Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey
of retainers, all in snow-white fur, lined the wide hallway, as the
guards conducted Bulger and me into the palace and bowed in silence as
we passed.
To my more than wonder, I saw that the inner rooms were most sumptuously
furnished, chairs and divans being scattered here and there, all covered
with superb skins of white fur, while the floor, too, was carpeted with
them, and as the soft radiance of the alabaster lamps fell upon these
magnificent pelts and set ten thousand jewels in the walls and ceilings
of ice, I was ready to admit that I had never seen anything half so
beautiful. And yet I was still outside the throne-room of his frigid
Majesty!
At length we came to one end of a broad hallway which seemed shut off
from the rest of the palace by a wall thickly incrusted with strings of
great diamonds, each as big as a goose-egg, extending from the ceiling
to the floor, and turning back the shimmer of the lamps with such a
flood of crystalline radiance that my eyes involuntarily closed before
it.
Think of my amazement when the two guards, laying hold of this wall of
jewels, as I deemed it, drew it to the right and left till there was
room for me to pass. What I had taken for a wall of jewels was but a
curtain made up of round bits of ice strung upon strings and hanging
like a shower of diamonds there before me, as they glittered in the
light of the lamps each side of them.
I now stood in the throne-room of his frigid Majesty, the King of the
Koltykwerps. Now I realized that what I had seen elsewhere in his palace
of ice was in reality but a sample of its magnificence, for here the
splendor of King Gelidus’ castle burst upon me in its fullest strength.
Imagine a great round chamber lighted with the soft flames of perfumed
oil, streaming from a hundred alabaster lamps, the walls lined with
broad divans covered with snow-white pelts, the floors thickly carpeted
with the same glorious rugs, while on one side, glittering in the
shimmer of the hundred massive lamps, stands the icy throne of the King
of the Koltykwerps, decked with snow-white skins, and he upon it, with
Schneeboule, his fair daughter, sitting at his feet, and all around and
about him, group-wise, a hundred Koltykwerps, the king, the princess,
and the courtiers all clad in skins whiter than the driven snow, and
you, dear friends, will have some faint idea of the splendor of the
scene which burst upon me as the two guards drew aside the strands of
ice jewels at the end of the hallway in the palace of ice!
Like all his subjects, King Gelidus looked out through the round window
of his fur hood, just as a big good-natured boy does through his
skating-cap.
The Koltykwerps were not much taller than I, but were very stocky built,
so that when broadened out by their thick fur suits they really took on
at times the appearance of animated snowballs. It would be hard for the
fingers of the deftest hand to draw faces fuller of kindliness and good
nature than those of the Koltykwerps. Their small, honest gray eyes
sparkled with a boniform glint, and so broad were their smiles that they
were only about half visible through the round holes of their fur hoods.
I was delighted with them from the very start, and the more so when I
heard King Gelidus cry out in a cheery voice: “A right crisp and cold
welcome to our icy court, little baron; but from what our people tell
us, thou carriest a pair of hands so hot that we beg thee to take a few
days to cool off before thou touchest palms with any of the Koltykwerps,
and we also beg thee to be careful and not to lean against any of our
richly carved panels, or to slide down any of our highly polished
railings, or to handle the strands of our jewels, or sit down for any
length of time on the front steps of our palace. And we make the same
request of thy four-footed companion, who is said to be of even a warmer
disposition than thou.”
I bowed and kissed my hand to his frigid Majesty, and assured him that I
should make every effort to lower my temperature as speedily as
possible, and, in the mean time, that I should be extremely careful not
to come into contact with any of the artistic carving of his palace of
ice.
As I pronounced these words, the whole company began to clap their
hands; and as they did so, a cold shiver ran down my back, for there was
a sound, methought, very much like the rattling of dry bones to that
applause, but I took good care not to let King Gelidus notice my fright.
His frigid Majesty now presented me to his daughter Schneeboule, a
pretty little maid of about sixteen crystal winters, with cheeks round
as apples, and as deeply dimpled as the furrows of a cross-bun. Her eyes
twinkled as she looked upon Bulger and me, and turning to her frigid
papa, she asked for leave to touch the tip end of my thumb, which being
done, she gave a squeaky little scream and began to blow on her tiny
finger as if I had blistered it.
King Gelidus also presented me to several of his court favorites, all
men of the coldest blood in the nation. Their names were Jellikin,
Phrostyphiz, Icikul, and Glacierbhoy. They were all dreadfully slow
thinkers when you questioned them very closely upon any subject.
It didn’t take me very long to discover this. In fact, they requested me
to be less warm in my manner, and not to ask them any posers, as they
invariably found that deep thought caused a rise in their temperature.
This was, to be honest about it, very annoying to me; for you know, dear
friends, what a loadstone my mind is, never asleep, always in a quiver
like a mariner’s compass, pointing this way and that, in search of the
polar star of wisdom.
Upon making known my trouble to his frigid Majesty, King Gelidus, he
most gracefully ordered one of his trusty attendants to conduct me to
the triple walled ice-cell of a certain Koltykwerp by the name of
Bullibrain, that is, literally, “Boiling Brain,” a man who had been born
with a hot head, and consequently with a very active brain. For fifty
years King Gelidus had been doing his very best to refrigerate this
subject of his, but without success. As I was just bursting with
impatience to ask a whole string of questions concerning the
Koltykwerps, you may imagine how delighted I was to make the
acquaintance of Bullibrain, or Lord Hot Head as he was called among the
Koltykwerps; but, dear friends, you must excuse me if I make this the
end of a chapter and stop here for a brief rest.
CHAPTER XXIII
LORD HOT HEAD AGAIN, AND, THIS TIME A FULLER ACCOUNT OF HIM.—HIS
WONDROUS TALES CONCERNING THE KOLTYKWERPS: WHERE THEY CAME FROM,
WHO THEY WERE, AND HOW THEY MANAGED TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD OF
ETERNAL FROST.—THE MANY QUESTIONS I PUT TO HIM, AND HIS ANSWERS IN
FULL.
Lord Bullibrain was never allowed to set foot inside the palace of ice.
King Gelidus, backed by the opinion of his favorites, still indulged the
belief that he would be able in the end to refrigerate him. True, he had
been many years at the task, so that it had now become a sort of hobby
of his, and almost daily did his frigid Majesty pay a visit to his
hot-headed subject and test his temperature by pressing a small ball of
ice against his temples. To King Gelidus’ mind, a man of so high a
temperature was a continual menace to the peace and quiet of his
kingdom. What if Lord Hot Head in a dream should wander forth some night
and fall asleep with his back against one of the walls of the ice
palace? Might he not melt away enough of it to throw the whole glorious
fabric into a slump and slush of débris? It was terrible to think of,
when he did think of it, and he thought of it quite often.
But Bullibrain had no terrors for me, nor for Bulger either; in fact,
Bulger was delighted to be stroked by a warm hand, and he and Bullibrain
and I soon became the very best of friends; but his frigid Majesty was
so alarmed when he heard of this friendship, that he was seized with
quite a spasm of warmth, for, thought he, the united heat of three hot
heads might work some terrible harm to the welfare of his people. So he
issued the coldest kind of a decree carved on a tablet of ice, that
Bullibrain and I should on no one day pass more than a half-hour
together; that we should never touch palm to palm, sleep in the same
room, eat from the same dish, or sit on the same divan.
These regulations were annoying, but I followed them to the letter; and
when King Gelidus saw how careful I was to yield the strictest obedience
to his decree, he conceived a genuine affection for me and sent several
magnificent pelts to the ice-house, which had been assigned to Bulger
and me, for, of course, it would not have been safe for us to lodge in
the palace itself, but his frigid Majesty held out the flattering
prospect that the very moment Bulger and I should become properly
refrigerated, apartments in the palace would be assigned to us, and, in
fact, that I should be permitted to eat at the royal table.
Who are the Koltykwerps? Where did these strange folk come from? How did
they ever find their way down into this World of Eternal Frost? And,
above all, where do they get their food and clothing from? These were a
few of the questions which I was so impatient to have answered that my
temperature was raised a whole degree, and I was obliged to sleep with
only one single pelt between me and my divan of crystal ice.
For a man bred and born in so cold a country as the land of the
Koltykwerps, Bullibrain had an extremely quick and active mind. On
account of his rapid heart-beat, and the consequent high temperature of
his body, he was not able to do his writing on slabs of ice as other
learned Koltykwerps had done, for it would not have been a pleasant
thing for him to see a poem which he had just finished literally melt
away in his hands, without so much as leaving an ink-stain behind, so he
had been obliged, with King Gelidus’ permission, to do his writing on
thin tablets of alabaster.
Before he began to talk to me about the progenitors of the Koltykwerps,
he showed me a map of the country in the upper world once inhabited by
them, and traced for me the course they had sailed upon abandoning that
country, and described the beautiful shores they had landed upon in
their search for a new home. I saw at a glance that it was Greenland
which Bullibrain was thus unconsciously describing; and knowing as I did
that in past ages Greenland had been a land of blue skies, warm winds,
green meadows, and fertile valleys, before moving mountains of ice came
down from the North and crushed all life out of it, I listened with
breathless interest to his wonderful tales of its beautiful lakes,
nestled at the foot of vine-clad mountains, all of which Bullibrain now
looked upon in fair visions inherited from his ancestors. And I also
knew that it must have been the Arctic Ocean which had been traversed by
the ships of the Koltykwerps, who had then landed upon the, in those
days, sunny shores of Northern Russia.
But the mountains of ice could sail too, and they followed the fleeing
Koltykwerps like mighty monsters, dashing themselves with terrible roar
and crash upon the peaceful shores, which they soon transformed into a
wilderness of berg, of glacier, and of floe.
Only a handful of the Koltykwerps survived; and these, in their dumb
despair taking refuge in the clefts and caverns of the North Urals,
could from their hiding-places look upon one of the strangest sights
that had ever greeted human eyes. So rapid had been the advance of these
mighty masses of ice, crashing against the mountain sides and rending
the very rocks in their fury, that the air gave up its warmth, and the