e at top, and hardly get even at deepest below the
upper skin of the warts, as the mountains are in comparison to the
whole earth, much such a part as a nail-paring is of a man. Wherever
we can set foot, we grub up these primeval stores, so far as we need
them; and nothing ever shoots forth again, neither coal nor diamond,
neither copper nor lead; and your notion of the matter is a mere
superstition. In Africa, they tell us a story, people used from time
to time to find little grains of gold in a sandpit, which they had to
deliver up to the poor black king as his property. With the help of
these he would then buy all sorts of things from foreiners. One day
going a little deeper they fell in with two good-sized lumps of massy
solid gold. The slaves in great delight carried the fruit of their
labours to their black master, it being more than they had found for
ten years past, and they thought how overjoyed the poor man would be
at becoming rich thus all at once. But they were mistaken. The wise
old king said: 'Look ye, my friends, these pieces are the father and
mother of that little brood of gold grains which we have constantly
been finding for ages: carry them back immediately and set them in the
very same place, that they may be able to go on producing fresh ones.
Unless you do so, we should get a vast gain for the moment, but should
lose a lasting source of profit for ever hereafter.' The moor was a
goosecap, was not he?"

"Very far from it," cried Conrad, growing more and more enraged; "he
was quite right not to meddle with that which goes on in secret;
although we, as miners, cannot see the matter exactly in the same
light as he did. Solid masses have grown like the rest of us; and who
can say whether they may not enliven and further the shooting and
coalescing of the metallic particles round about them?"

"I tell you however," replied the stranger, "that sprouting and
growing, and spreading out into the regions of the air, or in the form
of roots underground, are the properties of plants only. Stones rest
in themselves; vegetables feed on light and warmth and moisture, and
transform the particles of the earth they stand on into means of
growth and enlargement. Then animals start off and break loose from
the elements; but they move within them, and carry their roots about
with them in their entrails."

"No! no!" screamed Conrad, still more violently: "In this way the
whole world, and above all my glorious mountai