"He is there, is he? Let him stop there!" cried King Loc, rubbing his hands.
And having embraced the old Nur, he went out of the well in peals of laughter.
All along the road he held his sides to laugh at his ease; his head wagged with mirth; his beard rose and fell on his chest; "ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!" The little men who met him also began to laugh like him, out of sympathy. Seeing them laugh, others laughed too; this laughter spread from one to another till the whole inside of the earth was shaken with a jovial great guffaw.
CHAPTER XVI
TELLS THE MARVELLOUS ADVENTURE OF
GEORGE OF THE WHITE MOOR
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.