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<h1>THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE</h1>
<h5>BY<br/>
GEORGE MACDONALD</h5>
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<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></SPAN>CHAPTER I.</h2>
<p class="h2">THE MOUNTAIN.</p>
<ANTIMG class="dropimg" src="images/drop_c.jpg" alt="C" />
<p class="noin"><span style="font-weight:bold">URDIE</span>
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.</p>
<p>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 always feel quite awe enough
of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.</p>
<p>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 caldron,
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, it is 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 ceaseless,
cold and babbling, through banks crusted with
carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which
some of the stones are 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, numbing 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 mountain side 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 mountain tops and the
snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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 armies that defended it from certain troublesome
neighbours, and the judges whom he set to portion out
righteousness amongst 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 <i>mammon</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. 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 perfectly understood
each other; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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