Ep. 987 - Bee: The Princess of the Dwarfs - Chapter 16
Slpyhs, Arthur Rackham
King Loc did not laugh long; on the contrary, he hid the face of a very unhappy little man under his bedclothes. Thinking of George of the White Moor, prisoner of the Sylphs, he could not sleep the whole night. So, at that hour of the morning when the dwarfs who have a dairymaid for a friend go to milk the cows in her place while she sleeps like a log in her white bed, little King Loc revisited Nur in his deep well.
"Nur," he said to him, "you did not tell me what he was doing among the Sylphs."
The old Nur thought that King Loc had gone out of his mind, and he was not very frightened, because he was certain that King Loc, if he became mad, would certainly turn into a graceful, witty, amiable, and kindly madman. The madness of the dwarfs is gentle like their sanity and delightfully fantastic. But King Loc was not mad; at least he was not more so than lovers usually are.
"I mean George of the White Moor," he said to the old man, who had forgotten this young man as completely as possible.
Then the learned Nur arranged the lenses and the mirrors in a careful pattern, but so intricate that it had the appearance of disorder, and showed to King Loc in the mirror the very shape of George of the White Moor, such as he was when the Sylphs carried him off. By properly choosing and skilfully directing the instruments, the dwarf showed the lovelorn king the whole adventure of the son of that countess who was warned of her end by a white rose. And here expressed in words is what the two little men saw in the reality of form and colour.
When George was carried away in the icy arms of the daughter of the lake, he felt the water press his eyes and his breast, and he thought it was death. Yet he heard songs that were like caresses, and he was steeped in a delicious coolness. When he opened his eyes again he found himself in a grotto; it had crystal pillars in which the delicate tints of the rainbow shone. At the end of this grotto there was a large shell of mother-of-pearl, irisated with the softest colours: it was a canopy spreading over a throne of coral and weeds where sat the queen of the Sylphs. But the aspect of the sovereign of the waters had lights softer than the sheen of mother-of-pearl and of crystal. She smiled at the child brought to her by her women and let her green eyes rest on him long.
"Friend," she at length said to him, "welcome in our world, where you will be spared every pain. For you, no dry books or rough exercises, nothing coarse that recalls the earth and its labours, but only the songs, the dances, and the friendship of the Sylphs."
