Chapter 17 🔊✎
When you want to sound clever, you sometimes end up lying a bit. 🔊✎ I have not been completely straightforward with you when I talked about the lamplighters. 🔊✎ I might have ended up giving a false impression of our planet to someone who didn’t already know it. 🔊✎ In fact, people take up very little room on Earth. 🔊✎ If its two billion inhabitants were to stand close together, as they would at a public meeting, you would easily fit them into a square twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. You could put all of humanity on one of the smallest Pacific islands. 🔊✎ The grown-ups, of course, won’t believe you. They think they occupy far more space than that. They think they are as big as baobabs. 🔊✎ Advise them to do the math. They love figures. They’ll have a ball. 🔊✎ But don’t waste your time on this bit of homework, there’s really no need. I’m sure you trust me. 🔊✎
The little prince, once he’d arrived on Earth, was surprised not to see anyone. 🔊✎ He was starting to think he must have got the wrong planet, when he saw a ring, the colour of the moon, moving in the sand. 🔊✎
“Good evening,” said the little prince, just in case. 🔊✎
“Good evening,” said the snake. 🔊✎
“What planet have I landed on?” asked the little prince. 🔊✎
“You are on Earth. 🔊✎ This is Africa,” said the snake. 🔊✎
“Ah! So there are no people on Earth?” 🔊✎
“This is the desert. There are no people in the desert. The Earth is a big place,” said the snake. 🔊✎
The little prince sat down on a rock and looked at the sky. 🔊✎
“I wonder,” he said, “if the stars are lit up so that everyone can find his way back to his own one when he needs to. 🔊✎ Look at my planet. It’s exactly overhead. But so far away…”
“It’s pretty,” said the snake. “What are you going to do here?” 🔊✎
“I am having problems with a flower,” said the little prince. 🔊✎
And they were silent for a while. 🔊✎
“Where is everyone?” asked the little prince in the end. “You feel a bit lonely in the desert…” 🔊✎
“You feel lonely when you’re with people too,” said the snake. 🔊✎ The little prince looked at him for a long time. 🔊✎
“You’re a strange creature,” he said, “thin as a finger…” 🔊✎
“But I am more powerful than the finger of a king,” said the snake. 🔊✎
“You aren’t very powerful… you don’t even have feet… you can’t go very far…” 🔊✎
“I can take you further than a ship,” said the snake. 🔊✎
He curled himself around the little prince’s ankle like a golden bracelet. 🔊✎
“When I touch someone,” he said, “I send them back to the earth they come from. But you are pure, and you come from a star…” 🔊✎
The little prince didn’t answer. 🔊✎
“I feel sorry for you, so weak, on this Earth as hard as granite. I can help you one day if you miss your own planet too much. I can…” 🔊✎
“Oh! I understand very well,” said the little prince. “But why do you always talk in riddles?” 🔊✎
“I solve them all,” said the snake. 🔊✎