that grew not upon any soil but in the air. {*10} There were others
that sprang from the substance of other vegetables; {*11} others that
derived their substance from the bodies of living animals; {*12} and
then again, there were others that glowed all over with intense fire;
{*13} others that moved from place to place at pleasure, {*14} and
what was still more wonderful, we discovered flowers that lived and
breathed and moved their limbs at will and had, moreover, the
detestable passion of mankind for enslaving other creatures, and
confining them in horrid and solitary prisons until the fulfillment
of appointed tasks.'" {*15}
"Pshaw!" said the king.
"'Quitting this land, we soon arrived at another in which the bees
and the birds are mathematicians of such genius and erudition, that
they give daily instructions in the science of geometry to the wise
men of the empire. The king of the place having offered a reward for
the solution of two very difficult problems, they were solved upon
the spot -- the one by the bees, and the other by the birds; but the
king keeping their solution a secret, it was only after the most
profound researches and labor, and the writing of an infinity of big
books, during a long series of years, that the men-mathematicians at
length arrived at the identical solutions which had been given upon
the spot by the bees and by the birds.'" {*16}
"Oh my!" said the king.
"'We had scarcely lost sight of this empire when we found ourselves
close upon another, from whose shores there flew over our heads a
flock of fowls a mile in breadth, and two hundred and forty miles
long; so that, although they flew a mile during every minute, it
required no less than four hours for the whole flock to pass over us
-- in which there were several millions of millions of fowl.'" {*17}
"Oh fy!" said the king.
"'No sooner had we got rid of these birds, which occasioned us great
annoyance, than we were terrified by the appearance of a fowl of
another kind, and infinitely larger than even the rocs which I met in
my former voyages; for it was bigger than the biggest of the domes on
your seraglio, oh, most Munificent of Caliphs. This terrible fowl had
no head that we could perceive, but was fashioned entirely of belly,
which was of a prodigious fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking
substance, smooth, shining and striped with various colors. In its
talons, the monster was bearing away to his eyrie in the heavens, a
house from which it had knocked off the roof, and in the interior of
which we distinctly saw human beings, who, beyond doubt, were in a
state of frightful despair at the horrible fate which awaited them.
We shouted with all our might, in the hope of frightening the bird
into letting go of its prey, but it merely gave a snort or puff, as
if of rage and then let fall upon our heads a heavy sack which proved
to be filled with sand!'"
"Stuff!" said the king.
"'It was just after this adventure that we encountered a continent of
immense extent and prodigious solidity, but which, nevertheless, was
supported entirely upon the back of a sky-blue cow that had no fewer
than four hundred horns.'" {*18}
"That, now, I believe," said the king, "because I have read something
of the kind before, in a book."
"'We passed immediately beneath this continent, (swimming in between
the legs of the cow, and, after some hours, found ourselves in a
wonderful country indeed, which, I was informed by the man-animal,
was his own native land, inhabited by things of his own species. This
elevated the man-animal very much in my esteem, and in fact, I now
began to feel ashamed of the contemptuous familiarity with which I
had treated him; for I found that the man-animals in general were a
nation of the most powerful magicians, who lived with worms in their
brain, {*19} which, no doubt, served to stimulate them by their
painful writhings and wrigglings to the most miraculous efforts of
imagination!'"
"Nonsense!" said the king.
"'Among the magicians, were domesticated several animals of very
singular kinds; for example, there was a huge horse whose bones were
iron and whose blood was boiling water. In place of corn, he had
black stones for his usual food; and yet, in spite of so hard a diet,
he was so strong and swift that he would drag a load more weighty
than the grandest temple in this city, at a rate surpassing that of
the flight of most birds.'" {*20}
"Twattle!" said the king.
"'I saw, also, among these people a hen without feathers, but bigger
than a camel; instead of flesh and bone she had iron and brick; her
blood, like that of the horse, (to whom, in fact, she was nearly
related,) was boiling water; and like him she ate nothing but wood or
black stones. This hen brought forth very frequently, a hundred
chickens in the day; and, after birth, they took up their residence
for several weeks within the stomach of their mother.'" {*21}
"Fa! lal!" said the king.
"'One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass
and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he
would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the
exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. {*22} Another of
these magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to
shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its
reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so
vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of
fifty thousand fleshy men for a year. (*23} But a still more
wonderful conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was
neither man nor beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with
a black matter like pitch, and fingers that it employed with such
incredible speed and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in
writing out twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour, and this
with so exquisite a precision, that in all the copies there should
not be found one to vary from another by the breadth of the finest
hair. This thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or
overthrew the mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were
exercised equally for evil and for good.'"
"Ridiculous!" said the king.
"'Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in his
veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of sitting
down to smoke his chibouc in a red-hot oven until his dinner was
thoroughly roasted upon its floor. {*24} Another had the faculty of
converting the common metals into gold, without even looking at them
during the process. {*25} Another had such a delicacy of touch that
he made a wire so fine as to be invisible. {*26} Another had such
quickness of perception that he counted all the separate motions of
an elastic body, while it was springing backward and forward at the
rate of nine hundred millions of times in a second.'" {*27}
"Absurd!" said t
he king.
"'Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody ever
yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish their arms,
kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance at his will.
{*28} Another had cultivated his voice to so great an extent that he
could have made himself heard from one end of the world to the other.
{*29} Another had so long an arm that he could sit down in Damascus
and indite a letter at Bagdad -- or indeed at any distance
whatsoever. {*30} Another commanded the lightning to come down to him
out of the heavens, and it came at his call; and served him for a
plaything when it came. Another took two loud sounds and out of them
made a silence. Another constructed a deep darkness out of two
brilliant lights. {*31} Another made ice in a red-hot furnace. {*32}
Another directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did.
{*33} Another took this luminary with the moon and the planets, and
having first weighed them with scrupulous accuracy, probed into their
depths and found out the solidity of the substance of which they were
made. But the whole nation is, indeed, of so surprising a necromantic
ability, that not even their infants, nor their commonest cats and
dogs have any difficulty in seeing objects that do not exist at all,
or that for twenty millions of years before the birth of the nation
itself had been blotted out from the face of creation."' {*34}
Analogous experiments in respect to sound produce analogous results.
"Preposterous!" said the king.
"'The wives and daughters of these incomparably great and wise
magi,'" continued Scheherazade, without being in any manner disturbed
by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions on the part of
her husband -- "'the wives and daughters of these eminent conjurers
are every thing that is accomplished and refined; and would be every
thing that is interesting and beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality
that besets them, and from which not even the miraculous powers of
their husbands and fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save. Some
fatalities come in certain shapes, and some in others -- but this of
which I speak has come in the shape of a crotchet.'"
"A what?" said the king.
"'A crotchet'" said Scheherazade. "'One of the evil genii, who are
perpetually upon the watch to inflict ill, has put it into the heads
of these accomplished ladies that the thing which we describe as
personal beauty consists altogether in the protuberance of the region
which lies not very far below the small of the back. Perfection of
loveliness, they say, is in the direct ratio of the extent of this
lump. Having been long possessed of this idea, and bolsters being
cheap in that country, the days have long gone by since it was
possible to distinguish a woman from a dromedary-'"
"Stop!" said the king -- "I can't stand that, and I won't. You have
already given me a dreadful headache with your lies. The day, too, I
perceive, is beginning to break. How long have we been married? -- my
conscience is getting to be troublesome again. And then that
dromedary touch -- do you take me for a fool? Upon the whole, you
might as well get up and be throttled."
These words, as I learn from the "Isitsoornot," both grieved and
astonished Scheherazade; but, as she knew the king to be a man of
scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she
submitted to her fate with a good grace. She derived, however, great
consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from the
reflection that much of the history remained still untold, and that
the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for him a most
righteous reward, in depriving him of many inconceivable adventures.
~~~ End of Text ~~~
======
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM.
The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as _our_
ways ; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the
vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, _which have
a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus_. _Joseph
Glanville. _ .
WE had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some
minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you
on this route as well as the youngest of my sons ; but, about three
years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened to
mortal man - or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of -
and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken
me up body and soul. You suppose me a _very_ old man - but I am not.
It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty
black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so
that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow.
Do you know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without
getting giddy ?"
The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown
himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over
it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on
its extreme and slippery edge - this "little cliff" arose, a sheer
unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen
hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us. Nothing would have
tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink. In truth so
deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I
fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me,
and dared not even glance upward at the sky - while I struggled in
vain to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the
mountain were in danger from the fury of the winds. It was long
before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and
look out into the distance.
"You must get over these fancies," said the guide, "for I have
brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the
scene of that event I mentioned - and to tell you the whole story
with the spot just under your eye."
"We are now," he continued, in that particularizing manner which
distinguished him - "we are now close upon the Norwegian coast - in
Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe Page 39