The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapters 13–16

And every night they saw that there rose in the east new constellations which no one had ever seen in Narnia and perhaps, as Lucy thought with a mixture of joy and fear, no living eye had seen at all.

Most of them slept on deck and talked far into the night or hung over the ship's side watching the luminous dance of the foam thrown up by their bows.

The level valley which lay at the head of the bay showed no road or track or other sign of habitation.

There were flagons of gold and silver and curiously wrought glass; and the smell of the fruit and the wine blew towards them like a promise of all happiness.

Their hair, which was grey, had grown over their eyes till it almost concealed their faces, and their beards had grown over the table, climbing round and entwining plates and goblets as brambles entwine a fence, until, all mixed in one great mat of hair, they flowed over the edge and down to the floor.

But he sank back almost at once into a yet deeper sleep than before: that is, his heavy head sagged a few inches lower towards the table and all efforts to rouse him again were useless.

Here he cannot kiss the Princess till he has dissolved the enchantment.

Then something seemed to be flying at them out of the very centre of the rising sun: but of course one couldn't look steadily in that direction to make sure.

When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island.

"My son," said the star, "it would be no use, even though you wished it, to sail for the World's End with men unwilling or men deceived.

Let him sit beside these other three and drink oblivion till your return.

While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek will be head of the talking mice in Narnia.

It is our pleasure to choose from among such of you as are willing those whom we deem worthy of so high an enterprise.

Do you think that the privilege of seeing the last things is to be bought for a song?

Why, every man that comes with us shall bequeath the title of Dawn Treader to all his descendants and when we land at Cair Paravel on the homeward voyage he shall have either gold or land enough to make him rich all his life.

Good gracious, I must be seeing the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms down.

And by its shape she saw clearly that it was a shadow of towers and pinnacles, minarets and domes.

They were sailing above an open park-like country, dotted with little groves of brightly coloured vegetation.

"Where the waves grow sweet,
Doubt not, Reepicheep,
There is the utter East."

There is not a breath of wind. The sail hangs dead. The sea is as flat as a pond. And yet we drive on as fast as if there were a gale behind us.

Every day and every hour the light became more brilliant and still they could bear it.

No one ate or slept and no one wanted to, but they drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water, and pledged one another silently in deep draughts of it.

"If we were in higher latitudes, your Majesty," said Drinian, "I would say it was ice.

And when, after some consultation, the Dawn Treader turned back into the current and began to glide eastward through the Lily Lake or the Silver Sea (they tried both these names but it was the Silver Sea that stuck and is now on Caspian's map) the strangest part of their travels began.

To look at, this last sea was very like the Arctic; and if their eyes had not by now grown as strong as eagles' the sun on all that whiteness—especially at early morning when the sun was hugest—would have been unbearable.

"But, Sire," interrupted Drinian, "are you abdicating?"

And if your Majesty will not hear reason it will be the truest loyalty of every man on board to follow me in disarming and binding you till you come to your senses.

But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth—a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else.

"There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb; but as he spoke his snowy white flushed into tawny gold and his size changed and he was Aslan himself, towering above them and scattering light from his mane.

Then all in one moment there was a rending of the blue wall (like a curtain being torn) and a terrible white light from beyond the sky, and the feel of Aslan's mane and a Lion's kiss on their foreheads and then—the back bedroom in Aunt Alberta's home at Cambridge.