Simplicissimus (52 page)

Our merchants are not motivated by greed or lust for profit but solely by their desire to serve their fellow men by bringing them goods from distant lands. Our innkeepers do not run their inns in order to become rich, but to provide refreshment for hungry and thirsty travellers and hospitality for the tired and weary as a work of charity. The goal of the doctors, as of the apothecaries, is not their own advantage but their patients’ health. Our craftsmen know nothing of tricks, lies and deceit, but do their best to provide honest, lasting workmanship for their customers. Our tailors would never dream of misappropriating part of their client’s cloth and our weavers are so honest they haven’t even a spare ball of yarn to throw at a mouse. Usury is unknown, the wealthy help the needy unasked, simply out of Christian charity, and if a poor man can only pay by leaving himself with no money to buy food, a rich man will cancel the debt of his own accord.

We never meet with arrogance, since everyone is aware of their own mortality; we never come across envy, since each man sees the other as the image of God, beloved of his Creator; no man gets angry with another because he knows that Christ suffered and died for all; we never hear of lasciviousness and unlawful fleshly lusts, it is all done out of love of and desire for children; there are no drunken sots, if one man buys another a drink then they never get more than respectably mellow. There is no unwillingness to attend church, since every man is keen to serve God as best he can (that is the reason there are such fierce wars on earth at the moment, each side believes the other does not worship God properly). There are no misers any more, only thrifty folk; no wastrels, only generous philanthropists; no mercenaries, who rob and kill people, but soldiers defending their country; no idle beggars, but men who despise riches and choose poverty of their own free will; no profiteers who buy up wine and corn to drive up the prices, but prudent citizens saving the surplus for the people for the lean years to come.’

I paused for a while, wondering what else I could say, but the king told me he had already heard enough and if I wanted, his men would take me straight back up to the place they had brought me down from. However, he went on, as I was clearly of an enquiring mind, if I wanted to see some things in his kingdom rarely seen by a human he would arrange for me to be accompanied safely to any part of his realm I wanted; after that he would send me on my way home with a gift that would certainly be to my satisfaction. Since I could not make up my mind what to reply, he turned to some who were just setting off for depths of the Pacific to bring back food, both from the equivalent of a garden and what we would call a hunt, and said, ‘Take him with you, but bring him back in time for him to return to the surface today.’ To me he said that in the meantime I could be thinking of something it was in his power to give me to take back with me as a reward.

So I slipped off with the sylphs down a tunnel a few hundred miles long that took us to the bottom of the Pacific. There we found corals the size of oak-trees and they took pieces that had not yet hardened or become coloured for food; they eat them just as we eat new antlers. There were snails as tall as a fair-sized bastion and as broad as a barn door, pearls as big as your fist, which they ate instead of eggs, and too many other strange marvels of the deep for me to tell. The floor of the sea was strewn everywhere with emeralds, turquoise, rubies, diamonds, sapphires and other similar precious stones, most of them the size of the boulders we sometimes find in streams. Here and there we saw cliffs rising up for several miles and sticking out of the water with jolly little islands on top on them; all round they were decorated with quaint and bizarre sea-weed and inhabited by all kinds of strange erect, creeping, trotting creatures, just as the surface of the earth is with men and animals. The fish however, of which we saw huge numbers – large and small and of countless species – cruising through the water above us, reminded me of nothing so much as all the birds soaring through the air in the spring and autumn. And since there was a full moon and a clear sky (the sun was shining in our hemisphere so that it was night when I was in the Antipodes, daytime in Europe) I could see the moon and stars through the water, and the South Pole as well, at which I expressed my surprise. The sylph who had been told to look after me assured me however that if I had been there by day as well as by night I would have found it even more amazing, for you could see far-off mountains and valleys in the depths of the ocean as well as on land, and it looked more beautiful than the most beautiful landscape on the surface of the earth. When he noticed that I was surprised to find that he and all his companions, despite the fact that they were dressed as Peruvians, Brazilians, Mexicans or inhabitants of the Marianas, could still speak excellent German, he told me they only spoke one language, but that all peoples heard it as their own, and vice versa. The reason was that they had had nothing to do with the foolishness of the Tower of Babel.

Once the convoy had collected sufficient provisions, we returned to the centre of the earth via a different tunnel. En route I told some of them I had always thought of the centre of the earth as a kind of hollow cylinder, like the drive-wheel of a crane, with little pygmies running round inside to keep the earth moving, so that all parts would get their share of the sun which, according to Aristarchus and Copernicus stood motionless in the sky. They laughed out loud at my naïvety and told me to forget the idea, and the opinion of those two learned gentlemen, as the idle fancy it was. Instead I should be thinking, they said, of what I should ask their king to give me so that I didn’t go back up to the surface empty-handed. I told them my mind was so full of all the wonders I had seen I could not think of anything and I asked them to advise me. One idea I had was to ask him, since he controlled all the springs in the world, for a mineral spring on my farm, like the one that had recently appeared in Germany, though that just had ordinary water. The regent of the Pacific Ocean and its caverns told me that was not in the king’s power, and even if it were, such a spring would not last long. I asked him the reason and he replied, ‘Here and there in the earth there are empty spaces which gradually fill up with all kinds of metals, which are generated by a damp, thick, viscous exhalation. Sometimes, while this process is taking place, water from the centre filters in through the cracks in the ores and remains with the metals for many hundreds of years, absorbing their healthful qualities. If, with the passage of time, the pressure from the centre increases and the water finds an outlet through the ground, then it is the water that has been all that time with the metals that is forced out first and has those marvellous effects on the human body that you see in new medicinal springs. Once the water that has spent so long among the metals has all flowed out, ordinary water follows. It goes through the same passages but runs so fast it cannot absorb the properties of the metals and so does not have the same healing power.’

If I was so concerned about my health, he went on, I should ask the king to recommend me to the king of the fire-spirits, with whom he was in close contact. He could treat a human body with a precious stone so that it would not burn in fire, like that special kind of linen we had on earth which we cleansed by putting it in fire when it was dirty. A person who had been treated in this way could be placed in the middle of a fire, like a stinking, goo-encrusted old pipe, and all the bad humours and harmful vapours would be burnt off so that the patient emerged from it as young, fresh, healthy and reinvigorated as if he had taken Paracelsus’s elixir. I didn’t know whether the fellow was joking or meant it seriously so I thanked him for his suggestion but said that being of a choleric nature I was afraid such a cure might be too hot for me. What I would like best, I went on, would be to take a rare, health-giving spring back up to the surface which would benefit my fellow humans, bring honour to the king and make my name go down in history. The prince replied that he would put in a good word for me, although as far as the king was concerned, honour and dishonour on earth were all the same to him. In the meantime we had arrived back at the middle of the earth again just as the king and his princes were about to dine. It was a cold collation with neither wine nor spirits, like the Greek nephalia. Instead, they drank the contents of pearls which had not yet hardened, like raw or soft-boiled eggs, and this fortified them immensely.

While I was there I observed how the sun shone on each lake in turn and sent its rays down to these awesome depths, making it as bright in this abyss as on the surface and even casting shadows. The lakes were like windows for the Sylphs through which they received both light and warmth. Even if they didn’t always come directly, because the sides of some lakes were twisted, they were transmitted by reflection because nature had set whole slabs of crystal, diamonds and rubies where necessary in the angles of the cliffs.

Now the time had come for me to go back home, and the king commanded me to tell him what favour I thought he might do me. I said the greatest service he could render me would be to make a genuine medicinal spring appear on my farm. ‘Is that all?’ said the king. ‘I would have thought you would have picked up some large emeralds from the bottom of the Atlantic and asked to be allowed to take them up to the surface with you. Now I see that greed is not a vice of you Christians.’ With that he handed me a stone with strange, iridescent colours and said, ‘Take this. Wherever you place it on the ground it will seek to return to the centre of the earth, passing through the most suitable minerals until it reaches us. Then we will send a magnificent mineral spring back to you which will do you the good and bring you the profit you deserve for revealing the truth to us.’ Then the prince of the Mummelsee accompanied me back up by the way we had come.

The journey back seemed much longer than the way there, so that I estimated it at a good sixteen thousand miles, but the reason was probably that time seemed to drag because I did not talk to my escort this time, except for them to tell me they lived for three, four or five hundred years and were never ill at all. My mind was so full of my mineral spring that all my thoughts were occupied with working out where to site it and how to exploit it. I was already planning the fine buildings I would have to erect, so that the people who came to take the waters would have comfortable lodgings and I a handsome profit. I worked out what bribes to give the doctors to persuade them to recommend my new miracle spa above all others, even Schwalbach, and send me crowds of rich patients. In my mind I was already levelling whole mountains, so that arriving and departing guests would not complain the journey was too wearying, hiring crafty servants, miserly cooks, cautious chambermaids, vigilant stable-boys, clean supervisors for the baths and spring. I selected a spot in the wild hills close to my farm which I would level and turn into a beautiful garden with all kinds of rare plants where my guests could walk, invalids take the air and healthy visitors amuse and refresh themselves with all kinds games and pastimes. I would get some doctors, for a fee of course, to write a brochure, which I would have printed with a fine engraving showing my farm in ground plan and elevation, so praising my spring and its excellent properties that it would fill any sick person with hope and bring him half way back to health just to read it. I would have my children brought from Lippstadt and get them to learn all kinds of skills that would be useful for my new spa. None of them, however, would train as a barber-surgeon; I only intended to bleed my patients financially, not medically.

Full of these speculations and imaginary projects, I came back to the surface, and the prince even set me on land with dry clothes. But I had to return the jewel he had given me at the start immediately, otherwise I would have drowned in the air or had to put my head under water in order to breathe. Once that had been done we bade each other farewell as people who would never meet again. He submerged and went back down into the depths with his companions, while I set off for home clutching the stone the king had given me, as happy as if I were bearing the Golden Fleece from Colchis.

But, oh dear, my happiness, which looked as if it promised to have a permanent basis, did not last long at all. Hardly had I left the miraculous lake than I got lost in the immense forest, for I had not paid attention to the route my Da had taken. I had gone quite some way before I became aware of this, as I was still preoccupied with my scheme to set up and develop the spring on my land as a profitable investment. The longer I walked, the farther away I went, without realising it, from the place I most wanted to be. Worst of all, by the time I realised what was happening, the sun was already setting and there was nothing I could do about it. There I was, stuck in the middle of nowhere without food or gun, both of which I really needed to see me through the night. But I comforted myself with the thought of the stone I had brought up from the bowels of the earth. ‘Patience, patience’, I said to myself, ‘this will make up for any hardship you have to suffer. All in good time, Rome wasn’t built in a day, otherwise if he wanted any fool could get a fine mineral spring such as you have in your pocket without even having to break sweat.’

Encouraging myself thus seemed to give me new resolve and new strength so that I stepped out much more boldly than before, even though I was overtaken by darkness. The full moon was shining brightly, but the tall pines did not let as much light through to me as the depths of the sea had done earlier that day. However, I still made progress and around midnight saw a fire in the distance. I headed straight towards it and when I was still some way off I saw that there were some woodmen who had been gathering resin sitting round it. Although these folk are not always to be trusted, necessity and my own courage prompted me to speak to them. I crept up quietly and said, ‘Good night or good day, good morning or good evening gentlemen. Tell me what time it is so that I can greet you properly.’ At this all six stood or sat still, trembling with fright, and didn’t know what to say. I am pretty tall and this, with the black mourning clothes I was wearing because of my wife’s death, and the huge cudgel I was leaning on like a wild man of the woods made me a frightening figure to them. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Will no one answer?’ Their astonished silence continued for a while until one recovered and said, ‘Hoo be ye, zurr?’ From his dialect I could tell he was a Swabian, who are generally, though wrongly, considered to be simple-minded. I told them I was a wandering scholar who had just come from the Venusberg where I had learnt a whole heap of weird and wonderful skills. ‘Oho!” answered the oldest of them, ‘now I really do believe peace is coming, thank God, if the wandering scholars be on their travels again.’