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It was the mummy's coffin I was looking at; it burst open, and out issued from it the monarch of a thousand years ago the mummy form, black as pitch, dark and shining as a wood-snail, or as that thick slimy mud. It was the mud-king, or the mummy of the pyramids; I knew not which. He threw his arms around me, and I felt as if I were dying.
Mankind, on the contrary, at that time wore coats cut in another fashion from what they do in our days; but every one of them, serf or huntsman, whosoever he might be who trod upon the quagmire, fared a thousand years ago as they fare now: one step forward they fell in, and sank down to the MUD-KING, as he was called who reigned below in the great morass kingdom.
Andersen says "the north-east wind and the sunbeams fought over the 'infant Copenhagen, consequently the wind and the 'mud-king' reign in winter, the sunbeams in summer, and the latter bring forgetfulness of winter's hardships." Certainly, when the summer comes, the sunshine reigns supreme, and makes Copenhagen bright and pleasant for its citizens.
All this was well known to the stork-father and the stork-mother; and now, though rather late, we also know it. We know that the mud-king dragged her down with him, and that, as far as regarded her home, she was dead and gone; only the wisest of them all said, like the stork-mother, "She can take care of herself;" and, knowing no better, they waited to see what would turn up.
She so strongly resembled the princess from Egypt, that the stork at first thought it was herself who had become an infant again; but when he considered the matter he came to the conclusion that she was the daughter of the princess and the mud-king, therefore she lay in the calyx of a water-lily.
Then they expounded their meaning in this manner: "The warm sunbeam was the Egyptian princess; she descended to the mud-king, and from their meeting sprang a flower " "I cannot exactly repeat the words," said the stork-father, who had been listening to the discussion from the roof, and was now telling in his nest what he had heard.
Her tears trickled down upon the trunk of the alder tree, and then it moved; for it was the mud-king himself he who dwells in the morass.
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