‘Foolscap, indeed!’ replied the bird, ‘it is yourself that should be wearing one. The image on your paper is caused by the reflection of the luminous rays from the flying bird. Now,’ continued the black-cap, ‘I’ll tell you about the camera.
‘You know the ancient Egyptians understood everything!’
‘So they supposed,’ I grunted, ‘but——’
‘Don’t interrupt, please. The dungeons of that mysterious land were once upon a time small and dark and dismal in the extreme, and for a very little fault indeed people were thrown therein, perhaps never to leave them alive.’
‘Well, it came to pass that a certain poor man had offended the king, and all his worldly goods were confiscated and he himself was thrown into a cell in a rock. It was not a large one, and its walls were smoothly cemented with a mixture of lime and sand, and some other ingredients known only to the ancient Egyptians. The cell was situated in the side of a hill, with a door at one side which was opened only once a week, to thrust in a pitcher of water and a bundle of cassava root, on which the poor man lived, and to have the cell cleaned out. The only aperture for light and air was a little round hole at the front of the room, too small for even a bird to get through, though bees and moths often entered and kept the prisoner company. But, lo! every day and all day, especially when the sun shone, the rays of light through that aperture brought with them a picture which they painted on the opposite wall. This picture was upside down, but that was but a small drawback, and everything that happened out of doors or in the city beneath was painted on the wall in a marvellous manner. But when the cell door was opened the picture faded away, so the gaoler never saw it.
‘One day the prisoner addressed the gaoler as follows: “Speak unto the king for me, O my son, and tell him, if all my trespasses are forgiven me, and I am taken up out of this loathsome den, I will build for him in his palace a dark room in which he can sit and see all that is going on in the city beneath spread out before him like a great moving picture.”