Produced by Jo Churcher. HTML version by Al Haines.
The Princess and Curdie
by
George MacDonald
CONTENTS
1 The Mountain
2 The White Pigeon
3 The Mistress of the Silver Moon
4 Curdie's Father and Mother
5 The Miners
6 The Emerald
7 What Is in a Name?
8 Curdie's Mission
9 Hands
10 The Heath
11 Lina
12 More Creatures
13 The Baker's Wife
14 The Dogs of Gwyntystorm
15 Derba and Barbara
16 The Mattock
17 The Wine Cellar
18 The King's Kitchen
19 The King's Chamber
20 Counterplotting
21 The Loaf
22 The Lord Chamberlain
23 Dr Kelman
24 The Prophecy
25 The Avengers
26 The Vengeance
27 More Vengeance
28 The Preacher
29 Barbara
30 Peter
31 The Sacrifice
32 The King's Army
33 The Battle
34 Judgement
35 The End
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.