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 threads were fastened everywhere now, and the uprights all in
place. Moths were busy in all directions, showing the way, while bats
by the dozen darted like black lightning from corner to corner, making
sure that every spar and beam was fixed and steady. So exquisitely
woven was the structure that it moved past them overhead without the
faintest sound, yet so frail and so elastic that the whirring of the
moths sent ripples of quivering movement through the entire framework.
'Hush!' murmured Rogers, 'we're properly inside it now. Don't think of
anything in particular. Just follow your wandering minds and wait.'
The children lay very close against him. He felt their warmth and the
breathing of their little bosoms. All three moved sympathetically
within the rhythm of the dusk. The 'inside' of each went floating up
into the darkening sky.
The general plan of the scaffolding they clearly made out as they
passed among its myriad, mile-long rafters, but the completed temple,
of course, they never saw. Black darkness hides that ever. Night's
secret mystery lies veiled finally in its innermost chamber, whence it
steals forth to enchant the mind of men with its strange bewilderment.
But the Twilight Scaffolding they saw clearly enough to make a map of
it. For Daddy afterwards drew it from their description, and gave it
an entire page in the Wumble Book, Monkey ladling on the colour with
her camel's-hair brush as well as she could remember.
It was a page to take the breath away, the big conception blundering
clumsily behind the crude reconstruction. Great winds formed the base,
winds of brown and blue and purple, piled mountainously upon each
other in motionless coils, and so soft that the upright columns of the
structure plunged easily and deeply into them. Thus the framework
could bend and curve and sway, moving with steady glide across the
landscape, yet never collapsing nor losing its exquisite proportions.
The forests shored it up, its stays and bastions were the Jura
precipices; it rested on the shoulders of the hills. From vineyard,
field, and lake vast droves of thick grey shadows trooped in to
curtain the lower halls of the colossal edifice, as chamber after
chamber disappeared from view and Night clothed the structure from the
ground-floors upwards. And far overhead a million tiny scarves, half
sunset and half dusk, wove into little ropes that lashed the topmost
spars together, dovetailing them neatly, and fastening them at last
with whole clusters of bright thin stars.
'Ohhhhh!' breathed Jimbo with a delicious shudder of giddiness. 'Let's
climb to the very tip and see all the trains and railway stations in
the world!'
'Wait till the moon comes up and puts the silver rivets in,' the
leader whispered. 'It'll be safer then. My weight, you know--'
'There she is!' interrupted Monkey with a start, 'and there's no such
thing as weight--'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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