seemed to recede, the walls and floor dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultradimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge. Outlined against that boiling, measureless cauldron of malignant storm, Marta stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, the abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic-statuary.
I think that I alone had beheld it; that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead face of Marta. He drew her close, he repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery. Then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, he snatched a heavy sculptor's mallet from the table on which it was lying, and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modeled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the terror-maddened girl, crouching above a mass of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay.
Speaking Heads
Magicians of old were very successful in turning to their purposes the then infant science of Acoustics. In the Labyrinth of Egypt, which contained twelve palaces and 1500 subterranean apartments, the gods were made to speak in a voice of thunder; and Pliny, in whose time this singular structure existed, informs us that some of the palaces were so constructed that their doors could not be opened without starting peals of thunder in the interior.
When Darius Hystaspes ascended the throne, and allowed his subjects to prostrate themselves before him as a god, the divinity of his character was impressed upon his worshippers by the burst of thunder and flashes of lightning which accompanied their devotion. It is not known for a fact how this thunder was achieved, but it is not improbable that they used the same sort of instrument that is now often used in our theaters for the same purpose—a thin sheet of iron, three or four feet long. Held by one corner between the finger and thumb, and shaken horizontally in a direction at right angles to the surface of the sheet, a great variety of sounds can be produced, sounds varying from the deep growl of distant thunder to the loud and explosive bursts which rattle in quick succession from clouds that are hanging low and directly overhead.
Among the most spectacular of the ancient priests' acoustic devices were the speaking heads, which were constructed for the purpose of representing the gods and uttering oracular responses. Of these, probably the speaking head of Orpheus, which uttered its responses at Lesbos, was the most famous. It was celebrated not only throughout Greece but even in Persia, and it had the credit of predicting, in the equivocal language of the heathen oracles, the bloody death which terminated the expedition of Cyrus the Great into Cythia.
Odin, the mighty magician of the North, who imported into Scandinavia the magical arts of the East, possessed a speaking head said to have been that of the sage Minos, which he had encased m gold, and which uttered responses that had all the authority of a divine revelation. The celebrated mechanic Gerbert, who filled the papal chair A.D. 1000, under the name of Sylvester II, constructed a speaking head of brass. Albertus Magnus is said to have executed a head in the Thirteenth Century which not only spoke but moved. It was made of earthenware; and Thomas Aquinas is said to have been so terrified when he saw it that he broke it in pieces, upon which the mechanist exclaimed, "There goes the labor of thirty years!"
It is known that usually in these speaking heads the sound was conveyed into the mouth by concealed pipes within the head and leading back to someone secreted in another room. Lucian expressly states that the imposter Alexander made his figure of Aesculapius speak by transmitting his voice through the gullet of a crane to the mouth of the statue.
