Mr. Leeds, the Yankee showman in black, welcomes the friars and clerks from Quiroga's party into a room draped like a mortuary, lets them examine props before and after, and asks only for silence during the act. Ben-Zayb, sure the sphinx is optics, jumps the rail, lifts the cloth, and finds a table on three iron legs sunk into the floor with no mirrors anywhere. Padre Camorra asks where the mirrors went; Leeds jokes that his are at the hotel, and the journalist retreats muttering that the trick cannot run without glass he has not yet found.
Leeds narrates a pyramid fable: a worm-eaten box of ashes, papyrus words of creation and destruction, and a head that once stared at him alive. Friars who stage hell and purgatory for alms hold their breath so the dust is not lost; Ben-Zayb quips that the box smells of the Church until the room falls quiet. Leeds exposes the bare table again, cries Deremof, and a cadaverous head rises, fixing its cavernous eyes on Padre Salvi while outsiders at the door complain the sphinx is for friars only.
The head names itself Imuthis and tells of Egyptian priests who monopolised land and learning, then ruined him through a saintly priest of Abydos who wanted his beloved and forged rebellion in his name. The parable thickens until the head accuses murderer, slanderer, hypocrite and drives its gaze into Salvi, who groans Mercy, she still lives, and collapses as ladies faint for form and Irene blames bird's-nest soup. Custodio calls the show wicked; Ben-Zayb leaps the rail once more, finds nothing under the cloth, and next day writes of occult sciences while an ecclesiastical order bans the exhibition and Leeds slips away to Hongkong with his secret.
Rizal frames legerdemain as moral X-ray: the sceptic hunts apparatus, the pious faint at ashes, and the one who stays silent breaks when fiction names his crime. Leeds bows the shaken guests out and vanishes toward Hongkong before clerical orders can hold him. When authority prohibits the show after Salvi's confession, was the danger mirrors, or the listener who could not look away?
