‘How am I to understand you?’ I began, ‘Or, as that comet floats between the planets and the sun, do you float among men ... or what?’
But Alice’s hand was suddenly passed before my eyes.... It was as though a white mist from the damp valley had fallen on me....
‘To Italy! to Italy!’ I heard her whisper. ‘This night is a great night!’
XII
The mist cleared away from before my eyes, and I saw below me an immense plain. But already, by the mere breath of the warm soft air upon my cheeks, I could tell I was not in Russia; and the plain, too, was not like our Russian plains. It was a vast dark expanse, apparently desert and not overgrown with grass; here and there over its whole extent gleamed pools of water, like broken pieces of looking-glass; in the distance could be dimly descried a noiseless motionless sea. Great stars shone bright in the spaces between the big beautiful clouds; the murmur of thousands, subdued but never-ceasing, rose on all sides, and very strange was this shrill but drowsy chorus, this voice of the darkness and the desert....
‘The Pontine marshes,’ said Alice. ‘Do you hear the frogs? do you smell the sulphur?’
‘The Pontine marshes....’ I repeated, and a sense of grandeur and of desolation came upon me. ‘But why have you brought me here, to this gloomy forsaken place? Let us fly to Rome instead.’
‘Rome is near,’ answered Alice.... ‘Prepare yourself!’
We sank lower, and flew along an ancient Roman road. A bullock slowly lifted from the slimy mud its shaggy monstrous head, with short tufts of bristles between its crooked backward-bent horns. It turned the whites of its dull malignant eyes askance, and sniffed a heavy snorting breath into its wet nostrils, as though scenting us.
‘Rome, Rome is near...’ whispered Alice. ‘Look, look in front....’