An old man sits down next to him and says that it’s an important book, but that it contains the world’s greatest lie: that we do not control what happens to us. After making Santiago promise to give her one-tenth of the treasure as payment, the fortuneteller interprets the dream to mean that if Santiago journeys to the pyramids, he’ll find hidden treasure.Īnnoyed that he could have come to this interpretation on his own, Santiago leaves, and soon sits down in the plaza to read his book. In the dream, a child transports Santiago to the Pyramids of Egypt and promises he will find hidden treasure there, but Santiago always wakes up just as the child is about to reveal it. Santiago loves to travel, and became a shepherd, rather than a priest as his family had wanted, because his father told him that, among poor folk, only shepherds had the opportunity to travel.Ī few days before reaching the merchant’s daughter’s village, Santiago encounters a fortune-teller, whom he hopes will be able to interpret his recurring dream. Meeting her made him wish, for the first time in his life, that he could remain in one place. When he wakes, he looks forward to the village he will reach in four days where, the year before, he met a girl, the daughter of a merchant. In Part One of the novel, Santiago passes the night with his flock of sheep in an abandoned church. “What a lovely story,” the alchemist thinks. However, the lake reveals that, actually, it’s weeping because it misses being able to admire its own beautiful reflection in Narcissus’s eyes.

The lake is weeping, and the goddess assumes that the lake misses Narcissus’s beauty. In this version of the story, the goddess of the forest encounters the lake in which Narcissus drowned. In the Prologue, the alchemist reads a story about Narcissus-a youth so fascinated by his own beautiful reflection that he falls into a lake and drowns.

The alchemist book meaning