CHAPTER 6: Temptress and Victim of Temptation

Prince blinked back tears.  He had searched five castles high and low in two days but remained empty-handed.  He was beside himself with rage.

“Don’t argue with the devil.”

Rocky the Rockhopper Penguin

Every now and again, Prince felt a rush of anger and frustration, so intense that could have easily consumed him.  Full of self-doubt and lack of true self-esteem, Prince gradually realised that he could not turn into the fictious Prince Charming.

Prince crashed himself to the ground in agony and bellowed in pain, “My triangle eyes!”

Rocky patted consolingly on his wings, “She drew you with the signature features of a propagandist hero and crowned you with love and honour.  Don’t give in to the devil’s plot.  Love, patience, endurance, remember?”

Perhaps life lessons were better experienced than taught.  It was always a cliché though, until the moment the amazing idea, no matter how many times it had been told, self-sparked in one’s life.  A beastie’s characters were often developed through adversity.  The opposite situations would naturally provide a choice.  Prince could only prove his worth by rejecting the temptation to give up.  Otherwise, he could never learn to be persistent and determined in his quest.

It was the devil suggesting thoughts about judging physical attractiveness against the mage’s will, while the facial bilateral asymmetry was unique and fatal to Prince’s weaknesses.  The devil was always plotting Prince’s downfall by turning dreamy castles into prisons of forgone dreams.

It was not a sin to be tempted.  But it could be when Prince decided to action on it.

“Don’t give in.  Don’t give up.” Prince alarmed himself in a whisper and then paused to let the message sink in.

“Cheer up, Prince!” said Don.  “And where’re we going for the next treasure hunt?”

In a split second, Prince plucked up enough courage to journey on with his best beastie buddies.

Weimar was indeed a place where there was a surprise around every corner.  The two important buildings of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar at Marienstraße was designed by Henry van de Velde, the then master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts.  Walter Gropius succeeded Henry van de Velde and founded the Bauhaus movement in 1919.

The Art Nouveau main school building marked the threshold from older Historicism and Art Nouveau to the rationalist modernism that form reflected function.  At the foot of the elliptical staircase, the Bauhaus artist Joost Schmidt’s relief grudgingly retreated to the background when the French artist Auguste Rodin’s statue of Eve stole the scene as soon as anyone stepped in the entrance foyer.

The bronze sculpture was inherited by the Bauhaus.  Back in the old times, when the figurative aesthetics clashed with the functionalist perspective, there was a perspicuous argument, alongside with the institutional politics, over the more traditional aesthetics of sculptures and the elemental geometrics in modernist art.

The girl was chasing after Flora down the staircase.  Flora was clinging onto the curved balustrade handrail as she slid to find the perfect angle of viewing the masterpiece.  As soon as Prince was aware of their mischievous scheme, an idea of falling from height crossed his mind like an electrical storm and frightened him out of his wits.  Immediately, Prince rushed to the rescue.

In an unguarded moment, Prince fell flat on his belly.  As he tilted his head up, he was astonished that he had never seen this side of Eve before, alarmingly surreal.  In despair, Eve was descending the pedestal to leave the Garden of Eden and the twisted torso was backlit against the bright tall windows.  The staircase was soon twirling across the atrium above and Prince felt a tug at his heartstrings, empathy almost suffocating him.

The downfall of humanity was ignited by Eve taking the bait tossed by the serpent.  Unlike Adam, Prince did not blame Eve at all as he would have probably fallen into the same trap in the Garden of Eden.  It was just too easy, by the beasties’ sinful tendency, playing corrupt judges to tell what was good and what was evil.  Likewise, in the darkest pages of human history, influential leaders executed their great power to combat political opponents and to slaughter their foes in the name of the distorted standards of good and evil.

On the next day, the beastie buddies left the historic centre of Weimar and arrived at the Schloßpark Tiefurt to savour the moment of the rural idyll for a change.  The mansion’s former owner Duchess Anna Amalia used to invite poets and writers to the Schloß Tiefurt and socialised with an exalted circle of art lovers.  The German literary and cultural movement was known as the Weimar Classicism for the leading writers lived in Weimar.

The mansion of genteel elegance was set in twenty-one hectares of beautiful trees on both sides of the Ilm River.  As summer fell into autumn, the forest in the valley was ablaze with towering blossoms of caramel and chocolatey browns, scarlet, and gold.

Bass amused himself by jamming to the crunching sound of the fallen leaves under his feet as he bounced up the slope.  The soil around the Musentempel remained carpeted in green and the glossy water was shimmering in the sun as if carrying hundreds of thousands of diamonds in it.  There were stunning views at every bend, all framed by the interlocking branches in gold foliage, animated by an occasional autumn gust.

Bass was anxious to capture the moments, in his heart and with his smartphone.  Then a strawberry-red leaf gracefully tumbled down in three somersaults and finally perched between his strings.  His hands were tied up, and he could not care less about his impeccable grooming rules for three seconds.

Flora stood on tiptoe to reach for the leaf and returned it in the air to finish its final part of the floating ballet.

“Thank you, my dear,” retuned Bass, gently, with his eyes staying on the screen to fix the focus of the photograph.

Bianca stared at Flora with a cunning grin.

“Flora is so girlfriendable!” mocked the chubby little piglet, as she pushed her yellow-rimmed glasses up to her nose.

 “My, oh, my,” exclaimed Bianca, “and here Chococo starts inventing words again!”

Travelling seven kilometres over the valley, the beastie buddies finally arrived at the baroque Schloß Belvedere on the last day of their Weimar itinerary.  The summer residence of the ducal family of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach stood in the midst of the hunting forest stretching forty-three hectares on the outskirts of Weimar.

The girl gave a gasp of amazement, as her imagination took flight, of unicorns galloping past the labyrinth of tree-lined pathways and dwarves napping in the abandoned grotto.  Crystal-clear chilled air wrapped around her, and she pulled the ends of her scarf tighter over her head.  Prince was perspicacious and thoughtful; he took a big leap forward to stay in front of the gang in order to shield the girl from the howling wind.

The girl sneakily slowed down her pace to the end of the line and grabbed Rocky by her side.  “Now there’s a thing,” whispered she, “Prince is a lot happier today.  What did you tell him?”

“Don’t argue with the devil,” replied Rocky.