A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote)Blackwood, Algernon
Science
A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote)
Blackwood, Algernon
Magic -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
The children went on talking to each other under their breath, and
while they did so Cousin Henry entered their little wondering minds.
Or, perhaps, they entered his. It is difficult to say. Not even an
owl, who is awfully wise about everything to do with night and
darkness, could have told for certain. But, anyhow, they all three saw
more or less the same thing. The way they talked about it afterwards
proves that. Their minds apparently merged, or else there was one big
mirror and two minor side-reflections of it. It was their cousin's
interpretation, at any rate, that they remembered later. They brought
the material for his fashioning.
'Look!' cried Monkey, sitting up, 'there are millions and millions
now--lines everywhere--pillars and squares and towers. It's like a
city. I can see lamps in every street----'
'That's stars,' interrupted Jimbo. The stars indeed were peeping here
and there already. 'I feel up there,' he added, 'my inside, I mean--up
among the stars and lines and sky-things.'
'That's the mind wandering,' explained the eldest child of the three.
'Always follow a wandering mind. It's quite safe. Mine's going
presently too. We'll all go off together.'
Several little winds, released by darkness, passed them just then on
their way out of the forest. They gathered half a dozen sparks from
the fire to light them on their way, and brought cool odours with them
from the deepest recesses of the trees--perfumes no sunlight ever
finds. And just behind them came a big white moth, booming and
whirring softly. It darted to and fro to find the trail, then
vanished, so swiftly that no one saw it go.
'He's pushing it along,' said Jimbo.
'Or fastening the lines,' his sister thought, 'you see he hovers in
one place, then darts over to another.'
'That's fastening the knots,' added Jimbo.
'No; he's either an Inspector or a Pathfinder,' whispered Cousin
Henry, 'I don't know exactly which. They show the way the scaffolding
goes. Moths, bats, and owls divide the work between them somehow.' He
sat up suddenly to listen, and the children sat up with him. 'Hark!'
he added, 'do you hear that?'
Sighings and flutterings rose everywhere about them, and overhead the
fluffy spires of the tree-tops all bent one way as the winds went
foraging across the night. Majestically the scaffolding reared up and
towered through the air, while sheets of darkness hung from every
line, and trailed across the earth like gigantic sails from some
invisible vessel. Loose and enormous they gradually unfolded, then
suddenly swung free and dropped with a silent dip and rush. Night
swooped down upon the leagues of Jura forest. She spread her tent
across the entire range.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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