"Perhaps you already know what my business is. I have a colliery; I work with the miners, and spend my day underground."
"Ah, that explains everything," said Angela, regarding him with tender sympathy. "Now I understand that you are indeed right. It would be terrible to condemn a woman to the sufferings a miner's wife must endure. What can be more terrible than to take leave of her husband each morning, not knowing whether they will ever meet again; to know he is in the depths of the earth while she breathes the fresh air of heaven; to fancy her beloved is perhaps buried alive, and she cannot hear his cries for help; that even if it is not so, that he is surrounded by a deadly atmosphere, that it only needs a spark to become a hell, in which her darling would be lost to her forever? I can understand how a woman's heart would break under such a daily agony; even to her child she would say, 'Do not run so fast, else a stone may fall on your father's head and kill him.'" Then, with a sudden change of expression, Angela turned angrily to Ivan. "But why do you stay down in the mine like a common miner?"
"Because it is my element, as the battle-field is that of the soldier, the sea of the sailor, the desert of the traveller. It is with me as it is with them—a passion. I love the mysterious darkness of the world underground."
The warmth with which Ivan spoke these words kindled an answering enthusiasm in his listener.
"Every passion is absorbing," she said, "especially the passion for creation and for destruction. I understand how a woman would follow a man she loved, not only to the field, but into the battle itself, although the art of war has now become a very prosaic and second-class affair, and has lost every trace of idealism. I confess, however, the heroism of the miner is to me incomprehensible. A man who occupies himself with dead, cold stones is to me like that Prince Badrul-Buder in the 'Arabian Nights,' who was turned into a stone, and whose wife preferred a living slave to her marble husband. I prefer those who penetrate to unknown regions of the globe, and I could envy the wife of Sir Samuel Baker, who travelled by his side all through the deserts of South Africa, holding in one hand a pistol, while the other hand was clasped in that of her husband. Together they bore the burning heat, together repulsed the savage wild beasts. Hand in hand they appeared before the King of Morocco, and what the arm of the husband failed to procure was given to the charms of the wife. I can place myself in the position of this woman, who, alone and deserted in the Mangave wood, sat through the livelong night with the head of the wounded traveller on her lap and a loaded pistol beside her. To heal his wounds she ventured into the woods and found herbs; for his food she contrived to cook in the desert. She did this for the only man she loved, whose only love she is and has ever been. Her name is known and revered in every place where Europeans have penetrated."
Again they had to join the circle of dancers, and when they returned to their place Angela resumed the conversation:
"What I said just now was sheer nonsense; the whole thing was the outcome of despicable vanity. A miserable idea to travel through countries where a woman is hardly to be distinguished from a beast, and that because she walks upright; where the ideal of beauty is to have the upper lip bored into a big hole, so that when laughing the nose is visible—ridiculous! And then to be proud because she was the most beautiful woman, and her husband perforce was faithful to her. A great thing, indeed, to be the queen of beauty amid monsters of ugliness! No, no; I know of something better, far bolder. A woman, Fraulein Christian, has accomplished a journey alone on horseback all across the steppes of Asia. What if a man and a woman had the courage to penetrate through the Polenia Canal to the warm seas discovered by Kane? or if a man and a woman had the courage to cast anchor in the regions of the north pole, and to the inhabitants of that magnetic kingdom boldly say, 'Compare yourselves with us; we are handsomer, stronger, more faithful, happier than you are'? That would be a triumph; and such a journey I would willingly undertake."
As she said these words, Angela's eyes gleamed upon Ivan with the splendor of the aurora borealis. Ivan decided within himself upon a sudden experiment.
"Countess, if you have the passion or desire to visit strange worlds, and to excite the benighted inhabitants to a proper emulation for something better, truer, more intellectual than that they have hitherto known, if this is really your laudable wish, I can recommend to your notice a country equally in need of such enlightenment, and infinitely nearer to you."
"What is it?"