Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5Rabelais, François
Science
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5
Rabelais, François
Fantasy fiction, French -- Translations into English; Gargantua (Legendary character) -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction
Having well ballasted the holds of our human vessels, we weighed anchor,
hoised up sail, stowed the boats, set the land, and stood for the offing
with a fair loom gale, and for more haste unpareled the mizen-yard, and
launched it and the sail over the lee-quarter, and fitted gyves to keep it
steady, and boomed it out; so in three days we made the island of Tools,
that is altogether uninhabited. We saw there a great number of trees which
bore mattocks, pickaxes, crows, weeding-hooks, scythes, sickles, spades,
trowels, hatchets, hedging-bills, saws, adzes, bills, axes, shears,
pincers, bolts, piercers, augers, and wimbles.
Others bore dags, daggers, poniards, bayonets, square-bladed tucks,
stilettoes, poniardoes, skeans, penknives, puncheons, bodkins, swords,
rapiers, back-swords, cutlasses, scimitars, hangers, falchions, glaives,
raillons, whittles, and whinyards.
Whoever would have any of these needed but to shake the tree, and
immediately they dropped down as thick as hops, like so many ripe plums;
nay, what's more, they fell on a kind of grass called scabbard, and
sheathed themselves in it cleverly. But when they came down, there was
need of taking care lest they happened to touch the head, feet, or other
parts of the body. For they fell with the point downwards, and in they
stuck, or slit the continuum of some member, or lopped it off like a twig;
either of which generally was enough to have killed a man, though he were a
hundred years old, and worth as many thousand spankers, spur-royals, and
rose-nobles.
Under some other trees, whose names I cannot justly tell you, I saw some
certain sorts of weeds that grew and sprouted like pikes, lances, javelins,
javelots, darts, dartlets, halberds, boar-spears, eel-spears, partizans,
tridents, prongs, trout-staves, spears, half-pikes, and hunting-staves. As
they sprouted up and chanced to touch the tree, straight they met with
their heads, points, and blades, each suitable to its kind, made ready for
them by the trees over them, as soon as every individual wood was grown up,
fit for its steel; even like the children's coats, that are made for them
as soon as they can wear them and you wean them of their swaddling clothes.
Nor do you mutter, I pray you, at what Plato, Anaxagoras, and Democritus
have said. Ods-fish! they were none of your lower-form gimcracks, were
they?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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