"While at first sight it appears to depict only one carved armlet, it is really two armlets, one being carved inside the other out of the same piece of ivory with only the space of a knife-blade thickness between them. When moved, the two armlets rattle against each other. The ornamentation consists of four figures: a king or chief belonging to the outer armlet, and four sets of two hands placed between the human figures belonging to the inner armlet. The whole shows skill and ingenuity on the part of the artist who planned this difficult piece of work, so remarkable from a technical point of view. But although the beauty of design is not its chief attraction, it is nevertheless a piece of work which can not fail to be admired from the artistic standpoint also." Another object of interest described by Ling Roth is a highly ornate fragment on an article which originally had the shape of a brass sistrum, consisting of two bell forms, a large and a small one, grafted onto one handle. Its delicate treatment is described as differing somewhat from the rugged workmanship of the objects above described, but it is said to err in its excessive elaboration. "Yet there are good points," says Roth, "such as the blending of the two bell forms into the common handle, the happy tapering of the ornamentation into the Normian bird's beak; the increasing size of the side cups as they rise to correspond to the enlarged opening of the bell form; the truthfulness to nature in an essential like the bust of the Negro, all of which betoken a fair amount of artistic feeling. The craftsman who probably designed execution of the smallest detail."[20] It is the opinion of collectors that there existed in Benin at one time a very large amount of carved objects in wood, but, unfortunately, most of these must have been destroyed when the British burned the city in 1897. Very little of such work, therefore, has survived. What it may have been like cannot be definitely said, yet some hint might be gained from a few specimens that escaped the fire, though these specimens are probably modern in their execution. One such object is a wooden casket in the form of a bullock's head, with two hands jutting out of the forehead and grasping the horns of the animal. The casket is supported by a pedestal of appropriate size and is decorated to represent cowries. "The ears of the bullock's head are covered with embossed brass work, and there are strips of brass of scroll pattern running down the bullock's face and fastened on with small brass staples."[21]