The stranger had wit enough to perceive that Conrad was making a fool of him; but the peasants, though there were some things that puzzled them, swallowed all these nonsensical stories. Conrad exulted in his superiority, and went on: "Look you man, if there were no conjurers of this kind, how would all the contraband goods get in, which we find in every part of the world? and this is the reason why the preventive service can do so little, however strict and vigilant they may be. The learning the art indeed must probably cost some trouble; and this no doubt is why so very few seem to reach any mastery in it."
"All that you have been telling me," answered the traveller, is mighty strange; "and perhaps the neatest way of winding up our dialogue would be, if I were to affirm that I am one of the masters in this art. However you would immediately require some specimen of my skill; and at that indeed I might boggle a little. Nevertheless be it in earnest or in jest that you have been talking all this while, there is most unquestionably, as no rational being will dispute, a number of incomprehensible and marvellous things in the world."
Conrad, who in the mean time had been regaling himself with some strong beer, and fancied he had gained a complete victory over his unknown antagonist, was irritated by this rejoinder, and the more so because the peasants, who had heard the conversation, were not capable of undertaking the part of arbitrators.
"Heyday!" he now exclaimed; "you seem to me to be one of those people who have hardly a notion as to what is marvellous or what natural. Have you ever seen spirits with your own eyes, as I have? Have you ever held conversations with goblins, with the little creatures that go into and come out of the mountain-lord's great house there? Have you ever seen metals and precious stones a-growing? or gold and silver trees waving and tossing about, all alive and vegetating?"
"Do you believe then," asked the stranger, "that stones grow and decay, that metals shoot up and propagate their species? Do you fancy that the beds under the earth sprout up just like a potatoe-field?"
"I know nothing about potatoes and all such vermin!" cried Conrad in a passion,—it being something new to him to have an unknown, and, as it seemed, an insignificant person lord it over him: "But that metals and rocks have life and motion in them every body is aware, that they grow up and die away, and that, as there is sunshine and moonshine here above, rain and mist, frost and heat, so there are vapours and blasts there below, which burst in and rush out, and boil invisibly in the dark there, and mould themselves into shape. One of these blasts will curdle into a mist, and then it trickles down, and intermarries with the essences of the hills and of the regions under the earth; and according to the course and form the steam takes then, it begets metals or stones, it quickens into silver or gold, or runs along as iron and copper branching out or cleft asunder in veins that strike far and near."
"What then, are you so far behind all the rest of the world here!" asked the stranger with every mark of astonishment. "O my good friend, with your leave, ever since the creation, or at all events ever since the deluge, the mountains, and stones, and rocks, and metals, and gems, have been lockt up in their houses and never gadded abroad. We dig and delve in here at top, and hardly get even at deepest below the upper skin of the warts, as the mountains are in comparison to the whole earth, much such a part as a nail-paring is of a man. Wherever we can set foot, we grub up these primeval stores, so far as we need them; and nothing ever shoots forth again, neither coal nor diamond, neither copper nor lead; and your notion of the matter is a mere superstition. In Africa, they tell us a story, people used from time to time to find little grains of gold in a sandpit, which they had to deliver up to the poor black king as his property. With the help of these he would then buy all sorts of things from foreiners. One day going a little deeper they fell in with two good-sized lumps of massy solid gold. The slaves in great delight carried the fruit of their labours to their black master, it being more than they had found for ten years past, and they thought how overjoyed the poor man would be at becoming rich thus all at once. But they were mistaken. The wise old king said: 'Look ye, my friends, these pieces are the father and mother of that little brood of gold grains which we have constantly been finding for ages: carry them back immediately and set them in the very same place, that they may be able to go on producing fresh ones. Unless you do so, we should get a vast gain for the moment, but should lose a lasting source of profit for ever hereafter.' The moor was a goosecap, was not he?"
"Very far from it," cried Conrad, growing more and more enraged; "he was quite right not to meddle with that which goes on in secret; although we, as miners, cannot see the matter exactly in the same light as he did. Solid masses have grown like the rest of us; and who can say whether they may not enliven and further the shooting and coalescing of the metallic particles round about them?"
"I tell you however," replied the stranger, "that sprouting and growing, and spreading out into the regions of the air, or in the form of roots underground, are the properties of plants only. Stones rest in themselves; vegetables feed on light and warmth and moisture, and transform the particles of the earth they stand on into means of growth and enlargement. Then animals start off and break loose from the elements; but they move within them, and carry their roots about with them in their entrails."
"No! no!" screamed Conrad, still more violently: "In this way the whole world, and above all my glorious mountains, with their glittering subterraneous chambers, will be hocus-pocust into mere store-houses, wretcheder ones than if they were made of wood, into miserable wareshops and stalls. What then would the dwarfish sprites, and the mighty mountain-spirit, and all the goblins and elvish imps, and the swarm of gnomes there below have to do? and yet they are always, some of them cleverly, some of them clumsily, putting their hands to the wheel. And the waters! and the vapours! O thou blind and deaf generation, that wilt not see and understand, what is yet much more easily comprehensible than your dead, lifeless world! If life and growth, and the workings by which life is propagated and multiplied, can ever come to a standstill, then in your own realm too, in the places where you fancy you see life, it is a sheer illusion and cheat. The solid earth is alive, but in a different manner; and when it happens to draw in its breath, when the old giant yawns and stretches his tired limbs, and tries to arrange them more comfortably, you are all aghast, and set up a howl about earthquakes, while your walled hovels are running after you for variety's sake, and your towers are tumbling into your pockets and slippers."