Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

41 The Bokharian Dervish Hadji-Asvatz-Troov

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“‘Having returned home, I sat down and thought very seriously for a long time; and the result of all my thinking was that I decided to make an ordinary zimbal and to devise with the help of my friend the dervish Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran such a mechanism of little hammers that their striking should produce the corresponding sounds.

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“‘And that same evening I went to this friend of mine, the dervish Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran.

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“‘Before his initiation into the dervishes, he had been a real professional, namely, a watchmaker.

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“‘And in the monastery also, he devoted all his free time to this favorite craft of his.

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“‘My friend this dervish Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran had by the way recently become much enthused over a certain “freakish idea,” namely, he was trying to make a mechanical watch which would show the time very exactly without the aid of any spring whatsoever.

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“‘This freakish idea of his he explained in the following brief and very simple formulation:

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“‘“Nothing on the Earth is absolutely still, because the Earth itself moves. On the Earth only gravity is still and then only in half the space occupied by its volume. I wish to get such an absolute equilibrium of levers that their movement, which must necessarily proceed from the tempo of the movement of the Earth, should exactly correspond to the required movement of the hands of a clock, and so on and so forth.”

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“‘When I came to this queer friend of mine and explained to him what I wanted to obtain and what help I expected of him, he also immediately became very much interested in this and promised to help me in every way possible.

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“‘And the very next day we started work together.

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“‘From this joint work, the skeleton of this mechanical musical instrument devised by me was soon ready. I myself marked and spaced the places for the corresponding strings, while my queer friend continued to work on the mechanism of the little hammers.

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“‘And then, when I had finished stretching the strings and had begun to tune them correspondingly, just then that began which aroused that further interest in me which brought me to the experiments concerning the laws of vibrations which I began and am still continuing.

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“When we were all seated on the floor in the said section of the cave, the venerable Hadji-Asvatz-Troov said among other things that during the period of his investigations he and his friend the dervish Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran had also occasion to study very thoroughly all the theories existing on the Earth about vibrations made at any time by serious terrestrial scientists.

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“He said: ‘We studied the Assyrian theory of the great Malmanash, and the Arabian theory of the famous Selneh-eh-Avaz, and the Greek—of the philosopher Pythagoras—and of course all the Chinese theories.

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“First of all I asked him the following. I said:

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“‘Highly esteemed Hadji! Until now I have been fully convinced that nowhere on the Earth does there exist an apparatus for the exact measurement of vibrations. Yet here I see so many of these measuring apparatuses.

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“‘These apparatuses for our experiments were made by my deceased friend Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran, and it is chiefly to them that I am indebted for all my attainments in the knowledge of the laws of vibrations.

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“‘At first we made our experiments with the aid of this vibrosho alone, but one day when my friend Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran was in the Bokharan town of X on business, he happened to see a grand piano there at an auction sale of a number of things belonging to a Russian general who had left, and noticing by chance that its strings were made of just the metal needed for our experiments, he bought it and afterwards, of course with great difficulty, brought it up here into the mountains.

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“And so, when I enquired about the methods of the gas and electric lighting in this underground kingdom of his, he related to me the following:

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“‘The causes of the origin of these two kinds of lighting are entirely different, and each of these two kinds of lighting has its own independent story.

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“‘Gas lighting existed here from the very beginning, and was arranged here on the initiative of myself and my old friend the dervish Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran.

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“‘As for the electric lighting, it came here only quite recently, and the initiator of its origin was also one of my friends who is still young and who came from among the Europeans.

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“‘I think it will be better if I tell you the story of each kind of lighting separately.

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“‘I will begin with the gas lighting.

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“‘At the time when we first moved here, there was not far from here a certain holy place called the “holy cave” to which various “pilgrims” and “devotees” from all over Turkestan used to throng.

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“‘The popular belief about this holy place was that once there had lived in this cave, as it were, the famous “Herailaz,” who later was taken up “alive” into Heaven.

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“‘It was further said in this popular belief that he was taken alive into Heaven so unexpectedly that he even had no time to extinguish the fire which lit his cave.

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“‘This last belief was supported by the fact that in that cave there was indeed an “undying fire.”

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“‘As neither I nor my friend the dervish Kerbalai-Azis-Nuaran could believe in the verity of this popular belief, we therefore decided to probe into the real cause of that peculiar phenomenon.