|
|
|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
CHAPTER 1
The Mountain
Curdie was the son of Peter the miner. He lived with his father
and mother in a cottage built on a mountain, and he worked with his
father inside the mountain.
A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without
knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people
were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not
come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated
them - and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have
learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel
quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.
I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the
heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below,
and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great
wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals,
but of glowing hot, melted metals and stones. And as our hearts
keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it
is a huge power of buried sunlight - that is what it is.
Now think: out of that cauldron, where all the bubbles would be as
big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain
bubbles have bubbled out and escaped - up and away, and there they
stand in the cool, cold sky - mountains. Think of the change, and
you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about
the very look of a mountain: from the darkness - for where the
light has nothing to shine upon, much the same as darkness - from
the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest - up, with a
sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the
starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the
blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their
grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt,
the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and
everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and
caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are
studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and
the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of
the glaciers fresh born.
Think, too, of the change in their own substance - no longer molten
and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold.
Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the
birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of
its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the
valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its
armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and
the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and
green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices
down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful
gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound
lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of
ice.
All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what
lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles
thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin
or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones - perhaps a brook,
with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaselessly, cold and
babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes,
or over a gravel of which some of the stones arc rubies and
emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires - who can tell? - and
whoever can't tell is free to think - all waiting to flash, waiting
for millions of ages - ever since the earth flew off from the sun,
a great blot of fire, and began to cool.
Then there are caverns full of water, numbingly cold, fiercely hot
- hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water
cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in
the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the
great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it
out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and
kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to
the light, and rushes down the Mountainside in torrents, and down
the valleys in rivers - down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs
of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and
cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to
mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by
millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun,
it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds
back to the mountaintops and the snow, the solid ice, and the
molten stream.
Well, when the heart of the earth has thus come rushing up among
her children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses,
then straightway into it rush her children to see what they can
find there. With pickaxe and spade and crowbar, with boring chisel
and blasting powder, they force their way back: is it to search for
what toys they may have left in their long-forgotten nurseries?
Hence the mountains that lift their heads into the clear air, and
are dotted over with the dwellings of men, are tunnelled and bored
in the darkness of their bosoms by the dwellers in the houses which
they hold up to the sun and air.
Curdie and his father were of these: their business was to bring to
light hidden things; they sought silver in the rock and found it,
and carried it out. Of the many other precious things in their
mountain they knew little or nothing. Silver ore was what they
were sent to find, and in darkness and danger they found it. But
oh, how sweet was the air on the mountain face when they came out
at sunset to go home to wife and mother! They did breathe deep
then!
The mines belonged to the king of the country, and the miners were
his servants, working under his overseers and officers. He was a
real king - that is, one who ruled for the good of his people and
not to please himself, and he wanted the silver not to buy rich
things for himself, but to help him to govern the country, and pay
the ones that defended it from certain troublesome neighbours, and
the judges whom he set to portion out righteousness among the
people, that so they might learn it themselves, and come to do
without judges at all. Nothing that could be got from the heart of
the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver
the king's miners got for him. There were people in the country
who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in
a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred
all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king's hands it
never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.
About a year before this story began, a series of very remarkable
events had just ended. I will narrate as much of them as will
serve to show the tops of the roots of my tree.
Upon the mountain, on one of its many claws, stood a grand old
house, half farmhouse, half castle, belonging to the king; and
there his only child, the Princess Irene, had been brought up till
she was nearly nine years old, and would doubtless have continued
much longer, but for the strange events to which I have referred.
At that time the hollow places of the mountain were inhabited by
creatures called goblins, who for various reasons and in various
ways made themselves troublesome to all, but to the little princess
dangerous. Mainly by the watchful devotion and energy of Curdie,
however, their designs had been utterly defeated, and made to
recoil upon themselves to their own destruction, so that now there
were very few of them left alive, and the miners did not believe
there was a single goblin remaining in the whole inside of the
mountain.
The king had been so pleased with the boy - then approaching
thirteen years of age - that when he carried away his daughter he
asked him to accompany them; but he was still better pleased with
him when he found that he preferred staying with his father and
mother. He was a right good king and knew that the love of a boy
who would not leave his father and mother to be made a great man
was worth ten thousand offers to die for his sake, and would prove
so when the right time came. As for his father and mother, they
would have given him up without a grumble, for they were just as
good as the king, and he and they understood each other perfectly;
but in this matter, not seeing that he could do anything for the
king which one of his numerous attendants could not do as well,
Curdie felt that it was for him to decide. So the king took a kind
farewell of them all and rode away, with his daughter on his horse
before him.
A gloom fell upon the mountain and the miners when she was gone,
and Curdie did not whistle for a whole week. As for his verses,
there was no occasion to make any now. He had made them only to
drive away the goblins, and they were all gone - a good riddance -
only the princess was gone too! He would rather have had things as
they were, except for the princess's sake. But whoever is diligent
will soon be cheerful, and though the miners missed the household
of the castle, they yet managed to get on without them.
Peter and his wife, however, were troubled with the fancy that they
had stood in the way of their boy's good fortune. it would have
been such a fine thing for him and them, too, they thought, if he
had ridden with the good king's train. How beautiful he looked,
they said, when he rode the king's own horse through the river that
the goblins had sent out of the hill! He might soon have been a
captain, they did believe! The good, kind people did not reflect
that the road to the next duty is the only straight one, or that,
for their fancied good, we should never wish our children or
friends to do what we would not do ourselves if we were in their
position. We must accept righteous sacrifices as well as make
them.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
|