'"*
* The Eccalobeion
"Fa! lal!" said the king.
"'One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of
brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity
that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the
exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid.* Another of these
magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame
even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning
powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an
extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty
thousand fleshy men for a year.*(2) But a still more wonderful
conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was neither man nor
beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with a black matter
like pitch, and fingers that it employed with such incredible speed
and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in writing out
twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour, and this with so
exquisite a precision, that in all the copies there should not be
found one to vary from another by the breadth of the finest hair.
Pages:
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37