Page:Hans Andersen's fairy tales (Robinson).djvu/53

 HANS ANDERSEN'S FAIRY TALES cross made the airy phantom strong, and all three rode to the firm ground.

A cock crowed in the Viking's stronghold. The phantoms rose up in the mist, and were dispersed in the wind, but mother and daughter stood there together.

'Is that myself that I see in the deep water?' said the mother.

'Is that myself that I see in the bright shield?' exclaimed the daughter; and they came close together, breast to breast in each other's arms. The mother's heart beat strongest, and she understood it all.

'My child! My own heart's flower! My lotus from the deep waters!'

And she embraced her child, and wept over her; and the tears were as a baptism of new life and affection for little Helga.

'I came hither in a swan's skin, and I took it off,' said the mother. 'I sank through the quivering swamp, deep into the mire of the bog, that enclosed me as with a wall. But soon I found a fresher current about me; a power seemed to draw me ever deeper and deeper. I felt a pressure of sleep on my eyelids; I slept, I dreamt—I seemed to lie again in the pyramids of Egypt; but there still stood before me the moving elder-stump, which had frightened me on the surface of the moor. I looked at the crevices in the bark, and they shone forth in colours and became hieroglyphics—it was the case of a mummy which I was looking at. That burst, and out of it stepped a lord a thousand years old, a mummy form, black as pitch, shining black like a wood-snail or the slimy black mud—the Marsh King, or the mummy of the pyramid, I did not know which. He flung his arms about me, and I felt that I should die. When I first returned to life again, and my 34