Editor’s note: We’ve been reading The Silver Chair together this month. If you’re just joining us, be sure to read the Introduction, Part 1 (The Horrible Errors of Childhood), Part 2 (The Circus Won’t Find the Park) and Part 3 (The Darkness Around Us Is Deep).
_______
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
— William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other
After the dramatic end of the Lady of the Green Kirtle-turned-deadly-green-serpent, our story made a markedly brighter turn, if not immediately in actual brightness (our ragtag band of prince, Marsh-Wiggle and adolescent rescuers were still deep underground, after all), most assuredly in mood. The Witch, who had murdered the prince’s mother so many years ago, and later abducted and enchanted the prince himself, was very dead. The immediate danger was gone.
Now, all they had to do was find their way out of Underworld and back to Narnia.
They sat, they ate, I assume they cleaned up at least slightly, and they regrouped. After some discussion (and despite the now more hopeful future laying before them, some grim predictions by the still pessimistic Puddleglum), they retrieved Coalblack and Snowflake (Rilian and the Witch’s horses) from the stables and began to make their way to the area under construction to open to Overworld. Considering the days-long journey back down the river, they opted for the shorter route in hopes that the digging truly had, or nearly had, reached the surface. All along the journey, Earthmen were darting about in the shadows, visible only because of a deep, eery red glow on the horizon.
After some time, they did make it to the surface, and found an opening to the earth above them, a starry sky looking down. As Megan Willome pointed out last week, Jill, the first to climb through the opening, found herself having been underground for so long that she didn’t properly recognize her surroundings when she did emerge above ground. She stumbled (if being pulled out of the hole by dwarves can be called stumbling) into an exuberant nighttime festival underway on a snowy mountainside with those dwarves, fauns, druids, and talking animals of all kinds, a sure sign to all who know it of having arrived back in Narnia.
Eventually, they were all above ground, celebrating, eating, sipping warm drinks and telling their story to the revelers. The children were soon fast asleep, waking that next morning to find the prince had already left for Cair Paravel to meet his father, King Caspian the Tenth, whose ship was returning to see him. They traveled on the backs of centaurs (yes, probably the only two people in the history of this world and that to ride on the back of a stately centaur) to join them, arriving just in time to meet the King, who passed on moments after being embraced by his son, Prince Rilian.
The children were then whisked away by Aslan to the end of the world, where Caspian then rose as a young man from the stream, reunited with his old friend Eustace, and the four of them made quick work of the bullies and teachers back at Experiment House, Eustace and Jill’s troublesome school.
All’s well that ends well, yes?
Well, yes. But go back with me a minute to that eerie red glow and the furtive movements of the Earthmen, before the four travelers made their way back up to Narnia. Immediately after the Witch was destroyed, a chain reaction of spells was set in motion to destroy Underworld with tremors and flood. With the river rising, the group made their way toward the digging to make their exit. Not understanding that the Earthmen, too, had been under the enchantment of the Lady of the Green Kirtle, they found their strange movements worrisome, as though they were preparing for battle against them. Of their strange behavior, which included a growing roar of shouts from the previously nearly always silent beings, the Prince remarked:
I have never heard one of the rascals so much as speak with a loud voice in all the weary years of my bondage. Some new devilry, I don’t doubt.”
After snagging one of them from the shadows, a small gnome by the name of Golg, they learned that they had all awakened from the enchantment and yes, they were preparing for battle—against the Witch, who they assumed would be prepared to attack them. The Prince’s assessment, not understanding that they too had just been freed and were experiencing this liberation for the first time, was to ascribe more darkness to it, a “new devilry.” And of course, the Earthmen, knowing the Prince only as the Knight, second to the Witch, mistook the movements of the travelers as an act of war.
Golg spread the word among them that the Witch was dead, and the movements stopped being furtive and came out into the open. Fireworks exploded everywhere, and the Earthmen made their way in earnest toward the eerie red glow. The travelers listened to Golg’s story of his people and then accompanied Golg to the glow, which they learned was a fiery chasm that opened to allow them all to descend even further underground, to their native home of Bism, the “Really Deep Land.” This land where they were, to Eustace and Jill and their Narnian companions, was quite far enough underground. But to Golg and his people, it was distressingly shallow.
This country where we are now, the Witch’s country, is what we call the Shallow Lands. It’s a good deal too near the surface to suit us. Ugh! You might almost as well be living outside, on the surface itself. You see, we’re all poor gnomes from Bism whom the Witch has called up here by magic to work for her. But we’d forgotten all about it till that crash came and the spell broke. We didn’t know who we were or where we belonged. We couldn’t do anything or think anything, except what she put into our heads. And it was glum and gloomy things she put there all those years. I’ve nearly forgotten how to make a joke or dance a jig. But the moment the bang came and the chasm opened and the sea began rising, it all came back. And of course we all set off as quick as we could to get down the crack and home to our own place. And you can see them over there all letting off rockets and standing on their heads for joy. And I’ll be very obliged to your Honours if you’ll soon let me go and join in.”
“I think this is simply splendid,” said Jill. “I’m so glad we freed the gnomes as well as ourselves when we cut off the Witch’s head! And I’m so glad they aren’t really horrid and gloomy any more than the Prince really was—well, what he seemed like.”
“That’s all very well, Pole,” said Puddleglum cautiously. “But those gnomes didn’t look to me like chaps who were just running away. It looked more like military formations, if you ask me. Do you look me in the face, Mr. Golg, and tell me you weren’t preparing for battle?”
“Of course we were, your Honour,” said Golg. “You see, we didn’t know the Witch was dead. We thought she’d be watching from the castle. We were trying to slip away without being seen. And then when you three came out with swords and horses, of course everyone says to himself, Here it comes: not knowing that his Honour wasn’t on the Witch’s side. And we were determined to fight like anything rather than give up hope of going back to Bism.”
They asked Golg to show them the way to the diggings, so that they could return to the world above, to Narnia. And he reluctantly agreed, saying he would take them to the outskirts, but would rather die than go further.
That was the worst thing the Witch did to us. We were going to be led out into the open—on to the outside of the world. They say there’s no roof at all there; only a horrible emptiness called the sky. […] I know you Overlanders live there,” said Golg. “But I thought it was because you couldn’t find your way down inside. You can’t really like it—crawling about like flies on the top of the world!”
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
Golg and our travelers could have allowed a pattern that others made to prevail in the world. The Narnian Prince, the Marsh-Wiggle, the Son of Adam and Daughter of Eve and the Earthman told each other their stories. Eustace explained to Golg how living atop the earth is “not horrid at all.” And Golg describe the wonder of Bism, a place so deep into the earth that gold, silver and precious gems were alive, and a person could squeeze rubies into a goblet to drink.
The five of them stood together at the lip of the chasm so long that it nearly closed up before Golg had a chance to dive in. The Prince and Eustace, a yearning for adventure rising up within them, resisted the urge to descend themselves on a great exploration. And all the while, the river was rising, so that when they did depart to make their way along the stone path toward the diggings, the lamps began to go out behind them as they were plunged under the water.
When Jill emerged from underground into the side of that mountain where the Narnians were enjoying the Great Snow Dance, celebrated on “the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground,” it took some time to recognize that the pale blue light she not been able to identify from inside the earth was from the moon, that “the white stuff on the ground was really snow.”
And of course! There were the stars staring in a black frosty sky overhead.
In the end, the star: not missed at all.
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We’ve been reading The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis together this month, juxtaposed with William Stafford’s poem A Ritual to Read to Each Other. Are you reading along? Share with us in the comments your thoughts on this conclusion to the story.
And be sure to join us starting March 11, when the poetry of Ilya Kaminsky in Deaf Republic will guide us in a reimagining of what it means to be a hero, of disability, of the movements that compel us to survive.
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Photo by Gael Varoquaux, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Will Willingham.
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Megan Willome says
That phrase, “horrible emptiness called the sky,” has always stuck with me. I love to be in a place where there’s so much sky that you can see its curve and the world feels both empty and full at the same time.
Will Willingham says
Reminds me of when a mutual friend moved from a lifetime on the East Coast to a certain wide open state in the midwest. She referred to the open sky as “oppressive.”
If you haven’t been, you might enjoy seeing the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a place with the most intoxicating blues and yes, the actual curvature of the earth. Amazing.
L.L. Barkat says
I really, really loved this book club. Such a brilliant comparison, between the story and the poem. And, this last edition made me catch my breath, it was so simply profound (not kidding, even though that sounds a little dramatic 🙂 ). Thank you. These posts will stay with me for a long time.