“I don’t mind, particularly, shooting at a bird with a cross-bow,” he said, out in the woods of the mountain with his instructor; “but I think I particularly mind shooting with a cross-bow at a great auk, because I well know it to be extinct; besides it never lived here.”
“Less rattlement,” warned his instructor, “or I’ll make ye shoot at a dodo. Up a little to the right, and forward.”
Eszterhazy saw the great auk fall; but when he went to retrieve it (the hound absolutely refused), it had vanished. Some days later, however, he saw it in the muniments room, in a glass case. In the case next to it he saw a clutch of ostrich eggs. And in the glass case next to it, he saw the dodo. Both birds were smeared about the feet with what seemed to be dried red mud.
One day, not many days later, as they were standing at an open window, Prince Yohan suddenly exclaimed, “Hah! This is scrying time. Fine time for scrying, this!”
Deeply interested, Eszterhazy asked, “How do you know?”
Prince Popoff showed him a face slightly surprised. “How know} Why .. . the time of the month — Taurus, upon the cusps of the Ram — the cuspal times are decidely best for scrying, one isn’t sure why. — And then, too, observe the weather! The air’s not flat and dead, such as leaves the living images lying slack all around, no: neither is there a tearing wind or storm, you know, that’s no good, that tears the living images all up, and scatters them about, you see.
“But just look now. You see the air is clear and clean; you see how the clouds are scudding along and there’s brisk breeze. That means the living images will move along fairly quickly, it means that you can see them fairly clearly and cleanly in the scrying ink or in the scry-stone or scrying glass. One doesn’t always use a pool of ink, you know.”
Eszterhazy said he knew. “There are those who use a crystal ball,” he said.
Prince Popoff now looked at him in more than mere surprise. “There arc?” he cried. He was absolutely astonished.
By and by, having recovered from his astonishment, he took his guest into an inner room where they had not been before. It had been plastered, but it , had not been plastered lately, and patches of the primeval plaster had here and there crumbled and fallen, revealing — beneath the place where the plasma and slab of lime, sand, and water had been — areas of the primeval stone walling of the chamber. On the walls hung (often rather askew) badly engraved likenesses of the present emperor, sundry kings and so on; as well as wood-cuts of various voyvodes, counts, boyars, mukhtars and mamelukes and metropolitans and mprets and patriarchs and princes — God help us! — who knew who else? Eszterhazy, widely believed to know everything, knew not all of them — including a likeness of a sombre, brooding, melancholy countenance, a likeness (going by a name scribbled in a corner of the [perhaps] drawing) which he thought was perhaps of that John who was not only the last Catholic King of Sweden (bad timing, John) and enemy of the famous (infamous?) Gustav the Troll, but also the last Swedish King of Poland (bad timing, Poland) — though maybe it wasn’t.
There was also a copy of the Martin Behaim map, with gores, presented to the English King Henry VIII, powerful presumptive evidence of the early discovery of Australia; only Henry wasn’t interested in having Australia discovered (he was far more interested in discovering what he called the “pretty duckies” of Anne Boleyn), and neither was anyone in Scythia, Pan- nonia, Transbalkania, or Great or Little Byzantia. How came it here? Who the Hell knows; where it didn’t have cobwebs, it had fly-specks. There were old globes almost moist with the foam of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn, and here and there were odd skulls of the wisent, the aurochs, the wild mules of the Veneti, and — perhaps, perhaps — the unicorn: and if it wasn’t a unicorn, what was it? the rhinoceros, oryx, or narwhale? Nonsense. What would a skull of a rhinoceros, oryx, or narwhale be doing on the wall of an olden schloss in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania? Ha! Have you there!
“You can have half my kingdom,” said Prince Popoff, seating himself, “but you can’t have my chair. Pull up another.” And while his guest was pulling, the prince opened a small ebony chest from which he removed a something swathed in somewhat soiled white samite, and from the wrapping extracted a rather glossy black stone. Maybe Doctor Dee thought it was coal, and maybe Edward Kelly thought that it was coal, and maybe Horace Wk/pole thought it was coal; but Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy thought that it was not coal. Prince PopofF took it very carefully in his hands; and, saying, “Hold it like this” held it like this.
After some moments, he said, “It is not necessary, but it helps to repeat what was said by Bishop Albert of Ratisbon — oh, very well, then, Regensburg — called ‘the Great’ — Albertus, I mean, not the city —” and he repeated some phrases, in what some might regard as a rather debased Latin of the Swabian sort; others, on the other hand, might regard it as “Humanistic,” and not debased at all.
Eszterhazy watched carefully, sometimes he had rather to squint, he did repeat the phrases as best he remembered them (he remembered them rather well); and then —
“Hm,” said Prince Yohan. The surface of the stone, the upper surface, which had evidently once been highly polished, which so far had remained rather glossy or might one say sheeny, suddenly displayed a face. A human face.
At first Eszterhazy could not make it out. It seemed to slide across the face of the stone — or perhaps it was across his own vision — as though imprinted on a piece of silk which moved, passed, at an odd angle and in a way which he could no more identify than he could the likeness itself. Prince Yohan, though, seemed to be having less trouble. But then, he had had more experience. “Who is this mere child, of man size and, I suppose, man’s estate?” he asked. Eszterhazy could of course not answer, though he strove to get the image back in focus as his host held it rather slightly obliquely.
“He must be of importance,” the Prince went on, staring into the surface, “else why has Psalmanazzar scried him?”
“Psalmanazzar? ”
“Yes. Psalmanazzar. Its name. Ships have names, do they not? And so do scry-stones. The scry-stone of my uncle-cousin, Baron Big Boris, is named Agag, because it walks delicately. A metaphor, of course. Well, as for this youngling, I see passion plain in his face ... a mere prettyboy? no: more ... I see lust, and resolution and irresolution, mixed. . . . Tell me, so, savant, who is he?”
And Eszterhazy again gazed swift into the scry-stone and swift he saw the face one instant fixed before it fled into flux and swift he cried aloud and answered, “O God! O Christ Human and Divine! It is August Salvador, the Crown Princeling! Oh!”
In the brief pause which followed, he noticed that the room smelled of mold. Then he asked, “What is he doing here? I mean, there? And is he near — or far?”
Said this wise man of the mountains, “Middling near. And getting nearer. What -?”
Eszterhazy said that they would soon see “what.” And, “How quickly can I get a message to the nearest telegraph office?” he asked.
Said Prince PopofF, “Write it. And we shall see how soon.” He led Eszterhazy to another desk, satisfied himself that it provided paper which would take ink, ink which was not too gummy, a steel pen whose nib he promptly licked to make certain that it would hold the ink, and powdered cuttlefish bone to dry it. Then he began to bellow. By the time Eszterhazy had finished the message and shaken the powder off the paper —