“Perhaps you think you see snow,” said little Goldflame. “But when it snows here, it only snows powdered sugar.”
Werner now saw before him a high, shining white rock on which hundreds of men were working. They rode quite close and dismounted. “This is the great sugar quarry,” said Goldflame. “This entire rock consists of the finest white colonial sugar.”
Quite near them they observed an entrance to a cave, and as they approached it several miners hurried toward them with torches and led the way. They penetrated deep into the mountain, whose walls shimmered and shone in the reflected torchlight. Presently they stepped into a magnificent chamber whose walls, covered with huge crystals of transparent rock candy, glittered and sparkled in the light of the torches.
“This is the large rock-candy cavern,” said little Goldflame. They went on and came to a place where the miners were knocking and hammering, and working new passages into the mountains.
“These men are looking for melted sugar, and when they find it, they scoop it out with huge spoons,” she said.
Suddenly, as they proceeded, they beheld mountains, no longer white and shining, but dull, dark brown, and smelling of vanilla. “We are now approaching the chocolate mines,” explained little Goldflame.
Here many people were at work tunneling into the mountains, for it was only in the interior that the best vanilla chocolate was found. They passed through great chambers supported here and there by single pillars left standing. When at last they again stepped into the open air, Werner noticed a roaring brook that came from a ravine in the mountains and rushed toward the valley, where it turned the mills that sawed the chocolate blocks into cakes.
“Would you like to have a drink?” said little Goldflame. “It tastes good; it is pure liqueur.” Little Werner was so very thirsty after all the sweets he had eaten and seen, and from the brook came so fresh and enticing an odor, that he seized the cup eagerly which an obliging miner handed him, and emptied it at a single draft. But scarcely had he finished when the world began to turn about him in the queerest way—he saw two Goldflames, four Goldflames, a hundred Goldflames, glittering and gleaming before him, then flowing together into a shining sea of light, carrying away his senses—and he knew nothing more.
VI. Conclusion
The first sound that Werner heard on awakening was the chirping of a titmouse. He was astonished to find himself sitting on a stump under the old beech tree with the little pine tree in front of him. The titmouse hopped from branch to branch and chirped, but Werner no longer understood what she said. It suddenly occurred to him that it must be very late, that his mother had surely been anxiously waiting for him. But looking up at the sun he was astonished to find that scarcely a quarter of an hour had passed since he had left this spot. He could not account for this mystery, but eager to relate his wonderful experiences to his mother and little Anna, he cut down the pine tree and hurried home with his burden as fast as he could. When with shining eyes and breathless haste he had told them his story, his mother grew quite angry and told him not to dare fall asleep again in the woods in winter—had the weather been colder it might have been his death. But afterwards she shook her head, saying to herself, “Where does the boy get all his strange fancies?”