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most birds.'" (*20)
"
Twattle!" said the king.
"'I saw, also, among these people a hen without feathers, but bigger
than a camel; instead of flesh and bone she had iron and brick; her
blood, like that of the horse, (to whom, in fact, she was nearly
related,) was boiling water; and like him she ate nothing but wood or
black stones. This hen brought forth very frequently, a hundred chickens
in the day; and, after birth, they took up their residence for several
weeks within the stomach of their mother.'" (*21)
"Fa! lal!" said the king.
"'One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and
wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would
have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the exception of the
great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. (*22) Another of these magi constructed
(of like material) a creature that put to shame even the genius of him
who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second,
it performed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have
required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year. (*23)
But a still more wonderful conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing
that was neither man nor beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed
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