Ekim Bey
The next morning the first thing we did was to go to the offices of a Tashkent newspaper, to the department which accepted advertisements and also took orders for all sorts of posters.
The clerk there was a very friendly Jew who had recently arrived from Russia. After chatting with him a little, we arranged for advertisements to be inserted in all three of the Tashkent newspapers, and also ordered large posters announcing that a certain Indian fakir had arrived—I do not at the moment remember what Ekim Bey called himself, but I think it was Ganez or Ganzin—and that, with his assistant Salakan, on the following evening in the hall of a certain club, he would give a demonstration of hypnotic experiments and many other supernatural phenomena.
The clerk also undertook to obtain the permission of the police for putting up the posters throughout the town, and by the next day posters about unprecedented miracles were already eyesores to the inhabitants of both New and Old Tashkent.
By that time we had found two unemployed men who had come from the interior of Russia and, after sending them to the baths for a good scrub, we took them to our hotel and prepared them for hypnotic seances. We finally brought them into such a state of hypnosis that one could stick a large pin into their chests, sew up their mouths, and, placing them between two chairs with the head on one and the feet on another, put enormous weights on their stomachs; after which anyone in the audience who wished could come and pull a hair out of their heads, and so on and so forth.
But what particularly astonished all the learned doctors, lawyers and others, was when Ekim Bey, by the means I have described, found out their names or their ages. In short, at the end of the first seance, besides a full cashbox, we received hundreds of invitations to dinner; and how the women of all classes of society made eyes at us—of this there is no need to speak.
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