Chapter 1. Prologue
Not you but your mood walks those lands.
Jacob Andreas Poup, Professor of Mathematics, the Royal University of Prague
Chapter 1
Prologue
The ancient palace with turrets and spires, decorated with bas-reliefs and sculptures of winged fish and beasts, looked like a marvelous book illustration. Three aged gentlemen in frock coats and top hats stood by its wall facing a flowerbed shaped like an enormous eye.
“Phenomenal luck,” said one of them as he looked up at a turret. “Imagine falling from there and staying unharmed!”
The flowerbed looked well-kept, but at its very ‘pupil’ the plants were crushed and trampled down.
“Maybe ‘the eye’ had halted the downfall with its glance?” the second gentleman suggested in a dispassionate voice.
“These islanders still believe they can drive away evil spirits this way!” the third said, shaking his grey head.
“Spirits or not,” the second spoke thoughtfully, “but the person in question mentioned some magical glance that had transformed the terrestrial attraction…”
“Into 'celestial attractiveness'?” the third grinned. “Beware of Isaac Newton, dear colleague!”
“Yeah, yeah, infantile fantasies… Here it is – your ‘glance’,” the first nodded at the flowerbed. “Right in this bright ellipse. Well then, let’s get down to business, geniuses!” He opened his travel case, and the others also began to take out their notebooks and tape measures, gauging the ‘eye’ and drawing up some mathematical formulas.
The trio was made up of world-renowned natural science gurus, who had arrived at a small Atlantic island to study an interesting case: an eight-year-old girl had taken a hundred-feet tumble and remained unharmed. The girl’s name was Uncia and she happened to be the sole heiress to the regal Salamant dynasty that had ruled the island since the dawn of time.
The visiting luminaries radiographed the princess with their rays and examined her with various complicated devices, but, except for a tiny scratch, a replica of the Chinese hieroglyph ‘vapor’, they discovered no signs of volatility.
Right at the flowerbed, the scholars piled up a mountain of hypotheses so high that anyone who dared jump from it would inevitably die, finally agreeing that the girl was caught in an ascending air current: the weather on the island was indeed extremely hot.
Prompted by the reporters' coverage, the miraculous escape from death became immediately known as the ‘magical flight’. The news crossed the ocean and made headlines in every European and American newspaper, but a mysterious celestial body that fell to Earth in the very same days of June 1908 made a greater sensation and forced this story into the background.
To commemorate Uncia’s ‘magical flight,’ a festival with fireworks and a carnival was organized on her Native Island, which has been billed as such on every map from time immemorial. The sun that had heated the soil below the window was glorified in a hymn; the gardener and all his heirs, including daughters, were relieved from the flower and fruit taxes, and Uncia’s maid Medina, who had failed to prevent the accident on that unforgettable day, and whose outstanding beauty made up for her lack of proper education, was reduced in stature to a house-maid.
