No, no, not that! He could not bear the sight of blood, the shriek of pain. He could not be a great warrior.
Again his fancy drifted. He recalled “The Life and Adventures of the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha,” which he had read and reread with such delight. He would like to be a warrior without being obliged to shed blood, a hero like Don Quixote. Presently the stories of Quixote became fused with those he had heard of his great-uncle, Nathan Hollmann, of whose travels and adventures his aunts had told him so many grotesque tales and whose writings he had discovered in a dusty chest in his grandfather’s attic. Like his great-uncle he would also be dressed in an Asiatic costume and smoke a long Turkish pipe and speak Arabic and travel all over “the seven seas” and through Morocco and Spain and the deserts of Egypt and make a pilgrimage to the Holy City and perhaps, like him, see a vision on Mount Moriah! From the fantastic image of his great-uncle to a Sheik of the Bedouins was but a step. He visualized himself traveling with long trains of caravans and robber bands, scouring the dense forests of Arabia for victims (when Albert’s imagination took flight it disregarded geography). The notion of a robber chief appealed to him. The romantic scenes from “Die Räuber” haunted him. Of course, he would not really rob people—he could not think of taking anything away from anybody—but he would lead the robber bands through the immense woods and—and in chorus—sing beautiful songs, the echoes resounding through hill and dale . . .
Lying thus, his fancy at large, the arabesque tales about his great-uncle eventually merged into those of the knight errant. Cervantes and Don Quixote and his great-uncle became one and the same person, and he himself, for the moment, was the reincarnation of them all. He wished he could go away—far, far away—to Morocco, to Turkey, to the “dense forests” of Arabia, and perchance be thrown into an underground dungeon, penetrated only by the stray rays of the sun, mildew smells everywhere, with clanking chains and great keys turning in rusty locks, with big fat mice—beautiful, snow-white mice—darting back and forth, the turbulent waters of a surrounding moat lapping against the prison walls darkened with age. His imaginary confinement in the dungeon, however, did not interfere with his adventurous travels. His imprisonment was simultaneous with his roving with caravans of camels and donkeys and dromedaries, and elephants whose tusks glistened in the blazing sun of the Orient . . .