The two fair girls poured hair together, with forehead close to forehead, when the round substantial case lay coverless before them. A disc of yellow parchment was spread flat on the top of everything, with its edges crenelled into the asbestos lining. Hours, and perhaps days of care, had been spent by clever brain and hands, to keep the air and dust out.
“Who shall lift it?” asked Mabel, panting. “I am almost afraid to move.”
“I will lift it, of course,” said Alice; “I am his descendant; and he foresaw that I should do it.”
She took from the lathe a little narrow tool for turning ivory (which had touched no hand since the Prince’s), and she delicately loosened up the parchment, and examined it. It was covered with the finest manuscript, in concentric rings, beginning with half an inch of diameter; but she could not interpret a word of that. Below it shone a thick flossy layer of the finest mountain wool; and under that the soft spun amber of the richest native silk.
“Now, Alice, do you mean to stop all night!” cried Mabel; “see how the light is fading!”
The light was fading, and spreading also, in a way that reminded Alice (although the season and the weather were so entirely different) of her visit to that room two and a half long years ago, alone among the shadows. The white light, with the snow-gleam in it, favoured any inborn light in everything else that was beautiful.
Alice, with the gentlest touch of the fairy-gifts of her fingers, raised the last gossamer of the silk, and drew back and sighed with wonder. Mabel (always prompt to take the barb and shaft of everything) leaned over, and looked in, and at once enlarged her eyes and mouth in purest stupefaction.
Before and between these two most lovely specimens of the human race, lay the most beautiful and more lasting proofs of what nature used to do, before the production of women. Alice and Mabel, with the light in their eyes and the flush in their fair cheeks quivering, felt that their beauty was below contempt—except in the opinion of stupid men—if compared with what they were looking at.
Of all the colours cast by nature on the world, as lavishly as Shakespeare threw his jewels forth, of all the tints of sun and heaven in flower, sea and rainbow, there was not one that did not glance, or gleam, or lie in ambush, and then suddenly flash forth, and blush and then fall back again. None of them waited to be looked at; all were in perpetual play; they had been immured for centuries; and when the glad light broke upon them, forth they danced like meteors. And then, as all quick with life, they began to weave their crossing rays, and cast their tints through one another, like the hurtling of the Aurora. And to back their fitful brilliance, in amongst them lay and spread a soft, delicious, milky way of bashful white serenity.
“It is terrible witchcraft!” cried dazzled Mabel.