Page 40 - Book of Crates

fruits, which then take their size and their form. If this intense heat
continued to act on these plants and these fruits, it would burn them and
damage them. At this point in time there arises for these fruits the
fourth season, the autumn, during which the temperature of the air is of
a middle sort. The fruits improve at that time; they take colour, acquire
the good taste of maturity and are used by men.

“It is advisable to operate on our compound and to make the
various degrees of fire act on it, in a way similar to that of the seasons,
that the philosophers took as a term of comparison. As for me, I order
you not to scorn one word, nor a single comparison of the books of the
philosophers; because they do not have anything put there that was not
the truth.”

At this time my eyes closed themselves in spite of myself, and
under the sway of my preoccupations I fell asleep. It seemed me that I
was on the banks of the Nile, on a rock that dominated the river. All of
a sudden I saw a young vigorous man who fought against a dragon. At
the time when the young man fell on the dragon, it blew against him
and whistled violently, by raising the head.

The young man called me to his aid, by beckoning to me to cross
the river. I sprang at once and I was soon close to him. I took a pike of
iron, that I threw against the dragon; but it, turning toward me, blew
with such a violence that it made me fall backwards, however I did not
faint.

I came back to the task a second time. While seeing me returning
against the dragon, my pike of iron to the hand, the young man shouted
to me: “Stop, Cratès, it won’t be enough to kill the dragon.”

I stopped and said to him: “Hey well! make your business of it.”

The young man took some water which he threw over the dragon:
its head fell, and it remained in extended death.

Addressing then the dragon, the young man said to it: “Show the
profit which we expect from you.”

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