Suddenly on the edge of the sea he saw a dark thing, and it grew as they flew towards it, until he could see that it was an island. Over the water and up to them came the sound of a tremendous barking, a noise made up of all the different kinds and sizes of barks there are: yaps and yelps, and yammers and yowls, growling and grizzling, whickering and whining, snickering and snarling, mumping and moaning, and the most enormous baying, like a giant bloodhound in the backyard of an ogre. All Rover’s fur round his neck suddenly became very real again, and stood up stiff as bristles; and he thought he would like to go down and quarrel with all the dogs there at once—until he remembered how small he was.
‘That’s the Isle of Dogs,’ said Mew, ‘or rather the Isle of Lost Dogs, where all the lost dogs go that are deserving or lucky. It isn’t a bad place, I’m told, for dogs; and they can make as much noise as they like without anyone telling them to be quiet or throwing anything at them. They have a beautiful concert, all barking together their favourite noises, whenever the moon shines bright. They tell me there are bone-trees there, too, with fruit like juicy meat-bones that drops off the trees when it’s ripe. No! We are not going there just now! You see, you can’t be called exactly a dog, though you are no longer quite a toy. In fact Psamathos was rather puzzled, I believe, to know what to do with you, when you said you didn’t want to go home.’
‘Where are we going to, then?’ asked Rover. He was disappointed at not having a closer look at the Isle of Dogs, after he heard of the bone-trees.
‘Straight up the moon’s path to the edge of the world, and then over the edge and onto the moon. That’s what old Psamathos said.’
Rover did not like the idea of going over the edge of the world at all, and the moon looked a cold sort of place. ‘Why to the moon?’ he asked. ‘There are lots of places on the world I have never been to. I never heard of there being bones in the moon, or even dogs.’
‘There is at least one dog, for the Man-in-the-Moon keeps one; and since he is a decent old fellow, as well as the greatest of all the magicians, there are sure to be bones for the dog, and probably for visitors. As for why you are being sent there, I dare say you will find that out in good time, if you keep your wits about you and don’t waste time grumbling. I think it is very kind of Psamathos to bother about you at all; in fact I don’t understand why he does. It isn’t like him to do things without a good big reason—and you don’t seem good or big.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rover, feeling crushed. ‘It is very kind of all these wizards to trouble themselves about me, I am sure, though it is rather upsetting. You never know what will happen next, when once you get mixed up with wizards and their friends.’
‘It is very much better luck than any yapping little pet puppy-dog deserves,’ said the seagull, and after that they had no more conversation for a long while.
The moon got bigger and brighter, and the world below got darker and farther off. At last, all of a sudden, the world came to an end, and Rover could see the stars shining up out of the blackness underneath. Far down he could see the white spray in the moonlight where waterfalls fell over the world’s edge and dropped straight into space. It made him feel most uncomfortably giddy, and he nestled into Mew’s feathers and shut his eyes for a long, long time.
When he opened them again the moon was all laid out below them, a new white world shining like snow, with wide open spaces of pale blue and green where the tall pointed mountains threw their long shadows far across the floor.
On top of one of the tallest of these, one so tall that it seemed to stab up towards them as Mew swept down, Rover could see a white tower. It was white with pink and pale green lines in it, shimmering as if the tower were built of millions of seashells still wet with foam and gleaming; and the tower stood on the edge of a white precipice, white as a cliff of chalk, but shining with moonlight more brightly than a pane of glass far away on a cloudless night.
There was no path down that cliff, as far as Rover could see; but that did not matter at the moment, for Mew was sailing swiftly down, and soon he settled right on the roof of the tower, at a dizzy height above the moon-world that made the cliffs by the sea where Mew lived seem low and safe.
To Rover’s great surprise a little door in the roof immediately opened close beside them, and an old man with a long silvery beard popped his head out.
‘Not bad going, that!’ he said. ‘I’ve been timing you ever since you passed over the edge—a thousand miles a minute, I should reckon. You are in a hurry this morning! I’m glad you didn’t bump into my dog. Where in the moon has he got to now, I wonder?’
He drew out an enormously long telescope and put it to one eye.
‘There he is! There he is!’ he shouted. ‘Worrying the moonbeams again, drat him! Come down, sir! Come down, sir!’ he called up into the air, and then began to whistle a long clear silver note.
Rover looked up into the air, thinking that this funny old man must be quite mad to whistle to his dog up in the sky; but to his astonishment he saw far up above the tower a little white dog on white wings chasing things that looked like transparent butterflies.
‘Rover! Rover!’ called the old man; and just as our Rover jumped up on Mew’s back to say ‘Here I am!’—without waiting to wonder how the old man knew his name—he saw the little flying dog dive straight down out of the sky and settle on the old man’s shoulders.
Then he realised that the Man-in-the-Moon’s dog must also be called Rover. He was not at all pleased, but as nobody took any notice of him, he sat down again and began to growl to himself.
The Man-in-the-Moon’s Rover had good ears, and he at once jumped onto the roof of the tower and began to bark like mad; and then he sat down and growled: ‘Who brought that other dog here?’
‘What other dog?’ said the Man.
‘That silly little puppy on the seagull’s back,’ said the moon-dog.
Then, of course, Rover jumped up again and barked his loudest: ‘Silly little puppy yourself! Who said that you could call yourself Rover, a thing more like a cat or a bat than a dog?’ From which you can see that they were going to be very friendly before long. That is the way, anyhow, that little dogs usually talk to strangers of their own kind.
‘O fly away, you two! And stop making such a noise! I want to talk to the postman,’ said the Man.
‘Come on, tiny tot!’ said the moon-dog; and then Rover remembered what a tiny tot he was, even beside the moon-dog who was only small, and instead of barking something rude he only said: ‘I would like to, if only I had some wings and knew how to fly.’
‘Wings?’ said the Man-in-the-Moon. ‘That’s easy! Have a pair and be off!’
Mew laughed, and actually threw him off his back, right over the edge of the tower’s roof! But Rover had only gasped once, and had only begun to imagine himself falling and falling down like a stone onto the white rocks in the valley miles below, when he discovered that he had got a beautiful pair of white wings with black spots (to match himself). All the same, he had fallen a long way before he could stop, as he wasn’t used to wings. It took him a little while to get really used to them, though long before the Man had finished talking to Mew he was already trying to chase the moon-dog round the tower. He was just beginning to get tired by these first efforts, when the moon-dog dived down to the mountain-top and settled at the edge of the precipice at the foot of the walls. Rover went down after him, and soon they were sitting side by side, taking breath with their tongues hanging out.
‘So you are called Rover after me?’ said the moon-dog.
‘Not after you,’ said our Rover. ‘I’m sure my mistress had never heard of you when she gave me my name.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I was the first dog that was ever called Rover, thousands of years ago—so you must have been called Rover after me! I was a Rover too! I never would stop anywhere, or belong to anyone before I came here. I did nothing but run away from the time I was a puppy; and I kept on running and roving until one fine morning
—a very fine morning, with the sun in my eyes—I fell over the world’s edge chasing a butterfly.
‘A nasty sensation, I can tell you! Luckily the moon was just passing under the world at the moment, and after a terrible time falling right through clouds, and bumping into shooting stars, and that sort of thing, I tumbled onto it. Slap into one of the enormous silver nets that the giant grey spiders here spin from mountain to mountain I fell, and the spider was just coming down his ladder to pickle me and carry me off to his larder, when the Man-in-the-Moon appeared.
‘He sees absolutely everything that happens on this side of the moon with that telescope of his. The spiders are afraid of him, because he only lets them alone if they spin silver threads and ropes for him. He more than suspects that they catch his moonbeams—and that he won’t allow—though they pretend to live only on dragonmoths and shadowbats. He found moonbeams’ wings in that spider’s larder, and he turned him into a lump of stone, as quick as kiss your hand. Then he picked me up and patted me, and said: “That was a nasty drop! You had better have a pair of wings to prevent any more accidents—now fly off and amuse yourself! Don’t worry the moonbeams, and don’t kill my white rabbits! And come home when you feel hungry; the window is usually open on the roof!”
‘I thought he was a decent sort, but rather mad. But don’t you make that mistake—about his being mad, I mean. I daren’t really hurt his moonbeams or his rabbits. He can turn you into dreadfully uncomfortable shapes. Now tell me why you came with the postman!’
‘The postman?’ said Rover.
‘Yes, Mew, the old sand-sorcerer’s postman, of course,’ said the moon-dog.
Rover had hardly finished telling the tale of his adventures when they heard the Man whistling. Up they shot to the roof. There the old man was sitting with his legs dangling over the ledge, throwing envelopes away as fast as he opened the letters. The wind took them whirling off into the sky, and Mew flew after them and caught them and put them back into a little bag.
‘I’ve just been reading about you, Roverandom, my dog,’ he said. ‘(Roverandom I call you, and Roverandom you’ll have to be; can’t have two Rovers about here.) And I quite agree with my friend Samathos (I’m not going to put in any ridiculous P to please him) that you had better stop here for a little while. I have also got a letter from Artaxerxes, if you know who that is, and even if you don’t, telling me to send you straight back. He seems mighty annoyed with you for running away, and with Samathos for helping you. But we won’t bother about him; and neither need you, as long as you stay here.
‘Now fly off and amuse yourself. Don’t worry the moonbeams, and don’t kill my white rabbits, and come home when you are hungry! The window on the roof is usually open. Good-bye!’
He vanished immediately into thin air; and anybody who has never been there will tell you how extremely thin the moon-air is.
‘Well, good-bye, Roverandom!’ said Mew. ‘I hope you enjoy making trouble among the wizards. Farewell for the present. Don’t kill the white rabbits, and all will yet be well, and you will get home safe—whether you want to or not.’
Then Mew flew off at such a pace that before you could say ‘whizz!’ he was a dot in the sky, and then had vanished. Rover was now not only turned into toy-size, but his name had been altered, and he was left all alone on the moon—all alone except for the Man-in-the-Moon and his dog.
Roverandom—as we had better call him too, for the present, to avoid confusion—didn’t mind. His new wings were great fun, and the moon turned out to be a remarkably interesting place, so that he forgot to ponder any more why Psamathos had sent him there. It was a long time before he found out.
In the meanwhile he had all sorts of adventures, by himself and with the moon-Rover. He didn’t often fly about in the air far from the tower; for in the moon, and especially on the white side, the insects are very large and fierce, and often so pale and so transparent and so silent that you hardly hear or see them coming. The moonbeams only shine and flutter, and Roverandom was not frightened of them; the big white dragon-moths with fiery eyes were much more alarming; and there were sword-flies, and glass-beetles with jaws like steel-traps, and pale unicornets with stings like spears, and fifty-seven varieties of spiders ready to eat anything they could catch. And worse than the insects were the shadowbats.
Roverandom did what the birds do on that side of the moon: he flew very little except near at home, or in open spaces with a good view all round, and far from insect hiding-places; and he walked about very quietly, especially in the woods. Most things there went about very quietly, and the birds seldom even twittered. What sounds there were, were made chiefly by the plants. The flowers—the whitebells, the fairbells and the silverbells, the tinklebells and the ringaroses; the rhymeroyals and the pennywhistles, the tintrumpets and the creamhorns (a very pale cream), and many others with untranslatable names—made tunes all day long. And the feather-grasses and the ferns—fairy-fiddlestrings, polyphonies, and brasstongues, and the cracken in the woods—and all the reeds by the milk-white ponds, they kept up the music, softly, even in the night. In fact there was always a faint thin music going on.
But the birds were silent; and very tiny most of them were, hopping about in the grey grass beneath the trees, dodging the flies and the swooping flutterbies; and many of them had lost their wings or forgotten how to use them. Roverandom used to startle them in their little ground-nests, as he stalked quietly through the pale grass, hunting the little white mice, or snuffing after grey squirrels on the edges of the woods.
The woods were filled with silverbells all ringing softly together when he first saw them. The tall black trunks stood straight up, high as churches, out of the silver carpet, and they were roofed with pale blue leaves that never fell; so that not even the longest telescope on earth has ever seen those tall trunks or the silverbells beneath them. Later in the year the trees all burst together into pale golden blossoms; and since the woods of the moon are nearly endless, no doubt that alters the look of the moon from below on the world.
But you must not imagine that all of Roverandom’s time was spent creeping about like that. After all, the dogs knew that the Man’s eye was on them, and they did a good many adventurous things and had a great deal of fun. Sometimes they wandered off together for miles and miles, and forgot to go back to the tower for days. Once or twice they went up into the mountains far away, till looking back they could see the moon-tower only as a shining needle in the distance; and they sat on the white rocks and watched the tiny sheep (no bigger than the Man-in-the-Moon’s Rover) wandering in herds over the hillsides. Every sheep carried a golden bell, and every bell rang each time each sheep moved a foot forward to get a fresh mouthful of grey grass; and all the bells rang in tune, and all the sheep shone like snow, and no one ever worried them. The Rovers were much too well brought-up (and afraid of the Man) to do so, and there were no other dogs in all the moon, nor cows, nor horses, nor lions, nor tigers, nor wolves; in fact nothing larger on four feet than rabbits and squirrels (and toy-sized at that), except just occasionally to be seen standing solemnly in thought an enormous white elephant almost as big as a donkey. I haven’t mentioned the dragons, because they don’t come into the story just yet, and anyway they lived a very long way off, far from the tower, being all very afraid of the Man-in-the-Moon, except one (and even he was half-afraid).
Whenever the dogs did go back to the tower and fly in at the window, they always found their dinner just ready, as if they had arranged the time; but they seldom saw or heard the Man about. He had a workshop down in the cellars, and clouds of white steam and grey mist used to come up the stairs and float away out of the upper windows.
‘What does he do with himself all day?’ said Roverandom to Rover.
‘Do?’ said the moon-dog. ‘O he’s always pretty busy—though he seems busier than I have seen him for a long time, since you arrived. Making dreams, I believe.’
‘What does he make dreams for?’
‘O!
for the other side of the moon. No one has dreams on this side; the dreamers all go round to the back.’
Roverandom sat down and scratched; he didn’t think the explanation explained. The moon-dog would not tell him any more all the same: and if you ask me, I don’t think he knew much about it.
However, something happened soon after that, that put such questions out of Roverandom’s mind altogether for a while. The two dogs went and had a very exciting adventure, much too exciting while it lasted; but that was their own fault. They went away for several days, much farther than they had ever been before since Roverandom came; and they did not bother to think where they were going. In fact they went and lost themselves, and mistaking the way got farther and farther from the tower when they thought they were getting back. The moon-dog said he had roamed all over the white side of the moon and knew it all by heart (he was very apt to exaggerate), but eventually he had to admit that the country seemed a bit strange.
‘I’m afraid it’s a very long time since I came here,’ he said, ‘and I’m beginning to forget it a bit.’
As a matter of fact he had never been there before at all. Unawares they had wandered too near to the shadowy edge of the dark side, where all sorts of half-forgotten things linger, and paths and memories get confused. Just when they felt sure that at last they were on the right way home, they were surprised to find some tall mountains rising before them, silent, bare, and ominous; and these the moon-dog made no pretence of ever having seen before. They were grey, not white, and looked as if they were made of old cold ashes; and long dim valleys lay among them, without a sign of life.
Then it began to snow. It often does snow in the moon, but the snow (as they call it) is usually nice and warm, and quite dry, and turns into fine white sand and all blows away. This was more like our sort. It was wet and cold; and it was dirty.
‘It makes me homesick,’ said the moon-dog. ‘It’s just like the stuff that used to fall in the town where I was a puppy—on the world, you know. O! the chimneys there, tall as moon-trees; and the black smoke; and the red furnace fires! I get a bit tired of white at times. It’s very difficult to get really dirty on the moon.’
Tales From the Perilous Realm Page 4