aps diamonds and
sapphires--who can tell?--and whoever can't tell is free to think--all
waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages--ever since the earth
flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool.

Then there are caverns full of water, numbingly cold, fiercely
hot--hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water
cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the
body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great
caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again,
gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through
and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes
down the Mountainside in torrents, and down the valleys in
rivers--down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that
is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in
billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by
millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last,
melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and
borne by the servant winds back to the mountaintops and the snow, the
solid ice, and the molten stream.

Well, when the heart of the earth has thus come rushing up among her
children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses, then
straightway into it rush her children to see what they can find there.
With pickaxe and spade and crowbar, with boring chisel and blasting
powder, they force their way back: is it to search for what toys they
may have left in their long-forgotten nurseries? Hence the mountains
that lift their heads into the clear air, and are dotted over with the
dwellings of men, are tunnelled and bored in the darkness of their
bosoms by the dwellers in the houses which they hold up to the sun and
air.

Curdie and his father were of these: their business was to bring to
light hidden things; they sought silver in the rock and found it, and
carried it out. Of the many other precious things in their mountain
they knew little or nothing. Silver ore was what they were sent to
find, and in darkness and danger they found it. But oh, how sweet was
the air on the mountain face when they came out at sunset to go home to
wife and mother! They did breathe deep then!

The mines belonged to the king of the country, and the miners were his
servants, working under his overseers and officers. He was a real
king--that i