Well-documented magicians are not very common, but Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Maghrabi, the so-called Magician of Egypt, was described by many travellers to Cairo in the second quarter of the 19th century. He is known to held séances in the presence of Henry Salt, Joseph Bonomi, Edward Lane, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Leon de Laborde, Lord Prudhoe, Eliot Warburton, Isabella Romer, Colonel Barnet, John Frederick Lewis, Prisse d’Avennes and many others. Edward Lane, the author of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published 1836, inadvertently made him famous by describing in that book a séance held in 1833, where the Shaykh seemed to give extraordinarily accurate answers to questions about people back in Britain he did not know. The central part of the ritual was that a young boy was selected at random and was instructed to stare at a drop of ink which had been placed in his palm. The boy `saw’ images in the drop and answered questions relayed to him via the Shaykh.

Lane was initially enthusiastic about this display of magic and he and others confessed themselves unable to explain how the Shaykh did it. However, over the years, they grew increasingly sceptical about the Shaykh’s powers. As a visitor attraction, mentioned even in the Cairo edition of Murray’s Guidebook, the Shayk lasted for about 20 years, towards the end giving ever more hopeless sessions, rarely recapturing the amazing accuracy of the early days. Interest in what was called Mesmerism was then at its height, and a somewhat similar session in Paris in the 1840s, using a French medium, is recorded by the Rev Chauncey Hare Townshend, a major benefactor to the South Kensington Museum.

Vigne was an amateur artist and tireless traveller of Huguenot descent. He travelled in Britain and Europe, North America, Turkey, Persia, India, Kashmir, Baltistan, Ladakh, Afghanistan, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Norway, the West Indies, Mexico and Nicaragua, publishing accounts of his travels. His watercolour portraits of those he met on his journeys are now of great anthropological and historical interest.