CHAPTER I.
A discourse on light—Quangrollart explains the word crashee—Believes a fowl is a fruit—Gives a further account of Youwarkeds reception by her father, and by the king—Tommy and Hallycarnie provided for at court—Youwarkee and her father visit the colambs, and are visited—Her return put off till next winter, when her father is to come with her.
THE next day I prepared again of the best of everything for my new guests. I killed three fowls, and ordered Pedro (who was as good a cook almost as myself) to get them ready for boiling, whilst we took a walk to the lake. Though we went out in the clearest part of the morning, I heard no complaint of the light. I took the liberty to ask my brother if the light did not offend him; for I told him my wife could not bear so much without spectacles.—"What is that spectacle?" says he.—"Something I made your sister," says I, "to prevent the inconvenience of too much light upon her eyes."—He said the light was scarce at all troublesome to him, for he had been in much greater, and was used to it; and that the glumms, who travelled much abroad, could bear more light than the gawrys, who stayed much at home: these stirring but little out unless in large companies, and that of one another, and very rarely admitted glumms amongst them before marriage. For his own part, he said, he had an office at Crashdoorpt, * which, though he executed chiefly by a deputy, obliged him to reside there sometimes for a long season together; that being a more luminous country than Arndrumnstake, light was become familiar to him; for it was very observable that some who had been used to it young, though they might in time overcome it, yet at first it was very uneasy.
* The country of the Slits.
I was upon the tenter whilst he spoke, lest, before he had done, a question I had a thousand times thought to have asked my wife, should slip out of my head, as it had so often done before, and was what I had for years desired to be resolved in; viz., what the meaning of the word slit was, when applied to a man. So, on his pausing, I said that his mention of Crashdoorpt reminded me of inquiring what crashee meant, when applied to a glumm or gawry. "It would be no hard task," he said, "to satisfy me in respect of that, as I already understood the nature of the graundee;" whereupon he went on thus: "Slitting is the only punishment we use to incorrigible criminals: our method is, where any one has committed a very heinous offence, or, which is the same thing, has multiplied the acts of offence, he has a long string tied round his neck, in the manner of a cravat; and then two glumms, one at each end, take it in their hands, standing side by side with him; two more standing before him, and two behind him; all which in that manner take flight, so that the string keeps the criminal in the middle of them: thus they conduct him to Crashdoorpt, which lies farther on the other side of Arndrumnstake than this arkoe does on this side of it, and is just such an arkoe as ours, but much bigger within the rocks. When they come to the covett they alight, where my deputy immediately orders the malefactor to be slit, so that he can never more return to Normnbdsgrsutt, or indeed by any means get out of that arkoe, but must end his days there. The method of slitting is thus: The criminal is laid on his back with his graundee open, and after a recapitulation of his crimes, and his condemnation, the officer with a sharp stone slits the gume * between each of the filuses ** of the graundee, so that he can never fly more. But what is still worse to new-comers, if they are not very young, is the light of the place, which is so strong that it is some years before they can overcome it, if ever they do."
This discourse gave me a great pleasure; thereupon I repeated the dialogue that had passed between me and Youwarkee about my being slit, and how we had held an argument a long time, without being able to come at one another's meaning. "But pray, brother," says I, "how comes that light country to agree so well with you?"—"Why," says he, "the colambat *** of Crashdoorpt is reckoned one of the most honourable employments in the state, by reason of the hazard of it, and the person accepting it must be young: it was, by my father's interest at court, given to me at nine years of age; my friend Rosig has followed my fortune in it ever since, being much about my age, and has a post under me there: in short, by being obliged to be so much there, and from so tender an age too, I have pretty well inured myself to any light."