THE OTHER SIDE
IV
THE OTHER SIDE
When Alice went through the Looking-glass, she sprang down into a world where a change had passed on all familiar things; so that she must walk away from the things she wanted to arrive at, and time ran backwards and stopped. When a merman brought a girl through the translucent mirror of the water to be his wife in the great caves below the sea, she heard but dimly the church bell and the sounds of the world above, and saw but seldom its sights when she rose through the bay. And when Tom slipped into the stream he found himself in a great empty world below the water; and it was not for some time that he was able even to see the crowds of merry water-babies with which it was peopled.
We had often looked into the looking-glass from a little village on the bank of a great river. Sometimes this river was only a river of muddy water; sometimes towards evening, when no wind ruffled its surface, it was a mirror of burnished metal, reflecting the fires of the west; sometimes a river of molten gold. Sometimes, when the sky was bright above, it was a stretch of sapphire, edged with gold and set in emerald, for beyond the sandy shore of the river lay a great sea of green corn—few trees were there, but the waving corn, and animals pasturing in luxuriant vetch; and beyond this again began the sandy desert, which stretched away to the bases of the hills.
So the River ran, dividing the country, and the two sides of it have been called since the beginning of history the two lands. The River was broad, and so deep that the reptiles of the one side have never been able to cross to the other, and the lizards of the two lands are of quite different kinds.