Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face, Charles Kingsley [thriller novels to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Kingsley
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‘Your fathers would never have killed nicors,’ said Wulf, ‘if they had been—’
‘Like us—I know,’ said the Amal. ‘Now tell me, prince, you are old enough to be our father; and did you ever see a nicor?’
‘My brother saw one, in the Northern sea, three fathoms long, with the body of a bison-bull, and the head of a cat, and the beard of a man, and tusks an ell long, lying down on its breast, watching for the fishermen; and he struck it with an arrow, so that it fled to the bottom of the sea, and never came up again.’
‘What is a nicor, Agilmund?’ asked one of the girls.
‘A sea-devil who eats sailors. There used to be plenty of them where our fathers came from, and ogres too, who came out of the fens into the hall at night, when the warriors were sleeping, to suck their blood, and steal along, and steal along, and jump upon you—so!’
Pelagia, during the saga, had remained looking into the fountain, and playing with the water-drops, in assumed indifference. Perhaps it was to hide burning blushes, and something very like two hot tears, which fell unobserved into the ripple. Now she looked up suddenly—
‘And of course you have killed some of these dreadful creatures, Amalric?’
‘I never had such good luck, darling. Our forefathers were in such a hurry with them, that by the time we were born, there was hardly one left.’
‘Ay, they were men,’ growled Wulf.
‘As for me,’ went on the Amal, ‘the biggest thing I ever killed was a snake in the Donau fens. How long was he, prince? You had time to see, for you sat eating your dinner and looking on, while he was trying to crack my bones.’
‘Four fathom,’ answered Wulf.
‘With a wild bull lying by him, which he had just killed. I spoilt his dinner, eh, Wulf?’
‘Yes,’ said the old grumbler, mollified, ‘that was a right good fight.’
‘Why don’t you make a saga about it, then, instead of about right and wrong, and such things?’
‘Because I am turned philosopher. I shall go and hear that Alruna-maiden this afternoon.’
‘Well said. Let us go too, young men: it will pass the time, at all events.’
‘Oh, no! no! no! do not! you shall not!’ almost shrieked Pelagia.
‘Why not, then, pretty one?’
‘She is a witch—she—I will never love you again if you dare to go. Your only reason is that Agilmund’s report of her beauty.’
‘So? You are afraid of my liking her golden locks better than your black ones?’
‘I? Afraid?’ And she leapt up, panting with pretty rage. ‘Come, we will go too—at once—and brave this nun, who fancies herself too wise to speak to a woman, and too pure to love a man! Lookout my jewels! Saddle my white mule! We will go royally. We will not be ashamed of Cupid’s livery, my girls—saffron shawl and all! Come, and let us see whether saucy Aphrodite is not a match after all for Pallas Athene and her owl!’
And she darted out of the cloister.
The three younger men burst into a roar of laughter, while Wulf looked with grim approval.
‘So you want to go and hear the philosopher, prince?’ said Smid.
‘Wheresoever a holy and a wise woman speaks, a warrior need not be ashamed of listening. Did not Alaric bid us spare the nuns in Rome, comrade? And though I am no Christian as he was, I thought it no shame for Odin’s man to take their blessing; nor will I to take this one’s, Smid, son of Troll.’
CHAPTER XIII: THE BOTTOM OF THE ABYSS
‘Here am I, at last!’ said Raphael Aben-Ezra to himself. ‘Fairly and safely landed at the very bottom of the bottomless; disporting myself on the firm floor of the primeval nothing, and finding my new element, like boys when they begin to swim, not so impracticable after all. No man, angel, or demon, can this day cast it in my teeth that I am weak enough to believe or disbelieve any phenomenon or theory in or concerning heaven or earth; or even that any such heaven, earth, phenomena, or theories exist—or otherwise.... I trust that is a sufficiently exhaustive statement of my opinions? .... I am certainly not dogmatic enough to deny—or to assert either—that there are sensations.... far too numerous for comfort .... but as for proceeding any further, by induction, deduction, analysis, or synthesis, I utterly decline the office of Arachne, and will spin no more cobwebs out of my own inside—if I have any. Sensations? What are they, but parts of oneself—if one has a self! What put this child’s fancy into one’s head, that there is anything outside of one which produces them? You have exactly similar feelings in your dreams, and you know that there is no reality corresponding to them—No, you don’t! How dare you be dogmatic enough to affirm that? Why should not your dreams be as real as your waking thoughts? Why should not your dreams be the reality, and your waking thoughts the dream? What matter which?
‘What matter indeed? Here have I been staring for years—unless that, too, is a dream, which it very probably is—at every mountebank “ism” which ever tumbled and capered on the philosophic tight-rope; and they are every one of them dead dolls, wooden, worked with wires, which are petitiones principii.... Each philosopher begs the question in hand, and then marches forward, as brave as a triumph, and prides himself—on proving it all afterwards. No wonder that his theory fits the universe, when he has first clipped the universe to fit his theory. Have I not tried my hand at many a one—starting, too, no one can deny, with the very minimum of clipping,.... for I suppose one cannot begin lower than at simple “I am I”.... unless—which is equally demonstrable—at “I am not I.” I recollect—or dream—that I offered that sweet dream, Hypatia, to deduce all things in heaven and earth, from the Astronomics of Hipparchus to the number of plumes in an archangel’s wing, from that one simple proposition, if she would but write me out a demonstration of it first, as some sort of [Greek expression] for the apex of my inverted pyramid. But she disdained.... People are apt to disdain what they know they cannot do.... “It was an axiom,” it was, “like one and one making two.”.... How cross the sweet dream was, at my telling her that I did not consider that any axiom either, and that one thing and one thing seeming to us to be two things, was no more proof that they really were two, and not three hundred and sixty-five, than a man seeming to be an
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