however; neither did Pantagruel return a word. So that Queen
Whims, or Queen Quintessence (which you please), perceiving that we stood
as mute as fishes, said: Your taciturnity speaks you not only disciples of
Pythagoras, from whom the venerable antiquity of my progenitors in
successive propagation was emaned and derives its original, but also
discovers, that through the revolution of many retrograde moons, you have
in Egypt pressed the extremities of your fingers with the hard tenants of
your mouths, and scalptized your heads with frequent applications of your
unguicules. In the school of Pythagoras, taciturnity was the symbol of
abstracted and superlative knowledge, and the silence of the Egyptians was
agnited as an expressive manner of divine adoration; this caused the
pontiffs of Hierapolis to sacrifice to the great deity in silence,
impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound. My design is
not to enter into a privation of gratitude towards you, but by a vivacious
formality, though matter were to abstract itself from me, excentricate to
you my cogitations.

Having spoken this, she only said to her officers, Tabachins, a panacea;
and straight they desired us not to take it amiss if the queen did not
invite us to dine with her; for she never ate anything at dinner but some
categories, jecabots, emnins, dimions, abstractions, harborins, chelemins,
second intentions, carradoths, antitheses, metempsychoses, transcendent
prolepsies, and such other light food.

Then they took us into a little closet lined through with alarums, where we
were treated God knows how. It is said that Jupiter writes whatever is
transacted in the world on the dipthera or skin of the Amalthaean goat that
suckled him in Crete, which pelt served him instead of a shield against the
Titans, whence he was nicknamed Aegiochos. Now, as I hate to drink water,
brother topers, I protest it would be impossible to make eighteen goatskins
hold the description of all the good meat they brought before us, though it
were written in characters as small as those in which were penned Homer's
Iliads, which Tully tells us he saw enclosed in a nutshell.

For my part, had I one hundred mouths, as many tongues, a voice of iron, a
heart of oak, and lungs of leather, together with the mellifluous abundance
of Plato, yet I never could give you a full account of a third part of a
second of the whole.

Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the q