Chapter 9
Chapter 9 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 5. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 5, by François Rabelais. Translated by Peter-Antony Matheu and Sir Thomas Urquhart.
How we arrived at the Island of Tools. Having well ballasted the holds of our human vessels, we weighed anchor, hoist up sail, stowed the boats, set the land, and stood for the offing with a fair loom gale. And, for more haste, unperiled the mizzen yard and launched it in the sail over the lee quarter, and fitted gives to keep it steady, and boomed it out. So in three days, we made the island of tools that is altogether uninhabited. We saw there a great number of trees which bore mattocks, pickaxes, crows, weeding hooks, scythes, sickles, spades, trowels, hatchets, hedging bills, saws, adzes, bills, axes, shears, pincers, bolts, piercers, augers, and wimbles.
Others bore dags, daggers, poniards, bayonets, square-bladed tucks, stilettos, poniardos, skeins, penknives, punchions, bodkins, swords, rapiers, backswords, cutlasses, scimitars, hangers, falchions, glaives, royons, whittles, and winyards. Whoever would have any of these needed but to shake the tree, and immediately they dropped down as thick as hops like so many ripe plums. Nay, what's more, they fell on a kind of grass called scabbard, and sheathed themselves in it cleverly.
But when they came down there was need of taking care, lest they happened to touch the head, feet, or other parts of the body. For they fell with the point downwards, and in they stuck. or slit the continuum of some member, or lopped it off like a twig, either of which generally was enough to have killed a man,
though he were a hundred years old and worth as many thousand spankers, spur royals, and rose nobles. Under some other trees, whose names I cannot justly tell you, I saw some certain sorts of weeds that grew and sprouted, like pikes, lances, javelins, javelets, darts, dartlets, halberds, boar spears, eel spears, partisans, tridents, prongs, trout staves, spears, half-pikes, and hunting staves. As they sprouted up and chanced to touch the tree, straight they
met with their heads, points, and blades, each suitable to its kind, made ready for them by the trees over them, as soon as every individual wood was grown up, fit for its steel, even like the children's coats that are made for them, as soon as they can wear them and you wean them of their swaddling clothes. Nor do you mutter, I pray you, at what Plato, Anaxagoras, and Democritus have said, Odds fish, they were none of your lower form gimcracks, were they?
Those trees seem to us terrestrial animals, in no wise so different from brute beasts as not to have skin, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, kernels, bones, marrow, humors, matrices, brains, and articulations. For they certainly have some, since theophrastus will have it so. But in this point, they differed from other animals,
that their heads, that is, the part of their trunks next to the root, are downwards, their hair, that is, their roots, in the earth, and their feet, that is, their branches, upside down, as if a man should stand on his head with outstretched legs. and as you battered sinners on whom Venus has bestowed something to remember her
feel the approach of rains winds cold and every change of weather at your ischiatic legs and your almaplots by means of the perpetual almanac which she has fixed there so these trees have notice given them by certain sensations which they have at their roots stalks gums paps or marrow of the growth of the staves under them, and accordingly they prepare suitable points and blades for them beforehand. Yet, as all things, except God, are sometimes subject to error,
nature itself not free from it when it produceth monstrous things, likewise I observed something amiss in these trees, for a half-pike that grew up high enough to reach the branches of one of these instrumentiferous trees happened no sooner to touch them, but instead of being joined to an iron head, it impaled a stubbed broom at the fundament. Well, no matter, it will serve to sweep the chimney. Thus, a partisan met with a pair of garden shears. Come, all's good for something,
"'Twill serve to nip off little twigs and destroy caterpillars. "'The staff of a halberd got the blade of a scythe, "'which made it look like a hermaphrodite. "'Happy be lucky, tis all a case, "'twill serve for some mower.
"'Oh, tis a great blessing to put our trust in the Lord.'" As we went back to our ships, I spied behind I-don't-know-what bush, I-don't-know-what folk's doing, I don't know what business in I don't know what posture, scouring I don't know what tools in I
don't know what manner, and I don't know what place. End of chapter nine, read by Phineas, Denver, Colorado, 2025.
