“Alas, my friends, but it is quite unbearable,” declared Kerin, “that food should be upon that side of the dark water, and I, who have had rather a hard day of it, should be upon this side!”
“No, no!” they reassured him, “it is not unbearable, for we do not mind it in the least.”
Then the squeaking little creatures all went away from Kerin, flitting and skimming and twinkling over broad waters which seemed repellently cold and very dreadfully deep. Nevertheless, Kerin, in his desperation,—now that no god answered his prayer, and even the ignes fatui had deserted him, and only a great hungering remained with Kerin in the darkness,—Kerin now arose and went as a diver speeds into those most unfriendly looking waters.
The result was surprising and rather painful: for, as Kerin thus discovered, these waters were not more than two feet in depth. He stood up, a bit sheepishly, dripping wet, and rubbing his head. Then Kerin waded onward in a broad shallow puddle about which there was no conceivable need to bother any god.
Kerin thus came without any hindrance to dry land, and to a place where the shining concourse of lizard-women had already begun to nibble and tug and gulp. But Kerin, after having perceived the nature of their appointed food, and after having shivered, walked on beyond this place, toward the light he detected a little above him.
“For supper,” he observed, “is a matter of vital importance; and it really is necessary to draw the line somewhere.”
44.
Fine Cordiality of Sclaug
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NOW Kerin seemed in the dark to be mounting a flight of nineteen stairs. He came thus into a vast gray corridor, inset upon the left side with nineteen alcoves: each alcove was full of books, and beside each alcove stood a lighted, rather large candle as thick about as a stallion’s body. And Kerin’s surprise was great to find, near the first alcove, that very Sclaug with whom Kerin pleasurably remembered having had so much chivalrous trouble and such fine combats before, some years ago, this Sclaug had been killed and painstakingly burned.