Description
Through Magic Glasses and Other Lectures
CHAPTER I
THE MAGICIAN’S CHAMBER BY MOONLIGHT
The full moon was shining in all its splendour one lovely August night,
as the magician sat in his turret chamber bathed in her pure white
beams, which streamed upon him through the open shutter in the wooden
dome above. It is true a faint gleam of warmer light shone from below
through the open door, for this room was but an offshoot at the top of
the building, and on looking down the turret stairs a lecture-room might
be seen below where a bright light was burning. Very little, however, of
this warm glow reached the magician, and the implements of his art
around him looked like weird gaunt skeletons as they cast their long
shadows across the floor in the moonlight.
The small observatory, for such it was, was a circular building with
four windows in the walls, and roofed with a wooden dome, so made that
it could be shifted round and round by pulling certain cords. One
section of this dome was a shutter, which now stood open, and the strip,
thus laid bare to the night, was so turned as to face that part of the
sky along which the moon was moving. In the centre of the room, with its
long tube directed towards the opening, stood the largest magic glass,
the TELESCOPE, and in the dead stillness of the night, could be heard
distinctly the tick-tick of the clockwork, which kept the instrument
pointing to the face of the moon, while the room, and all in it, was
being carried slowly and steadily onwards by the earth’s rotation on its
axis. It was only a moderate-sized instrument, about six feet long,
mounted on a solid iron pillar firmly fixed to the floor and fitted with
the clockwork, the sound of which we have mentioned; yet it looked like
a giant as the pale moonlight threw its hug
Product ID: 9781776786503
Sku: 9781776786503
