Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 4Rabelais, François
General
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 4
Rabelais, François
Fantasy fiction, French -- Translations into English; Gargantua (Legendary character) -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction
With such darts, of which there was good store in the ship, at the first
blow he ran the physeter in at the forehead so furiously that he pierced
both its jaws and tongue; so that from that time to this it no more opened
its guttural trapdoor, nor drew and spouted water. At the second blow he
put out its right eye, and at the third its left; and we had all the
pleasure to see the physeter bearing those three horns in its forehead,
somewhat leaning forwards in an equilateral triangle.
Meanwhile it turned about to and fro, staggering and straying like one
stunned, blinded, and taking his leave of the world. Pantagruel, not
satisfied with this, let fly another dart, which took the monster under the
tail likewise sloping; then with three other on the chine, in a
perpendicular line, divided its flank from the tail to the snout at an
equal distance. Then he larded it with fifty on one side, and after that,
to make even work, he darted as many on its other side; so that the body of
the physeter seemed like the hulk of a galleon with three masts, joined by
a competent dimension of its beams, as if they had been the ribs and
chain-wales of the keel; which was a pleasant sight. The physeter then
giving up the ghost, turned itself upon its back, as all dead fishes do; and
being thus overturned, with the beams and darts upside down in the sea, it
seemed a scolopendra or centipede, as that serpent is described by the
ancient sage Nicander.
Chapter 4.XXXV.
How Pantagruel went on shore in the Wild Island, the ancient abode of the
Chitterlings.
The boat's crew of the ship Lantern towed the physeter ashore on the
neighbouring shore, which happened to be the Wild Island, to make an
anatomical dissection of its body and save the fat of its kidneys, which,
they said, was very useful and necessary for the cure of a certain
distemper, which they called want of money. As for Pantagruel, he took no
manner of notice of the monster; for he had seen many such, nay, bigger, in
the Gallic ocean. Yet he condescended to land in the Wild Island, to dry
and refresh some of his men (whom the physeter had wetted and bedaubed), at
a small desert seaport towards the south, seated near a fine pleasant
grove, out of which flowed a delicious brook of fresh, clear, and purling
water. Here they pitched their tents and set up their kitchens; nor did
they spare fuel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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