The wide golden prairie that Lee Scoresbys ghost had seen briefly through the window was lying quiet uhe first sun of m.
Golden, but also yellow, brown, green, and every one of the million shades between them; and black, in places, in lines and streaks ht pitch; and silvery, too, where the sun caught the tops of a particular kind of grass just ing into flower; and blue, where a wide lake some way off and a small pond closer by reflected back the wide blue of the sky.
And quiet, but not silent, for a soft breeze rustled the billions of little stems, and a billion is and other small creatures scraped and hummed and chirruped in the grass, and a bird too high in the blue to be seen sang little looping falls of bell notes now close by, now far off, and wice the same.
In all that wide landscape the only living things that were silent and still were the boy and the girl lying asleep, back to back, uhe shade of an outcrop of rock at the top of a little bluff.
They were so still, so pale, that they might have been dead. Hunger had drawn the skiheir faces, pain had left lines around their eyes, and they were covered in dust and mud and not a little blood. And from the absolute passivity of their limbs, they seemed in the last stages of exhaustion.
Lyra was the first to wake. As the sun moved up the sky, it came past the rock above and touched her hair, and she began to stir, and when the sunlight reached her eyelids, she found herself pulled up from the depths of sleep like a fish, slow and heavy aant.
But there was nuing with the sun, and presently she moved her head and threw her arm across her eyes and murmured: "Pan, Pan..."
Uhe shadow of her arm, she opened her eyes and came properly awake. She didnt move for some time, because her arms and legs were so sore, and every part of her body felt limp with weariness; but still she was awake, and she felt the little breeze and the suns warmth, and she heard the little i scrapings and the bell song of that bird high above. It was all good. She had fotten how good the world was.
Presently she rolled over and saw Will, still fast asleep. His hand had bled a lot, his shirt was ripped and filthy, his hair was stiff with dust and sweat. She looked at him for a long time, at the little pulse in his throat, at his chest rising and falling slowly, at the delicate shadows his eyelashes made when the sun finally reached them.
He murmured something and stirred. Not wanting to be caught looking at him, she looked the other way at the little grave theyd dug the night before, just a couple of hand spans wide, where the bodies of the Chevalier Tialys and the Lady Salmakia now lay at rest. There was a flat stone nearby; she got up and prized it loose from the soil, a upright at the head of the grave, and then sat up and shaded her eyes to gaze across the plain.
It seemed to stretch forever and ever. It was nowhere entirely flat; gentle undulations and little ridges and gullies varied the surface wherever she looked, and here and there she saw a stand of trees so tall they seemed to be structed rather than grown. Their straight trunks and dark green opy seemed to defy distance, being so clearly visible at what must have been many miles away.
Closer, though, in fact, at the foot of the bluff, not more than a hundred yards away, there was a little pond fed by a spring ing out of the rock, and Lyra realized how thirsty she was.
She got up on s