Of wizards and dragons, trolls and knights
It isn’t surprising that all this fuss about mysterious passages beneath Valletta is appealing to precisely the sort of person who’s wild for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, or who spent rather too much time romanticising about The Scarlet Pimpernel or dreaming of adventure with the Famous Five.
Of course there are holes and passages and pits excavated beneath Valletta. That’s where they got the stone to build the stuff up above, for crying out loud. In the days before mechanised transport, people tended to build right over the hole in the ground where they’d cut their stone. Have you ever tried to get a mule to pull a cart-load of limestone up a hill? No, but presumably you have the imagination to see what that might be like, and how impractical it would be. There you go, then.
What do Astrid and the Famous Five imagine, for heaven’s sake – that the ‘knights’, always pictured wearing a full suit of armour and at least six feet three inches tall in their wild imaginings, used these passages for secret trysts? I can’t think of a bigger passion-killer. “Was that a cockroach, or are you just pleased to see me?”
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Dear Daphne,
I am hooked on your posts today. Pure joy!
-“Was that a cockroach, or are you just pleased to see me?”
[Daphne – I bet the romanticists with their trysts and passages haven’t factored the full suit of armour into the equation. Or maybe the ladies came equipped with a particularly effective can-opener.]
Daphne,
That must have been just one big rattle. Especially when the ladies were also equipped with their chastity belts.
The clanging during these trysts would have woken up the dead in the “graveyard” on Mechant’s street. As far as I can remember, errant knights went to brothels; they didn’t play around in dim, dank, underground passages. However, maybe the idea of assignations in a tunnel fires up the imagination of some people. U halluna, FAA!
@ Mario Debono
Just to pull your leg:
“As far as I can remember, errant knights went to brothels; they didn’t play around in dim, dank, underground passages.”
1. You have a fantastic memory to remember what happened so long ago.
2. Congrats – You are currently the longest living person on the planet.
3. How do you know what they were up to? Did you also visit the brothels with the naughty knights?
@Mario Debono: “As far as I can remember, errant knights went to brothels”
As far as you remember? Do you mean to say that you are a reincarnation of an “errant knight”? Ooooh!
@Mario Debono
I just saw Vanni’s comment, and realised that he beat me to it!