The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel in the land of Flanders and elsewhere

by Charles de Coster

“I can help you,” said Katheline, “on one condition only: that a girl who loves you is willing to take you with her to the Sabbath of the Spirits of Spring, which is the Easter of Fruitfulness.”

“I will take him,” said Nele.

Whereupon Katheline took a crystal goblet and poured into it a certain mixture of a greyish colour, and she gave it to them both to drink, and rubbed their temples with this mixture, and their nostrils likewise, and the palms of their hands, and their wrists, and she also caused them to eat a pinch of white powder, and then she told them to gaze the one at the other in such manner that their two souls might become one.

Ulenspiegel looked at Nele, and straightway the sweet eyes of the girl illumined in him a mighty flame, and because of the mixture he had taken he felt as it were a thousand crabs nipping his skin all over him.

After that Nele and Ulenspiegel undressed, and very beautiful they looked in the lamplight, he in the pride of his manly strength, and she in all her youthful grace and sweetness. But they were not able to see one another, for already it was as though they were asleep. Then Katheline rested the neck of Nele upon the arm of Ulenspiegel, and taking his hand she placed it upon the young girl’s heart. And there they stayed, all naked, lying side by side. And to both of them it seemed that their bodies, where they touched, were made of tender fire, like the sun itself in the month of roses.

Then, as they afterwards related, they climbed together on to the window-sill, whence they threw themselves out into space, and felt the air all round them, buoying them up as the waters buoy up the ships at sea.

Thereafter they lost all consciousness, seeing naught of earth where slept poor mortals, nor yet of heaven whose clouds were rolling now beneath their feet; for now they had set their feet upon Sirius, the frozen star, and from thence again they were flung upon the Pole.

There it was that a fearful sight awaited them, a giant all naked, the Giant Winter. His hair was wild and tawny, and he was seated on an ice-floe, with his back resting against a wall of ice. Near by in the pools of water there disported a host of bears and seals, bellowing all round him. In a hoarse voice the giant summoned to his presence the hail-storms and the snow-storms and the icy showers; also there came at his behest the grey clouds and brown odorous mists, and the winds among whom is the sharp north wind, he that blows the strongest of all. Such were the terrors that raged together in that place of bane.

But smiling in the midst, the giant reclined on a bed of flowers that had been withered by his own hand, and of leaves dried by his very breath. Then, leaning down and scratching the ground with his finger-nails, and biting it with his teeth, the giant began to burrow a great pit. For he wanted to discover the heart of the earth to devour it, and to put the blackened coal where once there had been shady forests, and chaff where once had been corn, and barren sand in place of fruitful soil. But old earth’s heart was made of fire, so that he dared not touch it but recoiled therefrom in dread.

There he sat like a king upon his throne, draining his horn of oil. All round him were his bears and seals, and the skeletons of those whom he had killed on the high seas or on the dry land or in the cottages of the poor. He listened joyfully to the roaring of the bears, to the braying of the seals, and to the sound made by the skeletons of men and animals as the bones clicked together beneath the claws of the crows and vultures that came for the last remaining piece of flesh that might still adhere to them. And sweet also to his ears was the noise the ice-floes made as they were driven one against another by the waves of that dreary sea.