"Nur," said the king, embracing him, "I have come to consult you because you know many things."
"King Loc," answered Nur, "I might know many things and yet be only a fool. But I know the way to learn a few of the innumerable things I do not know, and this is why I am justly renowned as a man of learning."
"Well," continued Loc, "do you know where a boy called George of the White Moor is now?"
"I do not know, and I have never had the curiosity to learn," answered Nur. "Knowing how ignorant, stupid, and wicked men are, I do not care much what they think or what they do. Except that, to give some value to the life of the proud and wretched race, the men have courage, the women beauty, and the little children innocence, O King Loc, the whole of mankind is lamentable or ridiculous. Subject like the dwarfs to the necessity of working to live, men have rebelled against the divine law, and, far from being like us workmen full of jubilance, they prefer war to work, and would rather kill than help each other. But one must acknowledge, to be just, that the brevity of their life is the principal cause of their ignorance and their ferocity. They live too short a time for them to learn how to live. The Dwarf race, which lives under the earth, is happier and better. If we are not immortal, at least each of us will last as long as the earth which carries us in its bosom and pervades us with its inmost, fruitful warmth, while for the race which is born on its rough rind, its breath is burning or icy, spreading death as well as life. However, men are indebted to their extreme misery and wretchedness for a quality which makes the soul of some of them more beautiful than the soul of the dwarfs. This quality, as splendid to the mind as the mild sheen of pearls to the eye, King Loc, is compassion. Suffering teaches it, and the dwarfs do not know it well, because, being wiser than men, they have fewer sorrows. So the dwarfs sometimes leave their deep grottoes and mix with men on the inclement rind of the earth, in order to love them, to suffer with them and through them, and then to taste compassion, which falls on the soul like a heavenly, refreshing dew. Such is the truth about men, King Loc; but did you not ask me for the particular fate of one of them?"
King Loc having repeated his question, the old Nur looked into one of the glasses that filled the room. For the dwarfs have no books, those found among them come from man and are used as toys. To instruct themselves they do not refer as we do to signs made upon paper; they look into the glasses and see the subject of their researches. The only difficulty is to select the proper glass and direct it rightly.
These glasses are of crystal, also of topaz and opal; but those which have a big polished diamond as lens are the most powerful and are used to see very distant things.
The dwarfs also have lenses of a diaphanous substance, unknown to men. These allow the eye to pierce through walls and rocks as if they were glass. Others, more wonderful still, reproduce as faithfully as a mirror all that time has carried away in its course, for the dwarfs can recall, from the infinite vastness of the ether back into their cavern the light of former days together with the shapes and colours of vanished ages. They enjoy this view of the past by collecting the showers of light, which, having once fallen against the forms of men, of beasts, of plants and of rocks, recoil through the immeasurable ether for all time.
The old Nur excelled in reviving the shapes of the past and even those, impossible to imagine, which existed before the earth had taken upon it the aspect which we know. So it was mere play for him to find George of the White Moor.
Having looked for less than a minute in quite a simple glass, he said to King Loc:
"King Loc, he whom you seek is now among the Sylphs, in the manor of crystal from which none return, and whose iridescent walls march with your kingdom."