The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby
to be chained to the top of a mountain, with a vulture by him to give
him a peck whenever he stirred, lest he should turn the whole world
upside down with his prophecies and his theories.
"But stupid old Epimetheus went working and grubbing on, with the help
of his wife Pandora, always looking behind him to see what had happened,
till he really learnt to know now and then what would happen next; and
understood so well which side his bread was buttered, and which way the
cat jumped, that he began to make things which would work, and go on
working, too; to till and drain the ground, and to make looms, and
ships, and railroads, and steam ploughs, and electric telegraphs, and
all the things which you see in the Great Exhibition; and to foretell
famine, and bad weather, and the price of stocks and (what is hardest of
all) the next vagary of the great idol Whirligig, which some call Public
Opinion; till at last he grew as rich as a Jew, and as fat as a farmer,
and people thought twice before they meddled with him, but only once
before they asked him to help them; for, because he earned his money
well, he could afford to spend it well likewise.
"And his children are the men of science, who get good lasting work done
in the world; but the children of Prometheus are the fanatics, and the
theorists, and the bigots, and the bores, and the noisy windy people,
who go telling silly folk what will happen, instead of looking to see
what has happened already."
Now, was not Mother Carey's a wonderful story? And, I am happy to say,
Tom believed it every word.
For so it happened to Tom likewise. He was very sorely tried; for
though, by keeping the dog to heels (or rather to toes, for he had to
walk backward), he could see pretty well which way the dog was hunting,
yet it was much slower work to go backwards than to go forwards. But,
what was more trying still, no sooner had he got out of Peacepool, than
there came running to him all the conjurers, fortune-tellers,
astrologers, prophesiers, projectors, prestigiators, as many as were in
those parts (and there are too many of them everywhere), Old Mother
Shipton on her broomstick, with Merlin, Thomas the Rhymer, Gerbertus,
Rabanus Maurus, Nostradamus, Zadkiel, Raphael, Moore, Old Nixon, and a
good many in black coats and white ties who might have known better,
considering in what century they were born, all bawling and screaming at
him, "Look a-head, only look a-head; and we will show you what man never
saw before, and right away to the end of the world!"
But I am proud to say that, though Tom had not been to Cambridge--for,
if he had, he would have certainly been senior wrangler--he was such a
little dogged, hard, gnarly, foursquare brick of an English boy, that he
never turned his head round once all the way from Peacepool to the
Other-end-of-Nowhere: but kept his eye on the dog, and let him pick out
the scent, hot or cold, straight or crooked, wet or dry, up hill or down
dale; by which means he never made a single mistake, and saw all the
wonderful and hitherto by-no-mortal-man-imagined things, which it is my
duty to relate to you in the next chapter.
"Come to me, O ye children!
For I hear you at your play;
And the questions that perplexed me
Have vanished quite away.
"Ye open the Eastern windows,
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows,
And the brooks of morning run.
* * * * *
"For what are all our contrivings
And the wisdom of our books,
When compared with your caresses,
And the gladness of your looks?
"Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead."--LONGFELLOW.
CHAPTER VIII AND LAST
HERE begins the never-to-be-too-much-studied account of the
nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth part of the wonderful things which Tom saw
on his journey to the Other-end-of-Nowhere; which all good little
children are requested to read; that, if ever they get to the
Other-end-of-Nowhere, as they may very probably do, they may not burst
out laughing, or try to run away, or do any other silly vulgar thing
which may offend Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.
Now, as soon as Tom had left Peacepool, he came to the white lap of the
great sea-mother, ten thousand fathoms deep; where she makes world-pap
all day long, for the steam-giants to knead, and the fire-giants to
bake, till it has risen and hardened into mountain-loaves and
island-cakes.
And there Tom was very near being kneaded up in the world-pap, and
turned into a fossil water-baby; which would have astonished the
Geological Society of New Zealand some hundreds of thousands of years
hence.
For, as he walked along in the silence of the sea-twilight, on the soft
white ocean floor, he was aware of a hissing, and a roaring, and a
thumping, and a pumping, as of all the steam-engines in the world at
once. And, when he came near, the water grew boiling-hot; not that that
hurt him in the least: but it also grew as foul as gruel; and every
moment he stumbled over dead shells, and fish, and sharks, and seals,
and whales, which had been killed by the hot water.
And at last he came to the great sea-serpent himself, lying dead at the
bottom; and as he was too thick to scramble over, Tom had to walk round
him three-quarters of a mile and more, which put him out of his path
sadly; and, when he had got round, he came to the place called Stop. And
there he stopped, and just in time.
For he was on the edge of a vast hole in the bottom of the sea, up which
was rushing and roaring clear steam enough to work all the engines in
the world at once; so clear, indeed, that it was quite light at moments;
and Tom could see almost up to the top of the water above, and down
below into the pit for nobody knows how far.
But, as soon as he bent his head over the edge, he got such a rap on the
nose from pebbles, that he jumped back again; for the steam, as it
rushed up, rasped away the sides of the hole, and hurled it up into the
sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all
around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that
before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his
ankles, and began to be afraid that he should have been buried alive.
And perhaps he would have been, but that while he was thinking, the
whole piece of ground on which he stood was torn off and blown upwards,
and away flew Tom a mile up through the sea, wondering what was coming
next.
At last he stopped--thump! and found himself tight in the legs of the
most wonderful bogy which he had ever seen.
It had I don't know how many wings, as big as the sails of a windmill,
and spread out in a ring like them; and with them it hovered over the
steam which rushed up, as a ball hovers over the top of a fountain. And
for every wing above it had a leg below, with a claw like a comb at the
tip, and a nostril at the root; and in the middle it had no stomach and
one eye; and as for its mouth, that was all on one side, as the
madreporiform tubercle in a star-fish is. Well, it was a very strange
beast; but no stranger than some dozens which you may see.
"What do you want here," it cried quite peevishly, "getting in my way?"
and it tried to drop Tom: but he held on tight to its claws, thinking
himself safer where he was.
So Tom told him who he was, and what his errand was. And the thing
winked its one eye, and sneered:
"I am too old to be taken in in that way. You are come after gold--I
know you are."
"Gold! What is gold?" And really Tom did not know; but: the suspicious
old bogy would not believe him.
But after a while Tom began to understand a little. For, as the vapours
came up out of the hole, the bogy smelt them with his nostrils, and
combed them and sorted them with his combs; and then, when they steamed
up through them against his wings, they were changed into showers and
streams of metal. From one wing fell gold-dust, and from another silver,
and from another copper, and from another tin, and from another lead,
and so on, and sank into the soft mud, into veins and cracks, and
hardened there. Whereby it comes to pass that the rocks are full of
metal.
But, all of a sudden, somebody shut off the steam below, and the hole
was left empty in an instant: and then down rushed the water into the
hole, in such a whirlpool that the bogy spun round and round as fast as
a teetotum. But that was all in his day's work, like a fair fall with
the hounds; so all he did was to say to Tom--
"Now is your time, youngster, to get down, if you are in earnest, which
I don't believe."
"You'll soon see," said Tom; and away he went, as bold as Baron
Munchausen, and shot down the rushing cataract like a salmon at
Ballisodare.
And, when he got to the bottom, he swam till he was washed on shore safe
upon the Other-end-of-Nowhere; and he found it, to his surprise, as most
other people do, much more like This-End-of-Somewhere than he had been
in the habit of expecting.
And first he went through Waste-paper-land, where all the stupid books
lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winter wood; and
there he saw people digging and grubbing among them, to make worse books
out of bad ones, and thrashing chaff to save the dust of it; and a very
good trade they drove thereby, especially among children.
Then he went by the sea of slops, to the mountain of messes, and the
territory of tuck, where the ground was very sticky, for it was all made
of bad toffee (not Everton toffee, of course), and full of deep cracks
and holes choked with wind-fallen fruit, and green gooseberries, and
sloes, and crabs, and whinberries, and hips and haws, and all the nasty
things which little children will eat, if they can get them. But the
fairies hide them out of the way in that country as fast as they can,
and very hard work they have, and of very little use it is. For as fast
as they hide away the old trash, foolish and wicked people make fresh
trash full of lime and poisonous paints, and actually go and steal
receipts out of old Madame Science's big book to invent poisons for
little children, and sell them at wakes and fairs and tuck-shops. Very
well. Let them go on. Dr. Letheby and Dr. Hassall cannot catch them,
though they are setting traps for them all day long. But the Fairy with
the birch-rod will catch them all in time, and make them begin at one
corner of their shops, and eat their way out at the other: by which time
they will have got such stomach-aches as will cure them of poisoning
little children.
Next he saw all the little people in the world, writing all the little
books in the world, about all the other little people in the world;
probably because they had no great people to write about: and if the
names of the books were not Squeeky, nor the Pump-lighter, nor the
Narrow Narrow World, nor the Hills of the Chattermuch, nor the
Children's Twaddeday, why then they were something else. And all the
rest of the little people in the world read the books, and thought
themselves each as good as the President; and perhaps they were right,
for every one knows his own business best. But Tom thought he would
sooner have a jolly good fairy tale, about Jack the Giant-killer or
Beauty and the Beast, which taught him something that he didn't know
already.
And next he came to the centre of Creation (the hub, they call it
there), which lies in latitude 42.21° south, and longitude 108.56° east.
And there he found all the wise people instructing mankind in the