A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (mobi reader android .txt) 📕

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:

“Nihilistendynamittheaterkaestchenssprengungsattentaetsversuchungen!”

—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:

“Transvaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthiertreibertrauungsthraenen- tragoedie!”

—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 that 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.