EVER SINCE OUR ARRIVAL in Ejur, the Hungarian Skariovszki had practiced daily on his zither, with its pure and unsettling sounds.
Squeezed into the gypsy costume he never changed, the able virtuoso executed head-spinning compositions, which had the ability to astonish the natives.
An attentive and populous group of Ponukeleans followed all his performances.
Annoyed by this distracting audience, the great artiste looked for a solitary, welcoming retreat in which to practice, safe from unwelcome eavesdroppers.
Carrying his zither and the foldable stand designed to hold it, he reached the Behuliphruen and marched swiftly forward beneath its tall trees, with no apparent hesitation about which direction to follow.
After a fairly long walk, he halted at the edge of a spring in a charming, picturesque spot.
Skariovszki already knew of this isolated, mysterious place; once he had even tried to bathe in the limpid stream, which flowed with a million glints over shimmering mica rocks. But to his great surprise, he could not overcome the surface tension of the water, whose remarkable density prevented him from penetrating to any appreciable depth. Dropping to his hands and knees, he had managed to cross the heavy stream in both directions without wetting his body, which remained on the surface.
Ignoring the strange waterway this time, Skariovszki quickly set up his zither and stand before a low rock that could serve as his bench.
Soon, seated before the instrument, the virtuoso began playing a slow Hungarian melody full of tender yearning.
After several measures, although fully absorbed in the rise and fall of his hammers, Skariovszki intuited a slight movement coming from near the river.
A rapid glance revealed a giant earthworm, which, emerging from the water, began crawling onto the bank.
Without breaking his rhythm, the gypsy, with a series of furtive glances, watched the newcomer as it gently approached the zither.
Stopping beneath the stand, the worm curled up unafraid between the Hungarian’s feet, who, gazing down, saw it lying still on the ground.
Soon putting the incident out of his mind, Skariovszki continued his labors, and for three long hours waves of harmony flowed continuously from his poetic instrument.
When evening fell, the performer finally stood up; looking at the clear sky harboring no threat of rain, he decided to leave the zither in situ for his next session.
As he was leaving his retreat, he noticed the worm, which, heading back the way it came, slid toward the bank and soon disappeared into the depths of the river.
The next day, Skariovszki again settled next to the bizarre stream and began practicing a difficult slow waltz.
During the first refrain, the virtuoso was somewhat distracted by the colossal worm, which, rising from the currents, returned directly to its place from the day before, where it remained gracefully coiled until the end of the performance.
Once more, before leaving, Skariovszki watched the inoffensive, melody-sated annelid as it noiselessly slid back into the calm brook.
The same thing happened for several days running. Like a snake charmer, the Hungarian, by his talent, infallibly attracted the music-loving worm, which once captured could not tear itself away from its ecstasy.
The gypsy grew keenly interested in the creature, whose trusting nature astounded him. One evening, his day’s work over, he blocked its path with his hand in an attempt to tame it.
The worm, with no apprehension whatsoever, scaled the fingers offered to him, then wrapped itself several times around the Hungarian’s wrist as he progressively rolled up his sleeve.
The formidable load Skariovszki felt on his arm amazed him. Adapted to the dense environment provided by the water of the stream, the worm, despite its suppleness, was of considerable weight.
This first experiment was followed by many others. The worm soon recognized its master and could obey the slightest command from his voice.
Such docility inspired in the gypsy’s mind a plan that might yield valuable results.
The trick was to train the worm to produce sounds from the zither on its own, by patiently cultivating its mysterious passion for the sonorous disturbance of air currents.
After lengthy deliberation, Skariovszki imagined a device that could exploit the peculiar weight of the special waters the creature inhabited.
The rocks in the stream provided him with four solid, transparent slabs of mica, which, when sliced thin and sealed with clay, formed a receptacle well suited to certain goals. Two sturdy branches with forked ends, planted vertically in the ground on either side of the zither, supported the device that was built like a trough with a long, tapering base.
Skariovszki trained the worm to slide into the mica receptacle and stretch out, thereby stopping up a gap in the bottom edge.
Using a large fruit husk, he soon drew from the river several pints of water, which he poured into the transparent trough.
After this, with the end of a twig, he lifted, for a fraction of a second, an infinitesimal fragment of the worm’s recumbent body.
A drop of water slipped through and fell onto a zither string, which vibrated quite clearly.
The experiment, renewed several times in neighboring areas, produced a series of notes that formed a ritornello.
Suddenly the same musical formation was repeated by the worm, which all by itself created paths for the liquid through a series of tremors accomplished flawlessly in all the correct places.
Never would Skariovszki have dared count on such rapid comprehension. At this point his task struck him as simple and infallible.
Measure by measure, he taught the worm several lively or wistful Hungarian melodies.
The gypsy began by using the twig to educate the animal, which then reproduced the given fragment on its own.
Seeing that water was dripping inside the zither through its two sound holes, Skariovszki, with a pin, bored an imperceptible drain in the bottom of the instrument that allowed the excess liquid to escape in a fine stream.
Occasionally more water was collected from the nearby river, and the work continued without interruption.
Soon, driven by his growing ambition, the Hungarian, a twig in each hand, tried to obtain two notes simultaneously.
As the worm lent itself at once to this new demand, every zither composition, invariably based on the sometimes coincident strike of two hammers, was now within their reach.
Deciding to perform at the gala as a trainer rather than a performer, for the next several days the gypsy applied himself fanatically to his pedagogic task.
In the end, raising the difficulty level, he tied a long twig to each of his ten fingers and could thereby teach the worm many polyphonic acrobatics generally excluded from his repertoire.
Now certain of being able to exhibit the astonishing creature, Skariovszki thought up various refinements to improve the overall apparatus.
At his request, Chènevillot replaced the two forked branches that had until then supported the mica trough with a twin metallic mount, attached directly to the zither’s stand.
In addition, a partial felt lining was added to the instrument to gently absorb the echoing drip of the heavy water droplets.
To avoid drenching Trophy Square, an earthenware vessel with felt-lined channel would receive the thin stream escaping from the zither.
These preparations finished, Skariovszki completed the education of his worm, which every day, at the first sounds of the zither, emerged promptly from the dense river, into which the Hungarian personally hastened to plunge it again at the end of their lessons.