‘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.