B891 <=> B893 [BTG XLI The bokharian dervish, p. 892]

“When Hadji had finished his monotonous music, the flowers in the pot were in the same state of bloom as before.

“Then Hadji moved from the former monochord to the sound-producing instrument grand piano, and having again directed our attention to the hands of the vibrometers, he began to strike successively the corresponding keys of the grand piano, which gave out the same monotonous melody of the same five tones of sound.

“And this time also, the hands of the vibrometers indicated the same figures.

“Five minutes had barely passed when at a nod from Hadji, we looked at the pot of flowers and saw that the flowers in the pot had begun very definitely to fade, and when after ten minutes, the venerable Hadji again ceased his music, there were then in the pot only the quite faded and withered stalks of the former flowering plants.

“Hadji then again sat down by us and said:

“’As my investigations of long years have convinced me and as the science of Shat-Chai-Mernis states, there do indeed exist in the world two kinds of vibrations; namely, so to say, “creative vibrations” and “momentum vibrations.”

“’As I have made clear by experiment, the best strings for the production of the said creative vibrations are those made of a certain definite metal or of goat gut.

“’But strings made of other materials do not have this property.

“’Vibrations issuing from the latter kind of strings, and also the vibrations obtained from the flow of air, are purely momentum vibrations. In this case the sounds are obtained from those vibrations which arise from the mechanical action of the momentum evoked by them and from the friction of the air flowing from it.’