Syx's pretended
mine and the moon!"
"Hall!" I exclaimed, "you are mad!" My friend smiled good-naturedly,
and went on with his story.
"The instant the kite shrivelled and disappeared I understood why the
works were idle when the moon was not above the horizon, why birds
flying across that fatal beam fell dead upon the rocks, and whence the
terrible master of that mysterious mill derived the power of
destruction that could wither an army as the Assyrian host in Byron's
poem
"Melted like snow in the glance of the Lord."
"But how did Dr. Syx turn the flying atoms against his enemies?" I
asked.
"In a very simple manner. He had a mirror mounted so that it could be
turned in any direction, and would shunt the stream of metallic atoms,
heated by their friction with the air, towards any desired point. When
the attack came he raised this machine above the level of the roof and
swept the mob to a lustrous, if expensive, death."
"And the light at night--"
"Was the shining of the heated atoms, not luminous enough to be
visible in broad day, for which reason the engine never worked at
night, and the stream of volatilized artemisium was never set flowing
at full moon, when the lunar globe is above the horizon only during
the hours of darkness.
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