Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0128/01289.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01289}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 23}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{name
time
spell
ye
merlin
now
water
abbot
break
chapel}
$Date{1889}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 23

Restoration Of The Fountain

     Saturday noon I went to the well and looked on a while.  Merlin was
still burning smoke powders, and pawing the air, and muttering gibberish as
hard as ever, but looking pretty downhearted, for of course he had not
started even a perspiration in that well yet.  Finally I said:

     "How does the thing promise by this time, partner?"

     "Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest enchantment
known to the princes of the occult arts in the lands of the East; an it fail
me, naught can avail.  Peace, until I finish."

     He raised a smoke this time that darkened all the region, and must have
made matters uncomfortable for the hermits, for the wind was their way, and
it rolled down over their dens in a dense and billowy fog.  He poured out
volumes of speech to match, and contorted his body and sawed the air with his
hands in a most extraordinary way.  At the end of twenty minutes he dropped
down panting, and about exhausted.  Now arrived the abbot and several hundred
monks and nuns, and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of acres
of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke, and all in a grand state of
excitement.  The abbot inquired anxiously for results.  Merlin said:

     "If any labor of mortal might break the spell that binds these waters,
this which I have but just essayed had done it.  It has failed; whereby I do
now know that that which I had feared is a truth established: the sign of
this failure is, that the most potent spirit known to the magicians of the
East, and whose name none may utter and live, has laid his spell upon this
well.  The mortal does not breathe, nor ever will, who can penetrate the
secret of that spell, and without that secret none can break it.  The water
will flow no more forever, good Father.  I have done what man could.  Suffer
me to go."

     Of course this threw the abbot into a good deal of a consternation.  He
turned to me with the signs of it in his face, and said:

     "Ye have heard him.  Is it true?"

     "Part of it is."

     "Not all, then, not all!  What part is true?"

     "That that spirit with the Russian name has put his spell upon the
well."

     "God's wownds, then are we ruined!"

     "Possibly."

     "But not certainly?  Ye mean, not certainly?"

     "That is it."

     "Wherefore, ye also mean that when he saith none can break the spell -"

     "Yes, when he says that, he says what isn't necessarily true.  There are
conditions under which an effort to break it may have some chance - that is,
some small, some trifling chance - of success."

     "The conditions -"

     "Oh, they are nothing difficult.  Only these:  I want the well and the
surroundings for the space of half a mile, entirely to myself from sunset
today until I remove the ban - and nobody allowed to cross the ground but by
my authority."

     "Are these all?"

     "Yes."

     "And you have no fear to try?"

     "Oh, none.  One may fail, of course; and one may also succeed.  One can
try, and I am ready to chance it.  I have my conditions?"

     "These and all others ye may name.  I will issue commandment to that
effect."

     "Wait," said Merlin, with an evil smile.  "Ye wit that he that would
break this spell must know that spirit's name?"

     "Yes, I know his name."

     "And wit you also that to know it skills not of itself, but ye must
likewise pronounce it?  Ha-ha!  Knew ye that?"

     "Yes, I knew that, too."

     "You have that knowledge!  Art a fool?  Are ye minded to utter that name
and die?"

     "Utter it?  Why certainly.  I would utter it if it was Welsh."

     "Ye are even a dead man, then; and I go to tell Arthur."

     "That's all right.  Take your gripsack and get along.  The thing for you
to do is to go home and work the weather, John W. Merlin."

     It was a home shot, and it made him wince; for he was the worst
weather-failure in the kingdom.  Whenever he ordered up the danger signals
along the coast there was a week's dead calm, sure, and every time he
prophesied fair weather it rained brickbats.  But I kept him in the weather
bureau right along , to undermine his reputation.  However, that shot raised
his bile, and instead of starting home to report my death, he said, he would
remain and enjoy it.

     My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty well fagged, for they
had traveled double tides.  They had pack mules along, and had brought
everything I needed - tools, pump, lead pipe, Greek fire, sheaves of big
rockets, roman candles, colored-fire sprays, electric apparatus, and a lot of
sundries - everything necessary for the stateliest kind of a miracle.  They
got their supper and a nap, and about midnight we sallied out through a
solitude so wholly vacant and complete that it quite overpassed the required
conditions.  We took possession of the well and its surroundings.  My boys
were experts in all sorts of things, from the stoning up of a well to the
constructing of a mathematical instrument.  An hour before sunrise we had
that leak mended in shipshape fashion, and the water began to rise.  Then we
stowed our fireworks in the chapel, locked up the place, and went home to
bed.

     Before the noon mass was over, we were at the well again; for there was
a deal to do, yet, and I was determined to spring the miracle before
midnight, for business reasons: for whereas a miracle worked for the Church
on a weekday is worth a good deal, it is worth six times as much if you get
it in on a Sunday.  In nine hours the water had risen to its customary level,
that is to say, it was within twenty-three feet of the top.  We put in a
little iron pump, one of the first turned out by my works near the capital;
we bored into a stone reservoir which stood against the outer wall of the
well chamber and inserted a section of lead pipe that was long enough to
reach to the door of the chapel and project beyond the threshold, where the
gushing water would be visible to the two hundred and fifty acres of people I
was intending should be present on the flat plain in front of this little
holy hillock at the proper time.

     We knocked the head out of an empty hogshead and hoisted this hogshead
to the flat roof of the chapel, where we clamped it down fast, poured in
gunpowder till it lay loosely an inch deep on the bottom, then we stood up
rockets in the hogshead as thick as they could loosely stand, all the
different breeds of rockets there are; and they made a portly and imposing
sheaf, I can tell you.  We grounded the wire of a pocket electrical battery
in that powder, we placed a whole magazine of Greek fire on each corner of
the roof - blue on one corner, green on another, red on another, and purple
on the last, and grounded a wire in each.

     About two hundred yards off, in the flat, we built a pen of scantlings,
about four feet high, and laid planks on it, and so made a platform.  We
covered it with swell tapestries borrowed for the occasion, and topped it off
with the abbot's own throne.  When you are going to do a miracle for an
ignorant race, you want to get in every detail that will count; you want to
make all the properties impressive to the public eye; you want to make
matters comfortable for your head guest; then you can turn yourself loose and
play your effects for all they are worth.  I know the value of these things,
for I know human  nature.  You can't throw too much style into a miracle.  It
costs trouble, and work, and sometimes money; but it pays in the end.  Well,
we brought the wires to the ground at the chapel, and then brought them under
the ground to the platform, and hid the batteries there.  We put a rope fence
a hundred feet square around the platform to keep off the common multitude,
and that finished the work.  My idea was, doors open at ten thirty,
performance to begin at eleven twenty-five sharp.  I wished I could charge
admission, but of course that wouldn't answer.  I instructed my boys to be in
the chapel as early as ten, before anybody was around, and be ready to man
the pumps at the proper time, and make the fur fly.  Then we went home to
supper.

     The news of the disaster to the well had traveled far, by this time; and
now for two or three days a steady avalanche of people had been pouring into
the valley.  The lower end of the valley was become one huge camp; we should
have a good house, no question about that.  Criers went the rounds early in
the evening and announced the coming attempt, which put every pulse up to
fever heat.  They gave notice that the abbot and his official suite would
move in state and occupy the platform at ten thirty, up to which time all the
region which was under my ban must be clear; the bells would then cease from
tolling, and this sign should be permission to the multitudes to close in and
take their places.

     I was at the platform and all ready to do the honors when the abbot's
solemn procession hove in sight - which it did not do till it was nearly to
the rope fence, because it was a starless black night and no torches
permitted.  With it came Merlin, and took a front seat on the platform; he
was as good as his word, for once.  One could not see the multitudes banked
together beyond the ban, but they were there, just the same.  The moment the
bells stopped, those banked masses broke and poured over the line like a vast
black wave, and for as much as a half hour it continued to flow, and then it
solidified itself, and you could have walked upon a pavement of human heads
to - well, miles.

     We had a solemn stage wait, now, for about twenty minutes - a thing I
had counted on for effect; it is always good to let your audience have a
chance to work up its expectancy.  At length, out of the silence a noble
Latin chant - men's voices - broke and swelled up and rolled away into the
night, a majestic tide of melody.  I had put that up, too, and it was one of
the best effects I ever invented.  When it was finished I stood up on the
platform and extended my hands abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted
- that always produces a dead hush - and then slowly pronounced this ghastly
word with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and many
women to faint:

     "Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersgesellschafft!"

     Just as I was moaning out the closing hunks of that word, I touched off
one of my electric connections, and all that murky world of people stood
revealed in a hideous blue glare!  It was immense - that effect!  Lots of
people shrieked, women curled up and quit in every direction, foundlings
collapsed by platoons.  The abbot and the monks crossed themselves nimbly and
their lips fluttered with agitated prayers.  Merlin held his grip, but he was
astonished clear down to his corns; he had never seen anything to begin with
that, before.  Now was the time to pile in the effects.  I lifted my hands
and groaned out this word - as it were in agony -

"Aihilistendynamittheaterkaestchenssprengungsattentaetsbersuchungen!"

- and turned on the red fire!  You should have heard that Atlantic of people
moan and howl when that crimson  hell joined the blue!  After sixty seconds I
shouted -

"Transbaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthiertreibertrauungsthraenentragoedie!"

- and lit up the green fire!  After waiting only forty seconds, this time,  I
spread my arms abroad and thundered out the devastating syllables of this
word of words -

Mekkamuselmannenmassenmenchenmoerdermohrenmuttermarmormonumentenmacher!"

- and whirled on the purple glare!  There they were, all going at once, red,
blue, green, purple!  Four furious volcanoes pouring vast clouds of radiant
smoke aloft, and spreading a blinding rainbowed noonday to the furthest
confines of that valley.  In the distance one could see that fellow on the
pillar standing rigid against the background of sky, his seesaw stopped for
the first time in twenty years.  I knew the boys were at the pump, now, and
ready.  So I said to the abbot:

     "The time is come, Father.  I am about to pronounce the dread name and
command the spell to dissolve.  You want to brace up and take hold of
something."  Then I shouted to the people: "Behold, in another minute the
spell will be broken, or no mortal can break it.  If it break, all will know
it, for you will see the sacred water gush from the chapel door!"

     I stood a few moments, to let the hearers have a chance to spread my
announcement to those who couldn't hear, and so convey it to the furthest
ranks, then I made a grand exhibition of extra posturing and gesturing, and
shouted:

     "Lo, I command the fell spirit that possesses the holy fountain to now
disgorge into the skies all the infernal fires that still remain in him, and
straightway dissolve his spell and flee hence to the pit, there to lie bound
a thousand years.  By his own dread name I command it - BGWJJILLIGKKK!"

     Then I touched off the hogshead of rockets, and a vast fountain of
dazzling lances of fire vomited itself toward the zenith with a hissing rush,
and burst in mid-sky into a storm of flashing jewels!  One mighty groan of
terror started up from the massed people - then suddenly broke into a wild
hosannah of joy - for there, fair and plain in the uncanny glare, they saw
the freed water leaping forth!  The old abbot could not speak a word, for
tears and the chokings in his throat; without utterance of any sort, he
folded me in his arms and mashed me.  It was more eloquent than speech.  And
harder to get over, too, in a country where there were really no doctors that
were worth a damaged nickel.

     You should have seen those acres of people throw themselves down in that
water and kiss it; kiss it, and pet it, and fondle it, and talk to it as if
it were alive, and welcome it back with the dear names they gave their
darlings, just as if it had been a friend who was long gone away and lost,
and was come home again.  Yes, it was pretty to see, and made me think more
of them than I had done before.

     I sent Merlin home on a shutter.  He had caved in and gone down like a
landslide when I pronounced that fearful name, and had never come to since.
He never had heard that name before - neither had I - but to him it was the
right one; any jumble would have been the right one.  He admitted, afterward,
that the spirit's own mother could not have pronounced that name better than
I did.  He never could understand how I survived it, and I didn't tell him.
It is only young magicians that give away a secret like that.  Merlin spent
three months working enchantments to try to find out the deep trick of how to
pronounce that name and outlive it.  But he didn't arrive.

     When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back
reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind of a
superior being - and I was.  I was aware of that.  I took along a night shift
of monks, and taught them the mystery of the pump, and set them to work, for
it was plain that a good part of the people out there were going to sit up
with the water all night, consequently it was but right that they should have
all they wanted of it.  To those monks that pump was a good deal of a miracle
itself, and they were full of wonder over it; and of admiration, too, of the
exceeding effectiveness of its performance.

     It was a great night, an immense night.  There was reputation in it.  I
could hardly get to sleep for glorying over it.