CHAPTER TWO ON BOARD THE DAWN TREADER(第3/5页)
“You and I must lodge here,Edmund,”said Caspian.“We’ll leave your kinsman the bunk and sling hammocks for ourselves.”
“I beseech your Majesty—”said Drinian.
“No,no shipmate,”said Caspian,“we have argued all that out already.You and Rhince”(Rhince was the mate)“are sailing the ship and will have cares and labours many a night when we are singing catches or telling stories,so you and he must have the port cabin above.King Edmund and I can lie very snug here below. But how is the stranger ?”
Eustace,very green in the face,scowled and asked whether there was any sign of the storm getting less.But Caspian said,“What storm ?”and Drinian burst out laughing.
“Storm,young master !”he roared.“This is as fair weather as a man could ask for.”
“Who’s that ?”said Eustace irritably.“Send him away.His voice goes through my head.”
“I’ve brought you something that will make you feel better, Eustace,”said Lucy.
“Oh,go away and leave me alone,”growled Eustace.But he took a drop from her flask,and though he said it was beastly stuff(the smell in the cabin when she opened it was delicious)it is certain that his face came the right colour a few moments after he had swallowed it,and he must have felt better because,instead of wailing about the storm and his head,he began demanding to be put ashore and said that at the first port he would“lodge a disposition”against them all with the British Consul.But when Reepicheep asked what a disposition was and how you lodged it(Reepicheep thought it was some new way of arranging a single combat)Eustace could only reply,“Fancy not knowing that.”In the end they succeeded in convincing Eustace that they were already sailing as fast as they could towards the nearest land they knew,and that they had no more power of sending him back to Cambridge—which was where Uncle Harold lived—than of sending him to the moon. After that he sulkily agreed to put on the fresh clothes which had been put out for him and come on deck.
Caspian now showed them over the ship,though indeed they had seen most of it already.They went up on the forecastle and saw the look-out man standing on a little shelf inside the gilded dragon’s neck and peering through its open mouth.Inside the forecastle was the galley(or ship’s kitchen)and quarters for such people as the boatswain,the carpenter,the cook and the master-archer.If you think it odd to have the galley in the bows and imagine the smoke from its chimney streaming back over the ship,that is because you are thinking of steamships where there is always a headwind.On a sailing ship the wind is coming from behind,and anything smelly is put as far forward as possible. They were taken up to the fighting—top,and at first it was rather alarming to rock to and fro there and see the deck looking small and far away beneath.You realized that if you fell there was no particular reason why you should fall on board rather than in the sea. Then they were taken to the poop,where Rhince was on duty with another man at the great tiller,and behind that the dragon’s tail rose up,covered with gilding,and round inside it ran a little bench.The name of the ship was Dawn Treader.She was only a little bit of a thing compared with one of our ships,or even with the cogs,dromonds,carracks and galleons which Narnia had owned when Lucy and Edmund had reigned there under Peter as the High King,for nearly all navigation had died out in the reigns of Caspian’s ancestors.When his uncle,Miraz the usurper, had sent the seven lords to sea,they had had to buy a Galmian ship and man it with hired Galmian sailors.But now Caspian had begun to teach the Narnians to be sea-faring folk once more,and the Dawn Treader was the finest ship he had built yet.She was so small that,forward of the mast,there was hardly any deck room between the central hatch and the ship’s boat on one side and the hen-coop(Lucy fed the hens)on the other.But she was a beauty of her kind,a“lady”as sailors say,her lines perfect,her colours pure,and every spar and rope and pin lovingly made.Eustace of course would be pleased with nothing,and kept on boasting about liners and motor boats and aeroplanes and submarines(“As if he knew anything about them,”muttered Edmund),but the other two were delighted with the Dawn Treader,and when they returned aft to the cabin and supper,and saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset,and felt the quiver of the ship,and tasted the salt on their lips,and thought of unknown lands on the Eastern rim of the world,Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak.