Tales from the Perilous Realm: Roverandom and Other Classic Faery Stories. Alan Lee
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the nearer hills. And then Roverandom heard the sound of children’s voices, or the echo of the echo of their voices coming down a sudden soft-stirring breeze. He sat up and barked the loudest bark he had barked since this tale began.
‘Bless me!’ cried the Man-in-the-Moon, jumping up wide awake, straight out of the hammock onto the grass, and nearly onto Roverandom’s tail. ‘Have they arrived already?’
‘Who?’ asked Roverandom.
‘Well, if you didn’t hear them, what did you yap for?’ said the old man. ‘Come on! This is the way.’
They went down a long grey path, marked at the sides with faintly luminous stones, and overhung with bushes. It led on and on, and the bushes became pine-trees, and the air was filled with the smell of pine-trees at night. Then the path began to climb; and after a time they came to the top of the lowest point in the ring of hills that had shut them in.
Then Roverandom looked down into the next valley; and all the nightingales stopped singing, like turning off a tap, and children’s voices floated up clear and sweet, for they were singing a fair song with many voices blended to one music.
Down the hillside raced and jumped the old man and the dog together. My word! the Man-in-the-Moon could leap from rock to rock!
‘Come on, come on!’ he called. ‘I may be a bearded billy-goat, a wild or garden goat, but you can’t catch me!’ And Roverandom had to fly to keep up with him.
And so they came suddenly to a sheer precipice, not very high, but dark and polished like jet. Looking over, Roverandom saw below a garden in twilight; and as he looked it changed to the soft glow of an afternoon sun, though he could not see where the soft light came from that lit all that sheltered place and never strayed beyond. Grey fountains were there, and long lawns; and children everywhere, dancing sleepily, walking dreamily, and talking to themselves. Some stirred as if just waking from deep sleep; some were already running wide awake and laughing: they were digging, gathering flowers, building tents and houses, chasing butterflies, kicking balls, climbing trees; and all were singing.
‘Where do they all come from?’ asked Roverandom, bewildered and delighted.
‘From their homes and beds, of course,’ said the Man.
‘And how do they get here?’
‘That I ain’t going to tell you at all; and you’ll never find out. You are lucky, and so is anyone, to get here by any way at all; but the children don’t come by your way, at any rate. Some come often, and some come seldom, and I make most of the dream. Some of it they bring with them, of course, like lunch to school, and some (I am sorry to say) the spiders make—but not in this valley, and not if I catch ‘em at it. And now let’s go and join the party!’
The cliff of jet sloped steeply down. It was much too smooth even for a spider to climb—not that any spider ever dared try; for he might slide down, but neither he nor anything else could get up again; and in that garden were hidden sentinels, not to mention the Man-in-the-Moon, without whom no party was complete, for they were his own parties.
And he now slid bang into the middle of this one. He just sat down and tobogganed, swish! right into the midst of a crowd of children with Roverandom rolling on top of him, quite forgetting that he could fly. Or could have flown—for when he picked himself up at the bottom he found that his wings had gone.
‘What’s that little dog doing?’ said a small boy to the Man. Roverandom was going round and round like a top, trying to look at his own back.
‘Looking for his wings, my boy. He thinks he has rubbed them off on the toboggan-run, but they’re in my pocket. No wings allowed down here, people don’t get out of here without leave, do they?’
‘No! Daddy-long-beard!’ said about twenty children all at once, and one boy caught hold of the old man’s beard and climbed up it onto his shoulder. Roverandom expected to see him turned into a moth or a piece of indiarubber, or something, on the spot.
But ‘My word! you’re a bit of a rope-climber, my boy!’ said the Man. ‘I’ll have to give you lessons.’ And he tossed the boy right up into the air. He did not fall down again; not a bit of it. He stuck up in the air; and the Man-in-the-Moon threw him a silver rope that he slipped out of his pocket.
‘Just climb down that quick!’ he said; and down the boy slithered into the old man’s arms, where he was well tickled. ‘You’ll wake up, if you laugh so loud,’ said the Man, and he put him down on the grass and walked off into the crowd.
Roverandom was left to amuse himself, and he was just making for a beautiful yellow ball (‘Just like my own at home,’ he thought) when he heard a voice he knew.
‘There’s my little dog!’ it said. ‘There’s my little dog! I always thought he was real. Fancy him being here, when I’ve looked and looked all over the sands and called and whistled every day for him!’
As soon as Roverandom heard that voice, he sat up and begged.
‘My little begging dog!’ said little boy Two (of course); and he ran up and patted him. ‘Where have you been to?’
But all Roverandom could say at first was: ‘Can you hear what I’m saying?’
‘Of course I can,’ said little boy Two. ‘But when mummy brought you home before, you wouldn’t listen to me at all, although I did my best bark-talk for you. And I don’t believe you tried to say much to me either; you seemed to be thinking of something else.’
Roverandom said how sorry he was, and he told the little boy how he had fallen out of his pocket; and all about Psamathos, and Mew, and many of the adventures he had had since he was lost. That is how the little boy and his brothers got to know about the odd fellow in the sand, and learned a lot of other useful things they might otherwise have missed. Little boy Two thought that ‘Roverandom’ was a splendid name. ‘I shall call you that too,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget that you still belong to me!’
Then they had a game with the ball, and a game of hide-and-seek, and a run and a long walk, and a rabbit-hunt (with no result, of course, except excitement: the rabbits were exceedingly shadowy), and much splashing in the ponds, and all kinds of other things one after another for endless ages; and they got to like one another better and better. The little boy was rolling over and over on the dewy grass, in a very bed-timish light (but no one seems to mind wet grass or bed-time in that place), and the little dog was rolling over and over with him, and standing on his head like no dog on earth ever has done since Mother Hubbard’s dead dog did it; and the little boy was laughing till he—vanished quite suddenly and left Roverandom all alone on the lawn!
‘He’s waked up, that’s all,’ said the Man-in-the-Moon, who suddenly appeared. ‘Gone home, and about time too. Why! it’s only a quarter of an hour before his breakfast time. He’ll miss his walk on the sands this morning. Well, well! I am afraid it’s our time to go, too.’
So, very reluctantly, Roverandom went back to the white side with the old man. They walked all the way, and it took a very long time; and Roverandom did not enjoy it as much as he ought to have done. For they saw all kinds of queer things, and had many adventures—perfectly safe, of course, with the Man-in-the-Moon close at hand. That was just as well, as there were lots of nasty creepy things in the bogs that would otherwise have grabbed the little dog quick. The dark side was as wet as the white side was dry, and full of the most extraordinary plants and creatures, which I would tell you about, if Roverandom had taken any particular notice of them. But he did not; he was thinking of the garden and the little boy.
At last they came to the grey edge, and they looked past the cinder valleys where many of the dragons lived, through a gap in the mountains to the great white plain and the shining cliffs. They saw the world rise, a pale green and gold moon, huge and round above the shoulders of the Lunar Mountains; and Roverandom thought: ‘That is where my little boy lives!’ It seemed a terrible and enormous way away.
‘Do dreams come true?’ he asked.
‘Some