The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapters 5–8

Then she made a dash for the cabin door and got in and shut out for a moment the appalling sight of the speed with which they were rushing into the dark, but not of course the horrible confusion of creakings, groanings, snappings, clatterings, roarings and boomings which only sounded more alarming below than they had done on the poop.

The real trouble is water. Two casks seem to have got a leak knocked in them and are empty (Narnian efficiency again).

So I just explained coolly and quietly that I had been kidnapped and brought away on this idiotic voyage without my consent, and it was hardly my business to get them out of their scrape.

When morning came, with a low, grey sky but very hot, the adventurers found they were in a bay encircled by such cliffs and crags that it was like a Norwegian fjord.

The scene would have been pretty in a picture but was rather oppressive in real life.

He rose quietly from his place and walked away among the trees, taking care to go slowly and in an aimless manner so that anyone who saw him would think he was merely stretching his legs.

Soon he felt he could venture on a quicker and more determined stride.

The thing that came out of the cave was something he had never even imagined—a long lead-coloured snout, dull red eyes, no feathers or fur, a long lithe body that trailed on the ground, legs whose elbows went up higher than its back like a spider's, cruel claws, bat's wings that made a rasping noise on the stones, yards of tail.

It reached the pool and slid its horrible scaly chin down over the gravel to drink: but before it had drunk there came from it a great croaking or clanging cry and after a few twitches and convulsions it rolled round on its side and lay perfectly still with one claw in the air.

Eustace (unlike most boys) had never thought much of treasure but he saw at once the use it would be in this new world which he had so foolishly stumbled into through the picture in Lucy's bedroom at home.

For just in front of him, and a little on his right, where the moonlight fell clear on the floor of the cave, he saw a hideous shape moving.

Two dragons, one on each side, mimicking whatever he did!

Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

"We must all show great constancy," Caspian was saying.

Lucy tried hard to console him and even screwed up her courage to kiss the scaly face, and nearly everyone said "Hard luck" and several assured Eustace that they would all stand by him and many said there was sure to be some way of disenchanting him and they'd have him as right as rain in a day or two.

He was a very humane killer too, for he could dispatch a beast with one blow of his tail so that it didn't know (and presumably still doesn't know) it had been killed.

And in the evening if it turned chilly, as it sometimes did after the heavy rains, he was a comfort to everyone, for the whole party would come and sit with their backs against his hot sides and get well warmed and dried; and one puff of his fiery breath would light the most obstinate fire.

And poor Eustace realised more and more that since the first day he came on board he had been an unmitigated nuisance and that he was now a greater nuisance still.

Then he caught hold of me—I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on—and threw me into the water.

Great was the rejoicing when Edmund and the restored Eustace walked into the breakfast circle round the camp-fire.

It was all greens and vermilions with purple blotches—except where shell fish clung to it—and shaped rather like a horse's, though without ears.

It came up on what they first took to be a huge neck, but as more and more of it emerged everyone knew that this was not its neck but its body and that at last they were seeing what so many people have foolishly wanted to see—the great Sea Serpent.

It is true that he accomplished nothing beyond breaking Caspian's second best sword into bits, but it was a fine thing for a beginner to have done.

In the morning they found themselves in the green bay of a rugged, lonely-looking country which sloped up to a rocky summit.

When they reached the top they saw that it was a very small island, not more than twenty acres; and from this height the sea looked larger and more desolate than it did from the deck, or even the fighting-top of the Dawn Treader.

Everyone agreed to this and after about fifteen minutes they were at the source of the second river.

I claim this land for ever as a Narnian possession.

I am one of the four ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance to the High King my brother.

Across the grey hillside above them—grey, for the heather was not yet in bloom—without noise, and without looking at them, and shining as if he were in bright sunlight though the sun had in fact gone in, passed with slow pace the hugest lion that human eyes have ever seen.