Kalo Dant and the Seventh World, part I
The re-design a friend of mine, the lovely elva_undine , did on her page recently inspired me to finally finish off my work on this one. It's not perfect, by any means, but I wanted it to blend a little more with my new site, even if confined by blogger and my less than stellar CSS skills.
Other news: for those who have asked, Les Bonnes Fees is not dead. She is simply sleeping. The past month has been a busy one for us--three of our team are in what, we hope, are the final throes of their Ph.Ds, while I've been receiving a lot of on-request work. Due to our new, overflowing schedules, we've been forced to push ourselves back to bi-monthly issues, i.e. every two months. The new issue will be out in late September, and we'll be posting about where we are on the blog today.
Now, because I've been so slack--though I really am trying to return to a regular posting schedule of sorts--here's a fairy tale. It's a Gypsy story, excerpted from the 1966 volume Gypsy Folk Tales, by Marie Voriskova, translated by Jean Layton. Because it's quite long, I've broken it into two parts; the rest will be posted tomorrow.
Note: this tale has a slight religious theme.
*
Kalo Dant was a gypsy boy. He had roamed the world with his tribe ever since the day he was born. As he grew up, he came to know many foreign lands, and by the time he was twenty he had already seen so many that he could scarce believe he would ever see another new one in the days to come. He thought the tribe must soon reach the place where the world ended. But Kalo Dant was filled with great curiosity; he liked travelling and always wanted to be seeing something new.
When he learned that God had created seven worlds, just like ours, placed one on top of the other, he was very pleased.
“So I won’t have to return to places I’ve been before when I reach the end of the world,” he thought to himself happily. And he began asking everyone how he could get to those upper worlds. The gypsies just laughed at him. “No one can get to the upper worlds, because they’re divided from one another by solid celestial vaults!”
Now, long before Kalo Dant’s time, God had been angry with the gypsies because they were lazy, and He had driven them from their lands. He had also lifted the skies high above our world so that the gypsies could not steal his clouds.
“Just look how high the sky is!” said the gypsies to Kalo Dant, pointing to it. “Only a bird could fly as high as that. And in the end, even a bird would bash its wings against the solid vault of the heavens!”
Kalo Dant lay on his back in the grass, looking at the sky while he sucked at a straw. “True, the sky is high. But some of the mountains are high too, their tops get lost in the clouds. If a man were to climb one of them, I wonder whether up at the top he would find his head in the world above us?” He thought the idea seemed pretty sensible, but he didn’t tell anyone else about it. He just decided that he would set out by himself for one of those mountains, clib it and see if he could succeed in getting to another world.
He strapped up his bundle, stole away from the camp and set off towards a high mountain whose peak was lost in the clouds. When he reached it, he began climbing the steep sides, clambering up, and springing over the rocks and crevices like a mountain goat, for he was still young and agile.
Finally he got so high, that he found himself enveloped up to the waist in thick white mist. “That surely must be a cloud!” he thought. He stretched his arm up to see if he could touch the solid celestial arch yet, but he couldn’t feel anything solid. He was fearful lest he would fall into an abyss in that mist, so he decided to rest a while. He sat down and fell fast asleep.
When he awoke the mist had vanished. But whether what he saw around him was that other world or not, it was certainly a terribly barren and unpleasant place-not a tree or a bush or even a tiny flower, just bare black rocks and cliffs.
He got up and went a bit farther, and suddenly what should he see-a tree! So something did grow here after all! Yet what a strange tree it was-it soared up and up-straight and slender right to the sky. However hard he tried, Kalo Dant just could not see the top of it. Nor could he see whether the tree had any branches or leaves.
“I’ll shin up it,” he said to himsel and he began climbing. He climbed and climbed, till he got quite tired. Then he paused for a moment to get his breath, and looked up. Indeed, the sky was almost within arm’s reach. Yet still he couldn’t see the end of the trunk, but there was something else he could see. He blinked with surprise and rubbed his eyes, reddened and half-blinded as they now were by the sun, which seemed to be glowing only a few feet above his head. And still he saw this strange thing! Believe it or not, it was a slipper! A quite ordinary battered old slipper. Was it just stuck there in the air, or was it perhaps hanging from something? No, it was on a foot-a human foot-which was rather dark-skinned and bare and looked to Kalo Dant just like one of his own.
He looked a bit higher and saw a gypsy sitting above him. He felt much better at this discovery, and grinned at him cheerfully. The gypsy grinned back and said, “I was beginning to think you would never get here, Kalo Dant!”
“You know me?” asked Kalo Dant in amazement.
“I should think I do, why I’ve been waiting for you here all this time,” said the fellow from above.
“And why?”
“Well, you see, I knew you would take it into your head to take a look at the world above us, and I wanted to help you.”
“But why?” asked Kalo Dant in wonderment again.
“Because it will be easier tat way than watchng you all the time to make sure you don’t fall anywhere and break your neck,” said the gypsy gruffly. “You see, I’m your guardian angel.”
“You could have fooled me,” shouted Kalo Dant. “And where are your wings?”
“We gypsy guardian angels don’t have wings glued to our shoulders like the guardians of the white-skinned races,” explained the dark-skinned angel. “We have winged feet.”
Kalo Dant looked curiously at the bare foot hanging there in the slipper. For an angel it might have been a bit cleaner, but he couldn’t see anything ese strange about it.
“That’s my wing!” said the dark angel, wriggling his big toe inside the old slipper. “This is no ordinary slipper,” he went on, “though it may look like one. It’s getting a bit worn now from all the wear I’ve given it these last few thousand years. But it has the magic power of being able to carry me hither and thither, wherever I wish, and it does so more swiftly than the swiftest bird’s wings.”
“That’s the sort of thing I will be needing,’ sighed Kalo Dant.
“Well, I’ll lend you my slipper,” said the angel, “but you must promise you’ll kick it off as soon as you reach the next world. I can’t carry out my duties without it.” Kalo Dant promised willingly.
So the dark angel stretched out his leg and told Kalo Dant to pull the slipper off and put it on his own foot. The moment he had done so, Kalo Dant started floating up in the air. He rose at such speed, that he was quite frightened. Suddenly he came to a halt. He felt firm ground beneath his feet. And then he noticed that crowds of people were running towards him from all sides, and they were all gypsies.
There were many chilren among them, and Kalo Dant love children. He searched his pockets to see whether he could find some kind of sweet, a coloured button or at least some scrap of paper to give them, but there was nothing. Then he remembered his promise to the angel and hastily kicked off the slipper.
The children shouted with delight and fell on it, thinking not doubt that the stranger was giving them a slipper as a present. But the magic slipper began darting about, slipping between their hands more swiftly than a snake, and before they knew what had happened, it was gone.
The children were disappointed, and Kalo Dant tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault that the slipper ran away, but he realised they didn’t understand a word he said. The language spoken by the gypsies who surrounded him was completely strange to him. Luckily, they behaved in a friendly way, slapping him on the back and grinning at him.
They led him t a small wooden hut standing in a little garden. In the garden was a bench and on it sat an old, old gypsys. He was so old that his face was deeply furrowed and his skin was like yellow parchment. His hair and beard were long and white as milk but his black eyes sparkled with youthful fire. When the crowd arrived, he stood up, smiled, and said:
“Welcome to you, stranger!”
“You speak my language,” said Kalo Dant joyfully.
“I speak as many languages as I am years of age,” replied the old man, “and as I am ninety-nine years old, I know ninety-nine languagesg, which means-except for the language I haven’t learned yet-all the languages of the seven worlds.”
“And which don’t you know yet?” asked Kalo Dant.
“The language of the birds, my son,” replied the old gypsy. “The most beautiful and the hardest of them all. But in a year’s time, by the time I’ll be a hundred, I will know that, too. Where have you come from?”
Kalo Dant told him truthfully just where he had come from and how he had got there. When he had finished, the old man said:
“Curiosity is the first step in the ladder which we call knowledge. Now that you are here, you ought to try to learn something from us.”
“Gladly,” said Kalo Dant, “and I think you are just the person from whom I could learn a lot. May I stay with you awhile? Don’t be afraid that I’ll eat your bread and give nothing in return; I want to work.”
The old man agreed, and Kalo Dant remained there with him.
On the next day, Kalo Dant noticed that the wood-pile in the yard was getting low, so he offered to go to the forest and cut some fresh wood for the old man.
“It’s not as easy as all that, my lad,” said the old fellow. “First of all you’ll have to learn the language of the trees.”
“You mean the trees can speak?” said Kalo Dant in amazement.
“Of course they can, only so quietly that people don’t even notice it,” replied the old man, “Some trees speak, and those are living. Others don’t, because they are dead, and one may chop them down. I’ll come to the forest with you and show you which trees you may fell and which you may not.”
They went to the forest, and it was just as he had said. When the old man spoke to some of the trees, they answered; others didn’t. Kalo Dant felled the silent ones and while he sawed the wood and chopped off the branches, the wise old man taught him the language of living trees.
So Kalo Dant lived in this way with the old man for a whole year. During that time he learned a great many things, but one day the old man said to him:
“Well, Kalo Dant, what you’ve learned you know now. I can’t teach you any more, as my time is spent. Today I shall be one hundred years old to the very day and hour-I now know also the hundredth and final language-the language of birds. You must leave me and return home.”
“But how can I?” said Kalo Dant dejectedly. “Besides, since I’m here already, it’s certainly nearer to the worlds above us-and I wouldn’t like to return before I’ve come to know them all. Can’t you advise me how I can best reach them?”
“As for that, I can give you some advice all right,” replied the old man, “but I’m not sure how much use it will be to you. If you travers the forest where we saw the lived and dead trees, you will come to a meadow. Sit down there and wait till somebody comes. But I warn you in advance, the place is very deserted and hardly anyone ever passes that way. If anyone does come, however, they will surely be able to tell you how to reach the next world.”
Other news: for those who have asked, Les Bonnes Fees is not dead. She is simply sleeping. The past month has been a busy one for us--three of our team are in what, we hope, are the final throes of their Ph.Ds, while I've been receiving a lot of on-request work. Due to our new, overflowing schedules, we've been forced to push ourselves back to bi-monthly issues, i.e. every two months. The new issue will be out in late September, and we'll be posting about where we are on the blog today.
Now, because I've been so slack--though I really am trying to return to a regular posting schedule of sorts--here's a fairy tale. It's a Gypsy story, excerpted from the 1966 volume Gypsy Folk Tales, by Marie Voriskova, translated by Jean Layton. Because it's quite long, I've broken it into two parts; the rest will be posted tomorrow.
Note: this tale has a slight religious theme.
*
Kalo Dant was a gypsy boy. He had roamed the world with his tribe ever since the day he was born. As he grew up, he came to know many foreign lands, and by the time he was twenty he had already seen so many that he could scarce believe he would ever see another new one in the days to come. He thought the tribe must soon reach the place where the world ended. But Kalo Dant was filled with great curiosity; he liked travelling and always wanted to be seeing something new.
When he learned that God had created seven worlds, just like ours, placed one on top of the other, he was very pleased.
“So I won’t have to return to places I’ve been before when I reach the end of the world,” he thought to himself happily. And he began asking everyone how he could get to those upper worlds. The gypsies just laughed at him. “No one can get to the upper worlds, because they’re divided from one another by solid celestial vaults!”
Now, long before Kalo Dant’s time, God had been angry with the gypsies because they were lazy, and He had driven them from their lands. He had also lifted the skies high above our world so that the gypsies could not steal his clouds.
“Just look how high the sky is!” said the gypsies to Kalo Dant, pointing to it. “Only a bird could fly as high as that. And in the end, even a bird would bash its wings against the solid vault of the heavens!”
Kalo Dant lay on his back in the grass, looking at the sky while he sucked at a straw. “True, the sky is high. But some of the mountains are high too, their tops get lost in the clouds. If a man were to climb one of them, I wonder whether up at the top he would find his head in the world above us?” He thought the idea seemed pretty sensible, but he didn’t tell anyone else about it. He just decided that he would set out by himself for one of those mountains, clib it and see if he could succeed in getting to another world.
He strapped up his bundle, stole away from the camp and set off towards a high mountain whose peak was lost in the clouds. When he reached it, he began climbing the steep sides, clambering up, and springing over the rocks and crevices like a mountain goat, for he was still young and agile.
Finally he got so high, that he found himself enveloped up to the waist in thick white mist. “That surely must be a cloud!” he thought. He stretched his arm up to see if he could touch the solid celestial arch yet, but he couldn’t feel anything solid. He was fearful lest he would fall into an abyss in that mist, so he decided to rest a while. He sat down and fell fast asleep.
When he awoke the mist had vanished. But whether what he saw around him was that other world or not, it was certainly a terribly barren and unpleasant place-not a tree or a bush or even a tiny flower, just bare black rocks and cliffs.
He got up and went a bit farther, and suddenly what should he see-a tree! So something did grow here after all! Yet what a strange tree it was-it soared up and up-straight and slender right to the sky. However hard he tried, Kalo Dant just could not see the top of it. Nor could he see whether the tree had any branches or leaves.
“I’ll shin up it,” he said to himsel and he began climbing. He climbed and climbed, till he got quite tired. Then he paused for a moment to get his breath, and looked up. Indeed, the sky was almost within arm’s reach. Yet still he couldn’t see the end of the trunk, but there was something else he could see. He blinked with surprise and rubbed his eyes, reddened and half-blinded as they now were by the sun, which seemed to be glowing only a few feet above his head. And still he saw this strange thing! Believe it or not, it was a slipper! A quite ordinary battered old slipper. Was it just stuck there in the air, or was it perhaps hanging from something? No, it was on a foot-a human foot-which was rather dark-skinned and bare and looked to Kalo Dant just like one of his own.
He looked a bit higher and saw a gypsy sitting above him. He felt much better at this discovery, and grinned at him cheerfully. The gypsy grinned back and said, “I was beginning to think you would never get here, Kalo Dant!”
“You know me?” asked Kalo Dant in amazement.
“I should think I do, why I’ve been waiting for you here all this time,” said the fellow from above.
“And why?”
“Well, you see, I knew you would take it into your head to take a look at the world above us, and I wanted to help you.”
“But why?” asked Kalo Dant in wonderment again.
“Because it will be easier tat way than watchng you all the time to make sure you don’t fall anywhere and break your neck,” said the gypsy gruffly. “You see, I’m your guardian angel.”
“You could have fooled me,” shouted Kalo Dant. “And where are your wings?”
“We gypsy guardian angels don’t have wings glued to our shoulders like the guardians of the white-skinned races,” explained the dark-skinned angel. “We have winged feet.”
Kalo Dant looked curiously at the bare foot hanging there in the slipper. For an angel it might have been a bit cleaner, but he couldn’t see anything ese strange about it.
“That’s my wing!” said the dark angel, wriggling his big toe inside the old slipper. “This is no ordinary slipper,” he went on, “though it may look like one. It’s getting a bit worn now from all the wear I’ve given it these last few thousand years. But it has the magic power of being able to carry me hither and thither, wherever I wish, and it does so more swiftly than the swiftest bird’s wings.”
“That’s the sort of thing I will be needing,’ sighed Kalo Dant.
“Well, I’ll lend you my slipper,” said the angel, “but you must promise you’ll kick it off as soon as you reach the next world. I can’t carry out my duties without it.” Kalo Dant promised willingly.
So the dark angel stretched out his leg and told Kalo Dant to pull the slipper off and put it on his own foot. The moment he had done so, Kalo Dant started floating up in the air. He rose at such speed, that he was quite frightened. Suddenly he came to a halt. He felt firm ground beneath his feet. And then he noticed that crowds of people were running towards him from all sides, and they were all gypsies.
There were many chilren among them, and Kalo Dant love children. He searched his pockets to see whether he could find some kind of sweet, a coloured button or at least some scrap of paper to give them, but there was nothing. Then he remembered his promise to the angel and hastily kicked off the slipper.
The children shouted with delight and fell on it, thinking not doubt that the stranger was giving them a slipper as a present. But the magic slipper began darting about, slipping between their hands more swiftly than a snake, and before they knew what had happened, it was gone.
The children were disappointed, and Kalo Dant tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault that the slipper ran away, but he realised they didn’t understand a word he said. The language spoken by the gypsies who surrounded him was completely strange to him. Luckily, they behaved in a friendly way, slapping him on the back and grinning at him.
They led him t a small wooden hut standing in a little garden. In the garden was a bench and on it sat an old, old gypsys. He was so old that his face was deeply furrowed and his skin was like yellow parchment. His hair and beard were long and white as milk but his black eyes sparkled with youthful fire. When the crowd arrived, he stood up, smiled, and said:
“Welcome to you, stranger!”
“You speak my language,” said Kalo Dant joyfully.
“I speak as many languages as I am years of age,” replied the old man, “and as I am ninety-nine years old, I know ninety-nine languagesg, which means-except for the language I haven’t learned yet-all the languages of the seven worlds.”
“And which don’t you know yet?” asked Kalo Dant.
“The language of the birds, my son,” replied the old gypsy. “The most beautiful and the hardest of them all. But in a year’s time, by the time I’ll be a hundred, I will know that, too. Where have you come from?”
Kalo Dant told him truthfully just where he had come from and how he had got there. When he had finished, the old man said:
“Curiosity is the first step in the ladder which we call knowledge. Now that you are here, you ought to try to learn something from us.”
“Gladly,” said Kalo Dant, “and I think you are just the person from whom I could learn a lot. May I stay with you awhile? Don’t be afraid that I’ll eat your bread and give nothing in return; I want to work.”
The old man agreed, and Kalo Dant remained there with him.
On the next day, Kalo Dant noticed that the wood-pile in the yard was getting low, so he offered to go to the forest and cut some fresh wood for the old man.
“It’s not as easy as all that, my lad,” said the old fellow. “First of all you’ll have to learn the language of the trees.”
“You mean the trees can speak?” said Kalo Dant in amazement.
“Of course they can, only so quietly that people don’t even notice it,” replied the old man, “Some trees speak, and those are living. Others don’t, because they are dead, and one may chop them down. I’ll come to the forest with you and show you which trees you may fell and which you may not.”
They went to the forest, and it was just as he had said. When the old man spoke to some of the trees, they answered; others didn’t. Kalo Dant felled the silent ones and while he sawed the wood and chopped off the branches, the wise old man taught him the language of living trees.
So Kalo Dant lived in this way with the old man for a whole year. During that time he learned a great many things, but one day the old man said to him:
“Well, Kalo Dant, what you’ve learned you know now. I can’t teach you any more, as my time is spent. Today I shall be one hundred years old to the very day and hour-I now know also the hundredth and final language-the language of birds. You must leave me and return home.”
“But how can I?” said Kalo Dant dejectedly. “Besides, since I’m here already, it’s certainly nearer to the worlds above us-and I wouldn’t like to return before I’ve come to know them all. Can’t you advise me how I can best reach them?”
“As for that, I can give you some advice all right,” replied the old man, “but I’m not sure how much use it will be to you. If you travers the forest where we saw the lived and dead trees, you will come to a meadow. Sit down there and wait till somebody comes. But I warn you in advance, the place is very deserted and hardly anyone ever passes that way. If anyone does come, however, they will surely be able to tell you how to reach the next world.”