One day, in the dead of winter, I set forth to another village, but I was caught in a blizzard and lost my way. I found shelter behind a thick juniper tree and pulled my sheepskin coat around me. I tried to sleep, and I had just drifted off when I felt a tapping on my shoulder. I looked up and a stranger stood over me. He said, “My good man, get up! If you lie there any more, you will be buried in the snow, and no one will ever know what became of you.”
I followed him to a fire where three men sat, all dressed in white. It was summer in their sphere! All around them, for about thirty feet, winter had been banished. The moss was dry and the plants were green. Bees hummed in the grass and cicadas sung in the bushes.
The men gave me a drink that warmed me. I couldn’t understand their language, and then suddenly, there was a loud sound. The men got up and invited me to go with them. We walked to a cave where another fire burned brightly. The stranger then led me through rooms the size of cathedrals where the treasures of the earth were piled. I saw gold and silver bars stacked like firewood, glittering bright as the sun! I tried to count them but my host laughed at me and told me not to try. Instead he offered me a single bar, which I could not even lift off the ground.
We wandered through other rooms, so full of gold and silver that I became troubled. I asked my host, “What is the reason for keeping these treasures here where they can do no good to anybody? If they were given to men, no one would need to work or suffer hunger.”
He said, “It is exactly for that reason that I keep these riches out of your way. It is only through work and care that human beings can hope to be good for anything.”
It still made no sense to me that he should keep all this treasure while men, women, and children suffered. Then he said, “I am not really a man, though I have the outward form of one. I am one of the beings to whom is given the care of the world.”
Some time later, I woke, back at the juniper tree. I was very confused. It was no longer winter in the forest, and instead of the feeling the warm glow of the fire in the cave, the sun streamed down on me. It was all so strange. I got up and saw the traces of a dead fire. When I walked over to it, I found that the ashes were a fine silver dust, and that the half-burnt firewood was made of gold.
I threw off my fur coat, and filled it with the silver ash. Then I laid the golden sticks on top. The load was not too heavy, although it seemed heavy in my imagination, perhaps because I knew its real weight.
Hans Who Discovers the Underworld in The Underground Workers, Violet Fairy Book. Illustration by H.J. Ford.
