When they returo the ship, Farder and John Faa and the other leaders spent a long time in feren the saloon, and Lyra went to her to sult the alethiome-ter. Within five minutes she kly where the bears armor was, and why it would be difficult to get it back.
She wondered whether to go to the saloon and tell John Faa and the others, but decided that theyd ask her if they wao know. Perhaps they knew already.
She lay on her bunk thinking of that savage mighty bear, and the careless way he drank his fiery spirit, and the loneliness of him in his dirty lean-to. How different it was to be human, with ones daemon always there to talk to! In the silence of the still ship, without the tinual creak of metal and timber or the rumble of the engine or the rush of water along the side, Lyra gradually fell asleep, with Pantalaimon on her pillow sleeping too.
She was dreaming of her great imprisoned father when suddenly, for no reason at all, she woke up. She had no idea what time it was. There was a faint light in the that she took for moonlight, and it showed her new cold-weather furs that lay stiffly in the er of the . No sooner did she see them than she loo try them on again.
Ohey were on, she had to go out on deck, and a mier she opehe door at the top of the pan-ionway and stepped out.
At once she saw that something strange was happening in the sky. She thought it was clouds, moving and trembling under a nervous agitation, but Pantalaimon whispered:
「The Aurora!」
Her wonder was s that she had to clutch the rail to keep from falling.
The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely ceivable.
As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled.
Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabrid at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with mrace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could evehem: a vast distant whispering swish. In the eva delicacy she felt something as profound as shed felt close to the bear. She was moved by it; it was so beautiful it was almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes, and the tears splihe light even further into prismatic rainbows. It wasnt long before she found herself entering the same kind of trance as when she sulted the alethiometer. Perhaps, she thought calmly, whatever moves the alethiometers needle is making the Aurlow too.
It might even be Dust itself. She thought that without notig that shed thought it, and she soon fot it, and only remembered it much later.
And as she gazed, the image of a city seemed to form itself behind the veils and streams of translut color: towers and domes, honey-colored temples and nades, broad boulevards and sunlit parkland. Looking at it gave her a sense of vertigo, as if she were looking not up but down, and across a gulf so wide that nothing could ever pass over it. It was a whole universe away.
But something was moving across it, and as she tried to focus her eyes on the movement, she felt faint and dizzy, because the little thing moving wasnt part of the Aurora or of the other universe behind it. It was in the sky over the roofs of the town.
When she could see it clearly, she had e fully awake and the sky city was gone.
The flying thing came closer and circled the ship on outspread wings. Then it glided down and landed with brisk sweeps of its po