Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/536

 through devouring flames, frightful explosions, acrid black smoke, metals in fusion, lavas vomiting hideously, and all the terrors of volcanic eruption.

"These are my furnaces," she said, "the underground where my provisions elaborate themselves. You see, it is a good place for a mind disencumbered of the shell called a body. You have left yours in your bed, and your mind alone is with me. So you may touch and clutch primary matter. You are ignorant of chemistry; you do not yet know of what this matter is made, nor by what mysterious operation what appears here under the aspect of solid bodies come from a gaseous body which has shone in space, first as a nebula and later as a beaming sun. You are a child; I cannot initiate you into the great secrets of creation, and there is a long time yet to be passed before your professors themselves will know them. But I can show you the products of my culinary art. All here is somewhat confused for you. Let us mount a stage. Hold the ladder, and follow me."

A ladder, of which I could not perceive either the bottom or the top, stood before us. I followed the Fairy, and found myself in darkness, but I then noticed that she herself was wholly luminous and radiant as a torch. I then observed enormous deposits of oozy paste, blocks of whitish crystal and immense waves of black and shining vitreous matter, which the Fairy took up and crumbled between her fingers; then she piled the crystal in little heaps, and mixed all with the moist paste, and placed the whole on what she was pleased to call a gentle fire.

"What dish are you going to make of that?" I asked.

"A dish necessary to your poor little existence," she replied. "I am making granite, that is to say, with dust I make the hardest and most resisting of stones: it needs that to enclose Cocytus and Phlegethon. I make also various mixtures of the same elements. Here is what is shown to you under barbarous names—gneiss, the quartzes, the talcs, the micas, et cetera. Of all that which comes from my dust, I, later on, make other dusts with new elements, which will then be slates, sand, and gravel. I am skilful and patient; I pulverise unceasingly to reagglomerate. Is not flour the basis of all cakes? At the present time I imprison my furnaces, contriving for them some necessary vents, so that they may not burst. We will go above and see what is going on. If you are tired, you may take a nap, for it will take me a little to accomplish what I am going to do."

I lost all consciousness of time, and when the Fairy waked me:

"You have been sleeping a pretty considerable number of ages!" she said.

"How many, Madame Fairy?"

"You must ask that of your professors," she replied, laughingly. "Let us go on up the ladder."

She made me mount several stages through divers deposits, where I saw her manipulate the rust of metals, of which she made chalk, marl, clay, slate, jasper; and, as I questioned her as to the origin of metals:

"You want to know a great deal about it," she said. "Your inquirers may explain