A swarm of children was playing on the damp floor of the shaft. They hung fromthe lower portions of the timber-work, or ran in and out between the uprightsupports, humming tunes, with bread-and-dripping in their hands; or they sat onthe ground and pushed themselves forward across the sticky flagstones. The airhung clammy and raw, as it does in an old well, and already it had made thelittle voices husky, and had marked their faces with the scars of scrofula. Yetout of the tunnel- like passage which led to the street there blew now andagain a warm breath of air and the fragrance of budding trees—from theworld that lay behind those surrounding walls.
They had finished playing “Bro-bro-brille,” for the last rider hadentered the black cauldron; and Hansel and Gretel had crept safely out of thedwarf Vinslev’s den, across the sewer-grating, and had reached thepancake-house, which, marvelously enough, had also a grating in front of thedoor, through which one could thrust a stick or a cabbage- stalk, in order tostab the witch. Sticks of wood and cabbage-stalks were to be found in plenty inthe dustbins near the pancake-house, and they knew very well who the witch was!Now and again she would pop up out of the cellar and scatter the whole crowdwith her kitchen tongs! It was almost a little too lifelike; even the smell ofpancakes came drifting down from where the well-to-do Olsens lived, so that onecould hardly call it a real fairy tale. But then perhaps the dwarf Vinslevwould come out of his den, and would once again tell them the story of how hehad sailed off with the King’s gold and sunk it out yonder, in theKing’s Deep, when the Germans were in the land. A whole ship’s crewtook out the King’s treasure, but not one save Vinslev knew where it wassunk, and even he did not know now. A terrible secret that, such as well mightmake a man a bit queer in the head. He would explain the whole chart on hisdouble-breasted waistcoat; he had only to steer from this button to that, andthen down yonder, and he was close above the treasure. But now some of thebuttons had fallen off, and he could no longer make out the chart. Day by daythe children helped him to trace it; this was an exciting bit of work, for theKing was getting impatient!
There were other wonderful things to do; for instance, one could lie flat downon the slippery flagstones and play Hanne’s game—the“Glory” game. You turned your eyes from the darkness down below,looking up through the gloomy shaft at the sky overhead, which floated thereblazing with light, and then you suddenly looked down again, so that everythingwas quite dark. And in the darkness floated blue and yellow rings of color,where formerly there had been nothing but dustbins and privies. This dizzy fluxof colors before the eyes was the journey far out to the land of happiness, insearch of all the things that cannot be told. “I can see somethingmyself, and I know quite well what it is, but I’m just not going totell,” they murmured, blinking mysteriously up into the blue.
However, one could have too much of a good thing…. But the round grating underthe timbers yonder, where Hanne’s father drowned himself, was a thing onenever grew weary of. The depths were forever bubbling upward, filling thelittle children with a secret horror; and the half- grown girls would standa-straddle over the grating, shuddering at the cold breath that came murmuringup from below. The grating wa