As soon as he recovered from the shock, he looked around carefully, and saw, to his great satisfaction, that the bonds which held the giant were beyond doubt strong enough to hold him a prisoner. Then he crept cautiously all along the neck as far as his ear, and by its aid climbed up the chin, after having crossed the cheek in its whole {357}length. When he had found a convenient restingplace, he drew himself up to his full height, and raising his feeble voice as loud as he could, he said to the giant:-- “Murderer of our brethren, you are our prisoner, and you must die! Commend your soul to God.” [Illustration: 377] The giant tried to see the tiny being who was speaking to him so boldly, and cast down his eyes. At first he could distinguish nothing but a feeble glimmering light at the extremity of his nose; but the nose itself completely concealed the speaker. Kreiss then advanced a few steps from the chin towards the mouth of the colossus, and the latter now perceived a kind of little man, dressed in a cloak of mouse skin, which he grandly wrapped around him, as Hercules did with the skin of the Nemean lion. In his hand, however, he held not a club, but a lantern, in which a firefly did service as candle. Thanks to this phosphorescent sheen, which seemed to surround Kreiss as with a halo, Quadragant could examine him at leisure, and he asked himself how such an embryo could have flown out of his mouth, and how he, Quadragant, could have become his prisoner? {358}The contemptuous glance which he threw at the dwarf made Kreiss aware of what he was discussing in his mind. “You think you are not captured yet,” he said. “Very well, try to get up and walk, if you can!” Quadragant did try, and found that he was firmly fastened to the ground by ropes and chains, by each single hair of his head, by every hair on his body. He tried to speak to the pigmy, and he could not, by any effort of his, move his jaws in the slightest way. “As to the manner of your death,” Kreiss went on, “if the wolves and the vultures do not hasten your end, hunger will do the work.” At this thought of dying of hunger, a mode of death which he had always looked upon as the most terrible of all, Quadragant’s heart gave way, and he began to cry piteously. Two torrents of tears flowed down his cheeks, and after turning around the prominence of his lips, ran over from his chin. Kreiss was compelled to leave his position, so as to avoid the double current.