Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/418

 386 prince, and her sorrow at not possessing an immortal soul like his. She therefore stole out of her father's palace, and while everybody was merry and singing she sat sad at heart in her little garden. Suddenly she heard the sound of a bugle through the water, and she thought to herself, "Now he is out sailing—he whom I love more than father and mother, he to whom my thoughts cling, and in whose hands I would place the happiness of my life. I will risk everything to win him and an immortal soul. While my sisters are dancing in my father's palace I will go to the sea witch, of whom I have always been so frightened. She may advise and help me."

The little mermaid then went out of her garden toward the roaring whirlpools behind which the witch lived. She had never been that way before. Neither flowers nor seaweed grew there. Only the bare, gray sandy bottom could be seen stretching away to the whirlpools where the water whirled round like roaring mill-wheels, tearing everything they got hold of down with them into the abyss below. She had to make her way through these roaring whirlpools to get into the sea witch's district, and for a long distance there was no other way than over hot, bubbling mud, which the witch called her turf-moor. Behind it lay her house, in the middle of a weird forest. All trees and bushes were polyps, half animal, half plant. They looked like hundred-headed snakes growing out of the ground. All the branches were long slimy arms with fingers like wiry worms, and they moved, joint by joint, from the root to the outermost point. They twisted themselves firmly around everything they could seize hold of in the sea, and never released their grip. The little mermaid stood quite frightened before all this, her heart beat with fear, and she was nearly turning back, but then she thought of the prince and man's immortal soul, and this gave her courage. She twisted her long, flowing hair tightly round her head, so that the polyps should not seize her by it, crossed both her hands on her breast, and then darted forward as rapidly as fish can shoot through the water, in between the polyps, which stretched out their wiry arms and fingers after her. She noticed how they all held something which they had seized—held with a hundred little arms as if with iron bands. The white skeletons of people who had perished at sea and sunk to the bottom could be seen firmly fixed in the arms of the polyps, together with ships' rudders and sea chests, skeletons of land animals, and a little mermaid whom they had caught and strangled. This was the most terrible sight of all to her.

She now came to a large slimy place in the forest, where great fat water snakes were rolling about, showing their ugly whitish-yellow bellies. In the middle of the open space stood a house built of the white bones of the people who had been wrecked. There the sea witch was sitting, while a toad was eating out of her mouth, just as a human being lets a little canary bird eat sugar from his mouth. The ugly, fat water snakes she called her little chickens, and allowed them to crawl all over her bosom.