Lucy woke out of the
deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best
in the world had been calling her name. She thought at first it was her
father's voice, but that did not seem quite right. Then she thought it was
Peter's voice, but that did not seem to fit either. She did not want to get up;
not because she was still tired - on the contrary she was wonderfully rested
and all the aches had gone from her bones - but because she felt so extremely
happy and comfortable. She was looking straight up at the Narnian moon, which
is larger than ours, and at the starry sky, for the place where they had
bivouacked was comparatively open.
"Lucy,"
came the call again, neither her father's voice nor Peter's. She sat up,
trembling with excitement but not with fear. The moon was so bright that the
whole forest landscape around her was almost as clear as day, though it looked
wilder. Behind her was the fir wood; away to her right the jagged cliff-tops on
the far side of the gorge; straight ahead, open grass to where a glade of trees
began about a bow-shot away. Lucy looked very hard at the trees of that glade.
"Why, I do
believe they're moving," she said to herself. "They're walking
about." She got up, her heart beating wildly, and walked towards them.
There was certainly a noise in the glade, a noise such as trees make in a high
wind, though there was no wind tonight. Yet it was not exactly an ordinary tree
noise either. Lucy felt there was a tune in it, but she could not catch the
tune any more than she had been able to catch the words when the trees had so
nearly talked to her the night before. But there was, at least, a lilt; she
felt her own feet wanting to dance as she got nearer. And now there was no
doubt that the trees were really moving moving in and out through one another
as if in a complicated country dance. ("And I suppose," thought Lucy,
"when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.') She was
almost among them now.
The first tree she
looked at seemed at first glance to be not a tree at all but a huge man with a
shaggy beard and great bushes of hair. She was not frightened: she had seen
such things before. But when she looked again he was only a tree, though he was
still moving. You couldn't see whether he had feet or roots, of course, because
when trees move they don't walk on the surface of the earth; they wade in it as
we do in water. The same thing happened with every tree she looked at. At one
moment they seemed to be the friendly, lovely giant and giantess forms which
the tree-people put on when some good magic has called them into full life:
next moment they all looked like trees again. But when they looked like trees,
it was like strangely human trees, and when they looked like people, it was
like strangely branchy and leafy people - and all the time that queer lilting,
rustling, cool, merry noise.
"They are
almost awake, not quite," said Lucy. She knew she herself was wide awake,
wider than anyone usually is.
C.S. Lewis,
Prince Caspian (1951)
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