"Now that you are quite sure your pistol is loaded, and that it will explode, tell me, do you feel no remorse, no scruple about killing me thus, although I authorize you to do so?" "No, for I wish to kill you," the Arab repeated coldly. Without replying, I put an apple on the point of a knife, and, standing a few yards from the Marabout, ordered him to fire. "Aim straight at the heart," I said to him. My opponent aimed immediately, without the slightest hesitation. The pistol exploded, and the bullet lodged in the center of the apple. I carried the talisman to the Marabout, who recognized the ball he had marked. I could not say that this trick produced greater stupefaction than the ones preceding it: at any rate, my spectators, palsied by surprise and terror, looked round in silence, seeming to think, "Where the deuce have we got to here!" A pleasant scene, however, soon unwrinkled many of their faces. The Marabout, though stupefied by his defeat, had not lost his wits; so, profiting by the moment when he returned me the pistol, he seized the apple, thrust it into his waist belt, and could not be induced to return it, persuaded as he was that he possessed in it an incomparable talisman. For the last trick in my performance I required the assistance of an Arab. At the request of several interpreters, a young Moor, about twenty years of age, tall, well built, and richly dressed, consented to come on the stage. Bolder and more civilized, doubtless, than his comrades of the plains, he walked firmly up to me. I drew him toward the table that was in the center of the stage, and pointed out to him and to the other spectators that it was slightly built and perfectly isolated. After which, without further preface, I told him to mount upon it, and covered him with an enormous cloth cone, open at the top. Then, drawing the cone and its contents on to a plank, the ends of which were held by my servant and myself, we walked to the footlights with our heavy burden, and upset it. The Moor had disappeared--the cone was perfectly empty! Immediately there began a spectacle which I shall never forget. The Arabs were so affected by this last trick, that, impelled by an irresistible feeling of terror, they rose in all parts of the house, and yielded to the influence of a general panic. To tell the truth, the crowd of fugitives was densest at the door of the dress circle, and it could be seen, from the agility and confusion of these high dignitaries, that they were the first to wish to leave the house. Vainly did one of them, the Caid of the Beni-Salah, more courageous than his colleagues, try to restrain them by his words: "Stay! stay! we cannot thus lose one of our coreligionists. Surely we must know what has become of him, or what has been done to him. Stay! stay!" But the coreligionists only ran away the faster, and soon the courageous caid, led away by their example, followed them.