Rabelais Author:Walter Besant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 127 CHAPTER VI. THE QUEST OF THE DIVINE BOTTLE. We are now to set forth upon the strangest voyage on which ever company of adventurers were engaged. We ... more »are to sail over unknown seas, and to land on unknown islands. We shall encounter strange perils, and fall among strange people. We shall light upon wondrous customs : we shall meet with perilous adventures. Everywhere we shall find the people exactly the same as in France, following the same customs, speaking the same tongue, wearing the same attire, occupied with the same superstitions, and beset with the same prejudices : everywhere there will be illustrations as well as contrasts of the life we have left behind us : everywhere we shall find the same pretence at a reply, and the same dead silence to the question which lies in Pantagruel's mind, and is obscurely figured in Panurge's doubt. Is there, anywhere, or has there ever been any voice, any echo, any reply from the silent world ? We sail in quest of truth. What we discover we shall learn later on. Meanwhile we arc not going to tell the world what we are in search of. Sufficient for them to know thatPanurge still wears his long cloak of russet brown, with the spectacles in his cap, and the flea in his ear, in token, first, of his desire to many and lead a peaceful life—and secondly, of his grave doubts as to the prudence of the step; and that we are bound for the Oracle of the Bottle, where his doubts may be resolved. Many strange voyages were made in the old days when the mappa mundi was still open to the imagination of geographers; when the coast of America was supposed to be the coast of India; when the Ogygian Islands lay four days' sail from Albion, and the Fortunate Islands were somewhere in mid-Atlantic. The most famous of the voyages, and that to wh...« less