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A Dragon Trick
Man has one pair of eyelids, which he uses to moisten his eyes and to bring darkness. The crocodile is equipped with two different pairs of eyelids. The inner eyelids are transparent and serve to protect his yellow eyes from water. The outer eyelids, like a man’s, are opaque because their function is to shut out the sun. The dragon is more impressive yet, for he possesses three pairs of eyelids.
The middle pair of eyelids are like those of men and crocodiles. The outermost eyelids are made of a translucent fiber that maintains its structural integrity against temperatures ten times greater than the melting point of carbon. That is why the dragon can roast a cow or incinerate a village without melting his own eyeballs. Most wondrous of all are the dragon’s innermost eyelids, which are transparent from the outside looking in, but opaque from the inside looking out. This property allows the dragon to appear alert while sleeping.
When men visit a dragon’s lair to assault his ears with their dreary pleas, he can close his innermost eyelids and think pleasant thoughts. He recalls the early violence in his mother’s womb—for dragons, unlike most reptiles, are viviparous—when he jostled for room with the other prenatal dragons and eventually ate them. He thinks fondly of his first raid, when he burned down a mill and flew off with the miller’s jackass. His thoughts linger on the elfin race he found capering in the shrubbery at the foot of an extinct volcano. He brought the volcano to life with a dozen gusts of flame, and soon it was the elves who were extinct.
Now the dragon is old, like all dragons today. He is too decrepit to perform more than modest feats of evil. And what is this irksome creature who stands before him? A champion, he says? Cedric of the Southern Plains, come to avenge a historic agricultural loss? Yes, he might be the same dragon who turned those barley fields to scorched stubble four centuries ago. Or was it his cousin, who liked to drift over the plains in autumn, following the harvest? Didn’t one of those stern Renaissance saints dispatch his southern cousin? However the business turned out, it’s an awful impudence for this champion to rise hundreds of years later and come to vex him with a challenge. And why must it go on so long, this recitation of heroic deeds? Cedric is certainly a paragon of chivalry, and if he would only come to the point and present his terms, we’ll be sure to wake at dawn tomorrow and meet him at the ravine to make a hot breakfast of him.
But how this tinpot knight drones on and on. Behind him wait more supplicants in a winding queue. There are the bent women who wish to make a propitiatory slaughter of their infants. And here come the toothless old men with their gossip and their indictments. Yes, we’ll gather our bones and spread our age-mottled wings to swoop down on the brats who have been filching apples from the orchard. To be sure, we’ll burn them to a crisp. Evil shall be done. And the dragon, his eyes closed but apparently open, loses himself in reverie as the wretches arrive in an endless procession to entreat and berate and bore him. He dreams that he is chasing the Pegasus. His great green ocular orbs swivel as he follows his quarry through the clouds. He appears, to his importunate visitors, to be rolling his eyes.