Читать книгу Pyrotechnics. The History and Art of Firework Making онлайн

13 страница из 52

The writer once had an opportunity of witnessing a Chinese display of some importance, lasting several hours, which produced the effect on the mind of watching some performance or game of the rules of which one was in entire ignorance. Pyrotechnically, only the crudest effects were produced, the remainder of the display, consisting of such items as a man slowly climbing a ladder carrying a lantern, was to the uninitiated mystifying.

The following is an account by a traveller in the early nineteenth century of a Chinese display: “The fireworks, in some particulars,” says he, “exceeded anything of the kind I had ever seen. In grandeur, magnificence, and variety they were, I own, inferior to the Chinese fireworks we had seen at Batavia, but infinitely superior in point of novelty, neatness and ingenuity of contrivance. One piece of machinery I greatly admired: a green chest, five feet square, was hoisted up by a pulley fifty or sixty feet from the ground, the bottom of which was so contrived as then suddenly to fall out, and make way for twenty or thirty strings of lanterns, enclosed in a box, to descend from it, unfolding themselves from one another by degrees, so as at last to form a collection of full five hundred, each having a light of a beautifully coloured flame burning brightly within it. This devolution and development of lanterns was several times repeated, and at every time exhibiting a difference of colour and figure. On each side was a correspondence of smaller boxes, which opened in like manner as the other, and let down an immense network of fire, with divisions and compartments of various forms and dimensions, round and square, hexagons, octagons, etc., which shone like the brightest burnished copper, and flashed like prismatic lightnings, with every impulse of the wind. The whole concluded with a volcano, or general explosion and discharge of suns and stars, squibs, crackers, rockets and grenades, which involved the gardens for an hour in a cloud of intolerable smoke. The diversity of colour, with which the Chinese have the secret of clothing their fire, seems one of the chief merits of their pyrotechny.”