THE WONDERS OF THE LAST SEA VERY soon after they had left Ramandus try they began to feel that they had already sailed beyond the world. All was different. For ohing they all found that they were needing less sleep. One did not want to go to bed. nor to eat much, nor even to talk except in low voices. Ahing was the light. There was too much of it. The su came up each m looked twice, if not; three times, its usual size. And every m (which gave Lucy the stra feeling of all) the huge white birds, singing their song with human voices in a language no one knew, streamed overhead and vanished astern on their way to their breakfast at Aslans Table. A little later they came flying bad vanished into the east.
"How beautifully clear the water is!" said Lucy to herself, as she leaned over the port side early iernoon of the sed day.
And it was. The first thing that she noticed was a little black object, about the size of a shoe, travelling along at the same speed as the ship. For a moment she thought it was something floating on the surface. But then there came floating past a bit of stale bread which the cook had just thrown out of the galley. And the bit of bread looked as if it were going to collide with the black thing, but it didnt. It passed above it, and Luow saw that the black thing could not be on the surface. Then the black thing suddenly got very much bigger and flicked back to normal size a moment later.
Now Luew she had seen something just like that happen somewhere else - if only she could remember where. She held her hand to her head and screwed up her fad put out her tongue in the effort to remember. At last she did. Of course! It was like what you saw from a train on a bright sunny day. You saw the black shadow of your own coach running along the fields at the same pace as the train. Then you went into a cutting; and immediately the same shadow flicked close up to you and got big, rag :long the grass of the cutting-bank. Then you came out of the cutting and - Pick! - once more the black shadow had gone back to its normal size and was running along the fields.
"Its our shadow! - the shadow of the Dawn Treader," said Lucy. "Our shadow running along otom of the sea. That time when it got bigger it went over a hill. But in that case the water must be clearer than I thought! Good gracious, I must he seeing the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms down.」
As soon as she had said this she realized that the great silvery expanse which she had been seeing (without notig) for some time was really the sand on the sea-bed and that ail sorts of darker hter patches were not lights and shadows on the surface but real things otom. At present, for instahey were passing over a mass of soft purply green with a broad, winding strip of pale grey in the middle of it But now that she k was otom she saw it much better. She could see that bits of the dark stuff were much higher than other bits and were wavily. "Just like trees in a wind," said Lucy. "And do believe thats what they are. Its a submarine forest.」
They passed on above it and presently the pale streak was joined by another pale streak.
"If I was down there," thought Lucy, "that streak would be just like a road through the wood. And that place where it joins the other Would be a crossroads. Oh, I do wish I was.
Hallo! the forest is ing to an end. And I do believe the streak really was a road! I still see