“The thing is, of course,” he said, “to destroy the Earthquaker before he wakens; but how? What can kill such a monster? Prodding him with the sword would only stir
him up and make him more vicious. And I know of no other beast we can set against him, as I did with the Fire-beast and the Ice-beast, when I was young. Oh, for an idea!”
Then his mind, somehow, went back to the Council and the ponderous stupidity of the Prime Minister.
“Heavier than lead,” said the king. “By George! I have a plan. If I could get to the place where they keep the Stupidity, I could carry away enough of it to flatten out the Earthquaker.”
Then he remembered how, in an old Italian poem, he had read about all the strange lumber-room of odd things which is kept in the moon. That is the advantage of reading: Knowledge is Power; and you mostly get knowledge that is really worth having out of good old books which people do not usually read.
“If the Stupidity is kept in stock, up in the
moon, and comes from there, falling naturally down on the earth in small quantities, I might obtain enough for my purpose,” thought King Prigio. “But—how to get to the moon? There are difficulties about that.”
But difficulties only sharpened the ingenuity of this admirable king.
“The other fellow had a Flying Horse,” said he.
By “the other fellow” King Prigio meant an Italian knight, Astolfo, who, in old times, visited the moon, and there found and brought back the common sense of his friend, Orlando, as you may read in the poem of Ariosto.