I replied that there were a few things I could not understand. If they committed no misdeeds and therefore needed no punishment, why did they have to have a king? Similarly, how could they claim to enjoy freedom if they were subject to a king? Also, how could they be born and die if they never suffered pain or illness?
My little prince replied that the king did not administer justice, nor did they serve him. His function, like that of the queen in a beehive, was to order their affairs. Their women, he went on, felt no pleasure in coitus and no pain in giving birth. It might help me understand this, he said, to think of cats, which conceived in pain and gave birth with pleasure. Nor did they die in pain or from illness or old age; their bodies simply vanished along with their souls, like a light going out when its time has come. As far as the freedom he had boasted about was concerned, the freedom of the greatest monarch among us humans was as nothing compared to it. They could not be killed by us or other creatures, nor could they be forced to do anything they didn’t want to, much less imprisoned since they could pass through fire, water, air and earth without the least difficulty or tiredness, in fact that was something they never experienced.
‘If that is the way you are’, I replied, ‘then your race has been raised far higher and given greater gifts by the Creator than ours.’
‘Oh no’, replied the prince, ‘it would be sinful to say that, for you would be accusing God in His goodness of something which is not the case. You have been given far greater gifts than we have. You have been created to achieve eternal bliss and look on the face of the Lord for ever and ever, and in that blissful state one of you will feel more joy and delight in one single moment than our whole race has from the beginning of creation to the day of judgment.’
‘And what do the damned get out of it?’ I asked and he replied with a counter-question, saying, ‘What can God in His goodness do if one of you forgets his true nature, abandons himself to the creatures of this world and their shameful lusts, and gives free rein to his animal desires, thus putting himself on a level with the brute beasts and becoming, in his disobedience to God, closer to the fiendish rather than the blessed spirits? The eternal misery of the damned, which they have fallen into through their own fault, does not detract at all from the lofty nobility of your race since they, like everyone else, had the chance of achieving eternal bliss during their life on earth, if they had only chosen the path that leads to it.’
I had more opportunity than I needed to hear about this kind of subject up on the surface, so I asked my little prince to tell me the reason why there was sometimes a violent storm when a stone was thrown into the lake. I remembered having heard the same about Lake Pilatus in Switzerland and read something similar about Lake Camarina in Sicily, which gave rise to the phrase
Camarinam movere
.
‘Any heavy object that is thrown into water’, he replied, ‘will continue to fall towards the centre of the earth until it reaches the bottom. Since, however, all these lakes are bottomless, stones that are thrown into them naturally fall on the place where we live and would stay there if we didn’t bring them back up again. This we do with a certain amount of violence, to deter those who insist on throwing them in; that is one of our most important tasks. If we removed the stones without the violent thunderstorms then we would spend all our time at the beck and call of those nuisances who amuse themselves by despatching stones to us every day from all parts of the world. From this one single activity you can see how necessary we are. If we didn’t remove the stones, so many come from the various lakes round the world to the centre of the earth where we live that the structure which attaches the seas to the earth would be destroyed and the passages, which take the spring waters from the depths to the surface of the earth, would all be blocked up. The resulting damage and chaos could lead to the destruction of the whole world.’
I thanked him for this information and went on, ‘I see now how you use these lakes to supply all the springs and rivers on the surface of the globe. Can you tell me then why the water is not the same everywhere, but differs as to smell, taste, effect and so on since, as I understand from what you say, they all have their origin in the abyss of the great ocean to which all waters eventually return? Some springs are pleasant mineral waters and good for the health whilst others, though also mineral waters, are unpleasant and harmful to drink; some are even deadly poisonous, like the spring in Arcadia with which Jolla is said to have poisoned Alexander the Great. Some springs are warm, some boiling hot and others ice-cold; some, like the one in the county of Spis in Slovakia, can eat through iron like aqua fortis; some, on the other hand, can heal all wounds (there is said to be one like that in Thessaly); some waters turn into stone, others to salt and yet others to vitriol. The lake near Zirknitz in Carinthia only has water in winter and is dry in summer; the spring at Aengstlen south of Berne only flows in the summer, and that only at certain hours when the cattle are being watered; the Schändlebach by Obernäheim in Alsace only runs when the country is about to be visited by some disaster; and the Fluvius Sabbaticus in Palestine dries up every seventh day. I have often puzzled over all this and could never find the reason.’
To this the prince replied that all these phenomena had natural causes, most of which had been guessed at or deduced by human scientists from the different tastes, smells, powers and effects of the water, categorised and published in our surface world. If water on its way from their home to its outflow, which we call a spring, runs through nothing but stone, then it will remain cool and sweet. If, however, it passes through metals (the interior of the earth, he pointed out, is not the same everywhere), for example gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, mercury etc, or through semi-metals, that is sulphur, salt (in all its forms: natural salt, crystal salt, uric salt, root salt, saltpetre, sal ammoniac, rock salt etc), white, red yellow and green colours, green vitriol, gold, silver, lead or iron bismuth, lapis lazuli, alum, arsenic, antimony, yellow arsenic, amber, borax, sublimate of mercury etc, then it will absorb their taste, smell, nature, power and effect and thus be either healthful or harmful to human beings. That was also the reason there were so many different salts, some good for us, others bad. In Cervia and Comacchio the water is fairly black, he informed me, reddish in Memphis, snow-white in Sicily; that from Centuripe is purplish in colour, that from Cappadocia yellowish.
‘The hot springs’, he continued, ‘draw their heat from the fires burning within the earth which, like the waters, have vents and chimneys here and there, as for example the famous Mount Etna in Sicily, Hekla in Iceland, Gumung Api in the Moluccas and others. As far as the lake by Zirknitz is concerned, its waters appear at the Carinthian antipodes during the summer; likewise the Aengstlen spring can be seen at other places on the earth’s surface at different times of the day and year, doing exactly what it does in Switzerland, and the same is true of the Schändlebach. All these springs are regulated by our people according to the will of God to increase His praise among you. Regarding the Fluvius Sabbaticus, however, we celebrate the seventh day by reposing in its source and channel, that being the most pleasant spot of our whole region. Consequently the river cannot flow at all while we are celebrating our day of rest in it in honour of the Creator.’
Next I asked the prince if it would be possible for him to take me back up to the surface by another lake. ‘Of course’, he replied. ‘Why not, if it is God’s will. That was how our forebears in the olden days took some Canaanites, who had escaped Joshua’s sword and in desperation thrown themselves into one of these lakes, to America. Even today their descendants can show you the lake their ancestors came from.’
I could tell that he was amazed at my amazement, as if there were nothing amazing at all about what he had told me, so I asked him if they were ever amazed at the strange and unusual things we humans did. ‘The only thing that amazes us about you humans’, he answered, ‘is that, being created for eternal life and the everlasting joys of heaven, you let yourselves be so seduced by the transient pleasures of the world, which can no more be had without pain and distress than roses without thorns, that you lose your right to heaven and the joy of beholding the most holy countenance of God and are cast into eternal darkness with the fallen angels. If only we were in your place! Every single one of us would make sure that he stood the test of your brief and transient time on earth better than you. The life you have is not your true life; life or death is given you after you leave the temporal world. What you call life is but a moment, a little while granted to you to see God and come near to Him so that He can take you unto Himself. We look on the world as God’s touchstone for testing out humans, as a rich man tests silver and gold. Once He has found out their worth by the colour of the streak, or they have been assayed by fire, he adds the pure, fine gold and silver to his heavenly treasure, but throws the false and impure into the eternal fires. Your Saviour and our Creator made this clear enough with His parable of the tares and the wheat.’
That was the end of our discussion, as we were approaching the residence of the king, before whom I was brought without time-wasting ceremony. I had good cause to be astonished at His Majesty, for I saw neither a well-appointed court, nor pomp and circumstance, no chancellor or privy councillors, no spokesmen or bodyguards, not even a jester, nor a cook, cellarer, page or any favourites or flatterers. Instead there hovered round him all the princes of all the lakes in the whole world, each dressed in the costume of the country where the lake he was in charge of was situated. I saw sylphs looking like Chinese and Africans, troglodytes and men from Novaya Zemlya, Tartars and Mexicans, Samoyeds and Moluccans. I even saw some resembling men from the arctic and antarctic, which was a strange sight to see. The two who supervised the Wildsee and the Schwarzsee, their lakes being close to the Mummelsee, were dressed like the one who had guided me; the prince of Lake Pilatus had a broad, dignified beard and a pair of baggy knee-breeches like any respectable Swiss, and the one that looked after Lake Camarina was so like a Sicilian in both clothes and features one would have sworn he had never left Sicily and couldn’t speak a word of German. It was like looking through a book of national costumes, there were sylphs dressed like Persians, Japanese, Muscovites, Finns, Lapps and all other nations in the world.
I had no need of elaborate compliments, for the king immediately started to speak, in good German, by asking me why I had wantonly sent them such a pile of stones. My answer was brief: ‘Because in our world anyone is allowed to knock at a closed door.’
‘And what if you received your just desserts for your importunity?’ he asked.
‘The worst punishment I could be given’, I replied, ‘would be death. However, since throwing the stones I have have had the good fortune to see marvels unknown to millions of humans, so that dying would be a trifle, my death hardly count as punishment at all.’
‘Oh what blindness!’ exclaimed the king, raising his eyes to heaven in a look of amazement. ‘You humans die only once and you Christians should only be confident of overcoming death if your faith and your love of God give you a certain hope your souls will see the face of the Most High the moment the mortal body breathes its last.
However’, he went on, ‘it is something else I have brought you here to talk about. It has been reported to me that the human race, especially you Christians, expect the Day of Judgment very soon because not only have all prophecies, including the words of the Sybils, been fulfilled, but everyone on earth is so given over to vice that the Almighty will not wait any longer to bring the world to its end. Since our race is to perish with the world and be consumed by fire, even though we are creatures of water, we were not a little horrified to think such a terrible time was approaching. This was why I had you brought here, to find out if we should live in hope or fear. We ourselves cannot see any indications announcing the approach of such a change, either in the constellations, or in the earth itself, so we need information from those with whom your Saviour left signs to recognise His second coming. We beg you, therefore, to tell us whether that faith, which the Son of Man will have difficulty finding when He comes, still exists on earth or not.’
I replied that he had asked me things which were beyond me. Future events, and especially the coming of the Lord, were known only to God. To this the king said, ‘Well then, tell me how the different professions behave so that I can deduce from that whether the world is about to end, and our race along with it, or whether I will continue to rule my people in happiness for a long time. If you tell me the truth, I will let you see what few others have seen and send you back with a gift that will delight you for the rest of your days.’ When I said nothing in reply, as I was gathering my thoughts, the king added, ‘Come on, come on, start with the highest and finish with the lowest. You have to do this if you ever want to return to the surface.’
‘If I have to begin with the highest, then the right thing is to make a start with the clergy. In general they are all, whatever their religion, as Eusebius of Caeseria described them in a sermon: disdaining rest, avoiding sensual delights, eager to labour in their profession, patient in scorn, impatient for respect, poor in goods and wealth, rich in conscience, humble as regards their merits, proud in their dealings with vice. Their ambition is to serve God alone and to lead men to the kingdom of God more through their example than through their words, just as the sole aim of the worldly authorities is justice, which they dispense evenly to rich and poor alike, without regard to person. Our theologians are all Jeromes and venerable Bedes, our cardinals Charles Borromeos, our bishops Augustines, our abbots new Hilarions and Pachomiuses, and all the other clerics like the congregation of hermits in the Theban wilderness!