Prince Prigio Read Online Free PDF Page B

bigger, and lashing the fire with his hoofs and his blazing tail.
    "Who's there?" he said in a hoarse, angry voice. "Just let me get at you!"
    "It's me," answered the prince. It was the first time he had forgotten his grammar, but he was terribly excited.
    "What do you want?" grunted the beast. "I wish I could see you"; and, horrible to relate, he rose on a pair of wide, flaming wings, and came right at the prince, guided by the sound of his voice.
    Now, the prince had never heard that Fire-drakes could fly; indeed, he had never believed in them at all, till the night before. For a moment he was numb with terror; then he flew down like a stone to the very bottom of the hill and shouted:
    "Hi!"
    "Well," grunted the Firedrake, "what's the matter? Why can't you give a civil answer to a civil question?"
    "Will you go back to your hole and swear, on your honour as a Firedrake, to listen quietly?"
    "On my sacred word of honour," said the beast, casually scorching an eagle that flew by into ashes. The cinders fell, jingling and crackling, round the prince in a little shower.
    Then the Firedrake dived back, with an awful splash of flame, and the mountain roared round him.
    The prince now flew high above him, and cried:
    "A message from the Remora. He says you are afraid to fight him."
    "Don't know him," grunted the Firedrake.
    "He sends you his glove," said Prince Prigio, "as a challenge to mortal combat, till death do you part."
    Then he dropped his own glove into the fiery lake.
    "Does he?" yelled the Firedrake. "Just let me get at him!" and he scrambled out, all red-hot as he was.
    "I'll go and tell him you're coming," said the prince; and with two strides he was over the frozen mountain of the Remora.
    [Illustration: Chapter Ten]
CHAPTER X.
    --
The Prince and the Remora
    If he had been too warm before, the prince was too cold now. The hill of the Remora was one solid mass of frozen steel, and the cold rushed out of it like the breath of some icy beast, which indeed it
was
. All around were things like marble statues of men in armour: they were the dead bodies of the knights, horses and all, who had gone out of old to fight the Remora, and who had been frosted up by him. The prince felt his blood stand still, and he grew faint; but he took heart, for there was no time to waste. Yet he could nowhere see the Remora. "Hi!" shouted the prince. Then, from a narrow chink at the bottom of the smooth, black hill,--a chink no deeper than that under a door, but a mile wide,--stole out a hideous head!
    It was as fiat as the head of a skate-fish, it was deathly pale, and two chill-blue eyes, dead-coloured like stones, looked out of it.
    Then there came a whisper, like the breath of the bitter east wind on a wintry day:
    "Where are you, and how can I come to you?"
    "Here I am!" said the prince from the top of the hill.
    Then the flat, white head set itself against the edge of the chink from which it had peeped, and slowly, like the movement of a sheet of ice, it slipped upwards and curled upwards, and up, and up! There seemed no end to it at all; and it moved horribly, without feet, holding on by its own frost to the slippery side of the frozen hill. Now all the lower part of the black hill was covered with the horrid white thing coiled about it in smooth, flat shiny coils; and still the head was higher than the rest; and still the icy cold came nearer and nearer, like Death.
    The prince almost fainted: everything seemed to swim; and in one moment more he would have fallen stiff on the mountain-top, and the white head would have crawled over him, and the cold coils would have slipped over him and turned him to stone. And still the thing slipped up, from the chink under the mountain.
    But the prince made a great effort; he moved, and in two steps he was far away, down in the valley where it was not so very cold.
    "Hi!" he shouted, as soon as his tongue could move within his chattering teeth.
    There came a clear, hissing answer, like frozen words