Next one severed bleeding arm falls from the sky, and then another; and these are followed by two legs, as neatly dismembered as if cut off by the knife of a skilful surgeon. Lastly, the fakir himself reappears climbing down the string and holding the dripping knife between his teeth.
Calmly collecting the head and limbs he places them in his bag, throws it over his shoulder, and begins to walk away; but before he has gone many paces the spectators notice a movement in the bag. The fakir thereupon places it on the ground, salaams, makes a few mystic passes with his hands and utters a few cabalistic words, and the boy emerges from it, smiling and as sound in body as ever.
I have been at the trouble to recount these two versions of one and the same trick, because they are a source of perennial discussion amongst conjurors, professionals as well as amateurs. Personally, as I have already intimated, I utterly discredit the whole story. Yet I have, I am bound to say, met many people who hold the opposite view. I have even come across four or five people who profess to have seen the trick performed. While in India, and the East generally, the number of Europeans who know other Europeans who have seen the trick is legion.
The best answer to these credulous ones is that the thing is impossible. Consequently no such trick has ever been performed. This, I may add, was the opinion of H.H. the Maharajah of Jodhpur, with whom I had a long conversation relative to the subject. And he ought to know, for His Highness is an authority on Indian conjurors, and Oriental magic generally, having, as he himself assured me, seen practically every native conjuror of note at one time or another. His opinion is that it is just a traveller’s yarn, invented by Europeans for European consumption in the dim, far-off days when India was more or less a land of mystery, and handed down ever since as a sort of tradition from generation to generation. “I have yet to meet the educated native who believes the story,” were his concluding words.
I myself have asked scores of native fakirs to perform the trick for me, but they all professed themselves unable to do so, although they assured me that it could and had been done. Acting on this information I once caused it to be proclaimed in Colombo that I would pay £100—a fortune for a native—to anybody who would show me the trick. But the money was not claimed. The only even remotely plausible explanation I have ever heard of the mystery is that hypnotism is the agent. In other words, the spectator is mesmerised by the fakir into believing that he sees things which actually he does not see. But this, to my mind at all events, is the veriest nonsense imaginable.
Another Indian conjuring trick round which a good deal of mystery has been made to centre is that in which a mango plant is produced by the fakir in the course of a few minutes from an ordinary dried mango seed. There is really, however, nothing mysterious about this illusion; to the professional conjuror, at all events. It is a sleight-of-hand trick pure and simple, and one which any of us could easily imitate, if we were so minded.
The way it is worked is as follows. The fakir, with whom usually are two or three assistants, takes an ordinary mango seed inclosed in the dried husk, and hands it round for inspection. It is quite a fair-sized object, measuring some three inches in length by one and a half inches across. This he places in the ground in full view of the spectators, covering it with a little heaped-up pile of dry earth, which he scrapes together with his hands.
Then he waves his loin cloth over it for a minute or so, to the accompaniment of weird incantations by himself and the beating of tom-toms by his assistants, and when he takes it away a couple of inches of green growing plant is seen to have burst its way out of the earth. Again the performance is repeated, and when the cloth is removed the green shoot is seen to have increased in height to fully six inches. A third time, and it is now nine inches. Whereupon the fakir calls a temporary halt, pulls the plant out of the ground and passes it round for inspection, showing the tendrils of the root, and the seed bursted in growing. Afterwards he replaces the mango plant into the ground, and continues his incantations and cloth waving until—assuming a sufficiency of annas and pice are forthcoming—it attains to the dimensions of a small tree, four feet or more in height.
Now I came to the conclusion, after having seen this performance repeated once or twice, that it was just an ordinary conjuring trick, dependent for success on ordinary sleight-of-hand, and quick, clever palming, and I determined to prove it to my own satisfaction. So one day in Colombo, while I and some friends were idling away the time outside our hotel, and a fakir came along and offered to perform the trick for us, I put into execution a plan I had formed.
The fakir asked two rupees as his fee for the performance.