The Day Boy and the Night Girl | Page 2

sweet sorrow.
IV. Photogen
WATHO at length had her desire, for witches often get what they want:
a splendid boy was born to the fair Aurora. Just as the sun rose, he
opened his eyes. Watho carried him immediately to a distant part of the
castle, and persuaded the mother that he never cried but once, dying the
moment he was born. Overcome with grief, Aurora left the castle as
soon as she was able, and Watho never invited her again.
And now the witch's care was that the child should not know darkness.
Persistently she trained him until at last he never slept during the day
and never woke during the night. She never let him see anything black,
and even kept all dull colors out of his way. Never, if she could help it,
would she let a shadow fall upon him, watching against shadows as if
they had been live things that would hurt him. All day he basked in the
full splendor of the sun, in the same large rooms his mother had
occupied. Watho used him to the sun, until he could bear more of it
than any dark-blooded African. In the hottest of every day, she stripped
him and laid him in it, that he might ripen like a peach; and the boy
rejoiced in it, and would resist being dressed again. She brought all her
knowledge to bear on making his muscles strong and elastic and swiftly
responsive -- that his soul, she said laughingly, might sit in every fibre,
be all in every part, and awake the moment of call. His hair was of the
red gold, but his eyes grew darker as he grew, until they were as black
as Vesper's. He was the merriest of creatures, always laughing, always
loving, for a moment raging, then laughing afresh. Watho called him

Photogen.
V. Nycteris
FIVE or six months after the birth of Photogen, the dark lady also gave
birth to a baby: in the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead
of night, under the feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl
came into the darkness with a wail. And just as she was born for the
first time, Vesper was born for the second, and passed into a world as
unknown to her as this was to her child -- who would have to be born
yet again before she could see her mother.
Watho called her Nycteris, and she grew as like Vesper as possible -- in
all but one particular. She had the same dark skin, dark eyelashes and
brows, dark hair, and gentle sad look; but she had just the eyes of
Aurora, the mother of Photogen, and if they grew darker as she grew
older, it was only a darker blue. Watho, with the help of Falca, took the
greatest possible care of her -- in every way consistent with her plans,
that is, -- the main point in which was that she should never see any
light but what came from the lamp. Hence her optic nerves, and indeed
her whole apparatus for seeing, grew both larger and more sensitive;
her eyes, indeed, stopped short only of being too large. Under her dark
hair and forehead and eyebrows, they looked like two breaks in a
cloudy night-sky, through which peeped the heaven where the stars and
no clouds live. She was a sadly dainty little creature. No one in the
world except those two was aware of the being of the little bat. Watho
trained her to sleep during the day and wake during the night. She
taught her music, in which she was herself a proficient, and taught her
scarcely anything else.
VI. How Photogen Grew
THE hollow in which the castle of Watho lay was a cleft in a plain
rather than a valley among hills, for at the top of its steep sides, both
north and south, was a tableland, large and wide. It was covered with
rich grass and flowers, with here and there a wood, the outlying colony
of a great forest. These grassy plains were the finest hunting grounds in
the world. Great herds of small but fierce cattle, with humps and

shaggy manes, roved about them, also antelopes and gnus, and the tiny
roedeer, while the woods were swarming with wild creatures. The
tables of the castle were mainly supplied from them. The chief of
Watho's huntsmen was a fine fellow, and when Photogen began to
outgrow the training she could give him, she handed him over to Fargu.
He with a will set about teaching him all he knew. He got him pony
after pony, larger and larger as he grew, every one less manageable
than that which had preceded it, and advanced