BLIND TOWN CRIER, MUT.
It is not often that one gets the chance of interviewing a real ghost, so taking a candle and my revolver, I went down to the camel yard. Ibrahim showed me a pile of clods that had been thrown that he had collected—there must at least have been a dozen of them—and showed me the direction from which they had come.
It certainly was rather uncanny. On the other side of the wall was a flat open space, and there was nowhere within stone’s throw where any human being could possibly have hidden. I waited for some time to see if any more clods would be thrown; but as none came, I told Ibrahim in a loud voice to shoot any afrit he saw and gave him my revolver, and then in a lower tone told him that he was on no account to shoot at all, but that if anyone came he might threaten to do so.
Ibrahim was perfectly satisfied. It was not so much the possession of the revolver that reassured him as the fact that it was made of iron, and afrits, as of course is well known, are afraid of iron!
No more clods were thrown that night; but they began again on the following evening, and still Ibrahim was unable to see the culprit. The thing was becoming a nuisance and it had to be stopped. It was of no use going to the native officials; they would have been just as ready to believe in the afrit or ghul yarn as any of the natives of the oasis, so I decided to tackle the question myself.
Dahab, carrying a pot of whitewash and a brush, and I, with a sextant and the nautical almanac, repaired to the scene of the haunting in the afternoon. I wrote “Solomon” and “iron” in Arabic on the wall, drew two human eyes squinting diabolically, a little devil and the diagram of the configuration of Jupiter’s Satellites, taken from the nautical almanac—an extremely cabalistic-looking design. I then waved the sextant about and finally touched each of the marks I had drawn on the wall with it in turn.
By this time a small crowd had collected, and were watching the proceedings with considerable interest. A six-inch sextant, fitted with Reeve’s artificial horizon, is as awe-inspiring an instrument as any magician could show.
I told Dahab to explain to the crowd that I had just put a tulsim (talisman) on the wall, and that if it were an afrit that had been throwing the clods, the words, “Solomon” and “iron,” acting in conjunction with Jupiter’s Satellites, would certainly do for him completely. But if it were a human being who had been throwing the clods, the little devil and the eyes would get to work upon him at once.
The devil I explained was a particularly malignant little English imp that I had under my control, and if anyone threw any more clods at my camels, I had so arranged things, that the devil in the form of this tiny little black imp would crawl up his nostrils while he slept, and would stick the forked end of his tail into his brain and keep waggling it about, causing him the greatest suffering, until in a few years’ time he went mad. Then it would stamp with red-hot feet on the backs of his eyeballs till they fell out; after which the culprit would die in horrible agony.