ii8
ANDERSEN'S FAIRY TALES
shield over the deep moorland, and draw up the living root that gave thee life and cradled thee. Thou must do thy work before the consecration may come to thee."
And he lifted her on to the horse, handed her a golden censer, like that which she had seen in the Viking's castle, from which there came a sweet, strong fragrance. The open wound on the forehead of the slain shone like a radiant diadem. He took the cross from the grave, raised it on high ; and now they went off through the air, over the rustling forest, then over the mounds where the warriors were buried, sitting on their dead steeds ; and these majestic forms arose, and rode out to the tops of the hills. A broad golden hoop with a gold knob gleamed on their foreheads in the moonlight, and their cloaks fluttered in the wind. The dragon that sits and broods over treasure raised its head, and looked after them. Dwarfs peered forth from the hills, and the furrows swarmed with red, blue, and green lights, like a cluster of sparks in a burnt piece of paper.
Away over wood and heath, stream and pool, they flew to the moor, and floated over that in great circles. The Christian priest raised the cross on high ; it shone like gold, and from his lips came the eucharistic chant. Little Helga sang with him, as a child joins in the song of its mother. She swung the censer, and there came a fragrance as if from an altar, so powerful, so subtly operating, that the rushes and reeds of the moor put forth their flowers. All the germs sprang up from the deep soil ; everything that had life arose. A veil of water-lilies spread itself like an embroidered carpet of flowers, and on it lay a sleeping woman, young and beauti- ful. Little Helga thought she saw herself mirrored in the still water ; but it was her mother that she saw, the Marsh King's wife, the princess from the waters of the Nile.
The dead Christian priest bade the sleeper be lifted on to the hor.se ; but that sank under the burden as if its body was only a winding-sheet flying in the breeze ; but the sign of the cross made the airy phantom strong, and all three rode to the firm ground.
A cock crowed in the Viking's .stronghold. The phantoms rose up in the mist, and were dis- persed in the wind, but mother and daughter stood there together.
" Is that myself that I see in the deep water? " said the mother.
" Is that myself that I see in the bright shield ? " exclaimed the daughter ; and they came close together, breast to breast, in each other's arms. The mother's heart beat strongest, and she understood it all.
" My child ! My own heart's flower ! My lotus from the deep waters ! "
And she embraced her child, and wept over her ; and the tears were as a baptism of new life and affection for little Helga.
" I came hither in a swan's skin, and I took it off," said the mother. ' quivering swamp, deep into the mire of the bog, that enclosed me as with a wall, fresher current about me ; a power seemed to draw me ever deeper and deeper.
THE CHK15T1AN PRIKSr RAISED HIS CROSS ON MICH.
I sank through the
But soon I found a
I felt a pressure of
I slept, I dreamt
LAY A SLEEPING WOMAN.
sleep on m' eyelids — I seemed to lie again in the pyramids of Eg)-pt ; but there still stood before me the moving elder-stump, which had frightened me on the surface of the moor. I looked at the crevices in the bark, and they shone forth in colours and became hieroglyphics — it was the case of a mummy which I was looking at. That burst, and out of it stepped a lord a thousand years old, a mummy form, black as pitch, shining black like a wood-snail or the slimy black mud — the Marsh King, or the mummy of the
