"What then, are you so far behind all the rest of the world here!" asked the stranger with every mark of astonishment. "O my good friend, with your leave, ever since the creation, or at all events ever since the deluge, the mountains, and stones, and rocks, and metals, and gems, have been lockt up in their houses and never gadded abroad. We dig and delve in here at top, and hardly get even at deepest below the upper skin of the warts, as the mountains are in comparison to the whole earth, much such a part as a nail-paring is of a man. Wherever we can set foot, we grub up these primeval stores, so far as we need them; and nothing ever shoots forth again, neither coal nor diamond, neither copper nor lead; and your notion of the matter is a mere superstition. In Africa, they tell us a story, people used from time to time to find little grains of gold in a sandpit, which they had to deliver up to the poor black king as his property. With the help of these he would then buy all sorts of things from foreiners. One day going a little deeper they fell in with two good-sized lumps of massy solid gold. The slaves in great delight carried the fruit of their labours to their black master, it being more than they had found for ten years past, and they thought how overjoyed the poor man would be at becoming rich thus all at once. But they were mistaken. The wise old king said: 'Look ye, my friends, these pieces are the father and mother of that little brood of gold grains which we have constantly been finding for ages: carry them back immediately and set them in the very same place, that they may be able to go on producing fresh ones. Unless you do so, we should get a vast gain for the moment, but should lose a lasting source of profit for ever hereafter.' The moor was a goosecap, was not he?" "Very far from it," cried Conrad, growing more and more enraged; "he was quite right not to meddle with that which goes on in secret; although we, as miners, cannot see the matter exactly in the same light as he did. Solid masses have grown like the rest of us; and who can say whether they may not enliven and further the shooting and coalescing of the metallic particles round about them?" "I tell you however," replied the stranger, "that sprouting and growing, and spreading out into the regions of the air, or in the form of roots underground, are the properties of plants only. Stones rest in themselves; vegetables feed on light and warmth and moisture, and transform the particles of the earth they stand on into means of growth and enlargement. Then animals start off and break loose from the elements; but they move within them, and carry their roots about with them in their entrails."