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rabbits! But about the hour of noon, when the captain and his men had mustered again, they suddenly saw a man come through the air unto them, and a voice said distinctly: “It is time! It is high time!” But when that person was nighest unto them (he passed by them flying quickly like a shadow, in the direction in which the volcano was situated) they recognised with the greatest confusion that it was Zarathustra. For all of them, except the captain, had seen him before, and they loved him, as the folk love, blending love and awe in equal parts. “Lo! there,” said the old steersman, “Zarathustra goeth unto hell!”
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ashore on the island of Mount Stromboli to shoot rabbits. At three o’clock they called the crew together to go aboard, when, to their inexpressible astonishment, they saw two men flying rapidly over them through the air. One was dressed in black, the other in grey. They approached them very closely, in the greatest haste; to their greatest dismay they descended amid the burning flames into the crater of the terrible volcano, Mount Stromboli. They recognised the pair as acquaintances from London.
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As Frau E. Förster-Nietzsche, the poet’s sister, told me, in reply to my inquiry, Nietzsche took up Just. Kerner between the age of twelve and fifteen, when stopping with his grandfather, Pastor Oehler, in Pobler, but certainly never afterwards. It could never have been the poet’s intention to commit a plagiarism from a ship’s log; if this had been the case, he would certainly have omitted the very prosaic “to shoot rabbits,” which was, moreover, quite unessential to the situation. In the poetical sketch of Zarathustra’s journey into Hell there was obviously interpolated, half or wholly unconsciously, that forgotten impression from his youth.
This is an instance which shows all the peculiarities of cryptomnesia. A quite unessential detail, which deserves nothing but speedy forgetting, is reproduced with almost verbal fidelity, whilst the chief part of the narrative is, one
