[67]. The local name of the Patna gauzes. The term was originally applied to the produce of the Coan looms, which, however, was anticipated in ancient Egypt. See p. 287 of “L’Archéologie Égyptienne” (Paris, A. Quantin) of the learned Professor G. Maspero, a most able popular work by a savant who has left many regrets on the banks of Nilus.
[68]. The great prototype of the Flying Carpet is that of Sulayman bin Dáúd, a fable which the Koran (chap. xxi. 81) borrowed from the Talmud, not from “Indian fictions.” It was of green sendal embroidered with gold and silver and studded with precious stones, and its length and breadth were such that all the Wise King’s host could stand upon it, the men to the left and the Jinns to the right of the throne; and when all were ordered, the Wind, at royal command, raised it and wafted it whither the Prophet would, while an army of birds flying overhead canopied the host from the sun. In the Middle Ages the legend assumed another form. “Duke Richard, surnamed ‘Richard sans peur,’ walking with his courtiers one evening in the forest of Moulineaux, near one of his castles on the banks of the Seine, hearing a prodigious noise coming towards him, sent one of his esquires to know what was the matter, who brought him word that it was a company of people under a leader or King. Richard, with five hundred of his bravest Normans, went out to see a sight which the peasants were so accustomed to that they viewed it two or three times a week without fear. The sight of the troop, preceded by two men, who spread a cloth on the ground, made all the Normans run away, and leave the Duke alone. He saw the strangers form themselves into a circle on the cloth, and on asking who they were, was told that they were the spirits of Charles V., King of France, and his servants, condemned to expiate their sins by fighting all night against the wicked and the damned. Richard desired to be of their party, and receiving a strict charge not to quit the cloth, was conveyed with them to Mount Sinai, where, leaving them without quitting the cloth, he said his prayers in the Church of St. Catherine’s Abbey there, while they were fighting, and returned with them. In proof of the truth of this story, he brought back half the wedding-ring of a knight in that convent, whose wife, after six years, concluded him dead, and was going to take a second husband.” (Note in the Lucknow Edition of The Nights.)
[69]. Amongst Eastern peoples, and especially adepts, the will of man is not a mere term for a mental or cerebral operation, it takes the rank of a substance; it becomes a mighty motive power, like table-turning and other such phenomena which, now looked upon as child’s play, will perform a prime part in the Kinetics of the century to come. If a few pair of hands imposed upon a heavy dinner-table can raise it in the air, as I have often seen, what must we expect to result when the new motive force shall find its Franklin and be shown to the world as real “Vril”? The experiment of silently willing a subject to act in a manner not suggested by speech or sign has been repeatedly tried and succeeded in London drawing-rooms; and it has lately been suggested that atrocious crimes have resulted from overpowering volition. In cases of paralysis the Faculty is agreed upon the fact that local symptoms disappear when the will-power returns to the brain. And here I will boldly and baldly state my theory that, in sundry cases, spectral appearances (ghosts) and abnormal smells and sounds are simply the effect of a Will which has, so to speak, created them.
[70]. The text has “But-Khánah” = idol-house (or room) syn. with “But-Kadah” = image-cuddy, which has been proposed as the derivation of the disputed “Pagoda.” The word “Khánah” also appears in our balcony, origin. “balcony,” through the South-European tongues, the Persian being “Bálá-khánah” = high room. From “Kadah” also we derive “cuddy,” now confined to nautical language.
[71]. Europe contains sundry pictures which have, or are supposed to have, this property; witness the famous Sudarium bearing the head of Jesus. The trick, for it is not Art, is highly admired by the credulous.
[72]. i.e. the Hindu Scripture or Holy Writ, e.g. “Káma-Shastra” = the Cupid-gospel.
[73]. This shifting theatre is evidently borrowed by Galland from Pliny (N. H. xxxvi., 24) who tells that in B.C. 50, C. Curio built two large wooden theatres which could be wheeled round and formed into an amphitheatre. The simple device seems to stir the bile of the unmechanical old Roman, so unlike the Greek in powers of invention.
[74]. This trick is now common in the circuses and hippodromes of Europe, horses and bulls being easily taught to perform it; but India has as yet not produced anything equal to the “Cyclist elephant” of Paris.
[75]. This Arab.-Pers. compound, which we have corrupted to “Bezestein” or “Bezetzein” and “Bezesten,” properly means a market-place for Baz or Bazz = cloth, fine linen; but is used by many writers as = Bazar, see “Kaysariah,” vol. i, 266.
[76]. The origin of the lens and its applied use to the telescope and the microscope are “lost” (as the Castle-guides of Edinburgh say) “in the glooms of antiquity.” Well ground glasses have been discovered amongst the finds of Egypt and Assyria: indeed much of the finer work of the primeval artists could not have been done without such aid. In Europe the “spy-glass” appears first in the Opus Majus of the learned Roger Bacon (circa A.D. 1270); and his “optic tube” (whence his saying “all things are known by perspective”), chiefly contributed to make his wide-spread fame as a wizard. The telescope was popularised by Galileo who (as mostly happens) carried off and still keeps, amongst the vulgar, all the honours of invention. Some “Illustrators” of The Nights confound this “Nazzárah,” the Pers. “Dúr-bín,” or far-seer, with the “Magic Mirror,” a speculum which according to Gower was set up in Rome by Virgilius the Magician; hence the Mirror of Glass in the Squire’s tale; Merlin’s glassie Mirror of Spenser (F. Q. ii. 24); the mirror in the head of the monstrous fowl which forecast the Spanish invasion to the Mexicans; the glass which in the hands of Cornelius Agrippa (A.D. 1520) showed to the Earl of Surrey fair Geraldine “sick in her bed;” to the globe of glass in The Lusiads; Dr. Dee’s show-stone, a bit of cannel-coal; and lastly the zinc and copper disk of the absurdly called “electro-biologist.” I have noticed this matter at some length in various places.