Angels and Insects (19 page)

So he put it on the edge of his tongue, where it dissolved, with a taste of woodland shadow, and he felt something like pins and needles run through his veins, and a terrible giddiness,
and the next he knew he was standing next to the ant and was now only about twice her height. She appeared much more menacing and mysterious when she was larger, or he was smaller. Her huge black eyes considered him out of their dark shiny windows. Her shear-like mandibles opened and shut.

‘I am worse off than before,’ he said. ‘I am even more helpless now. Any of the pigs and donkeys here can crush me thoughtlessly. The hens and doves can eat me. Please restore me.’

‘I told you,’ said the ant, in what now was a crackling boom. ‘I can get in and out of here. If I can, you can. Please follow me.’

And so he began a terrible journey, through earthy tunnels, that twisted and turned every which way, with the spokeswoman ant leading, and the others helping Seth along in the absolute darkness by holding on to his limbs and pushing and pulling, gently and precisely. They trod delicately, and he slid, and stumbled, and after some time they came out, quite suddenly, round a very sharp corner, into very bright sunlight, which he had not seen for so long that he blinked and blinked and his eyes filled with tears.

He could not see where he was, for he was down among the roots of a large grassy lawn, and his view was restricted to some rocky gravel and the waving forest roof of the grasses. The ants suggested he should climb a rose-bush which stood near, so he did that, standing carefully on the largest thorns like a robber climbing over the defences of a castle. And when he was up in the air, and could see a long way, he saw he was in some kind of high-walled garden, with pleached fruit trees growing in the sun along the bricks, and with lawns, and stone benches, and flowerbeds, and beds of vegetables and herbs and soft fruits stretching as far as he could see. But everything was so much too much for his new vision that he became very giddy, and had to hold tightly to a leaf and close his eyes briefly against the terrible crimson of
the rose petals as large as Persian carpets, or the glitter of the grass forest, as wide as the English Channel.

Imagine to yourself a red apple, hard and shiny and heavy as the Albert Hall, hung on a cable and swinging over your defenceless head. Imagine then how much more terrible must appear the veined spherical mountain, wonderfully streaked with rich purple, soft and green-ridged and folded with crevices and crannies, which is a gleaming cabbage, bursting with strength and just ready to pick. Seth was overcome with a mixture of awe, and apprehension, and admiration of the huge force behind all this burgeoning. He climbed down again to the earth, and thanked the ants for their kindness. He thought he might try to live in the garden until he could find a way of restoring himself to his original form, and rescuing his comrades. He thought he could hide well enough from Dame Cottitoe Pan Demos, unless of course she knew a magic that would reveal him to her. This thought cast him down a little. He began to hurry across the lawn forest, away from the wall of the castle, as though there was any use in distancing himself from her sphere of influence. The ants had helped him. He might meet other helpers, he told himself, to keep his spirits up.

He could hear all sorts of sounds around him. Some of them he would have heard in his natural state—the liquid warbling of the birds, now an orchestra singing in a waterfall, and the huge hum of bees, darting from flower to flower. He heard also sounds he would never have heard with unsharpened ears—the mumbling, and champing and sawing, and munching of thousands and thousands of busy mouths eating away at leaf and flower, fruit and flesh and bone. He could hear worms sliding by like slimy trains and thirsty mouths in the soil, sucking up dew and juices. After a time he got used to all these sounds, like a man walking easily in the bustle of a great city, and began to look about him more confidently. He
carne out of a tunnel in the grass, and on to the edge of a bed of raspberry canes. He thought he might manage to pull off a raspberry and eat part of it—he was suddenly hungry—and began to climb up the stem of one, hand over hand, as he used to do in the days of his sailing. By this method he managed to approach the sun-baked top of a low brick wall, against which the canes were springing, and he was about to reach out for the fruit, when, from amongst the leaves, he heard a slow, menacing hiss. And from along the wall he heard a kind of threatening coughing growl, like the voice of an angry crocodile.

Along the branches of the raspberry poured the most terrible creature, a loathsome, blunt-snouted dragon, with a horrible bloated head, and huge staring eyes. And along the wall, making the growling noise, advanced another, waving a forked tail like a whiplash, rearing up a huge cavernous mouth, snarling loudly. This one had a wine-coloured back and bright green head and tail. It moved slowly, in a swaying way, whilst the more serpentine beast
oozed
over the branch.

Seth backed away, looking frantically for a weapon. He found a flake of slate on the wall that might, at a pinch, cut or stab, and he picked up a handful of fragments to throw.

‘Get away—’ he cried. ‘Go back.’

The serpent in the branches swayed to and fro. It spoke in a thick, bloated kind of voice, as though its mouth was full of nasty things.

‘I—am—very—unpleasant—indeed. I—will—hurt—you—very—badly. I—am—very—dangerous. You—should—not—approach—me.’

And the one on the path said, ‘I—am—very—cruel. I—am—the—eater. I—pick—you—to—the—bones.’

‘Go back,’ said Seth. He could smell their hot breaths, all fleshy and full. He threw a pebble at the forked-tailed one, which stopped and twitched its skin, and then came on again. Seth thought his last moment had come: he could not run
away because there was a sheer rising wall behind him, and the fat-headed serpent in front. He was trapped between the two.

And just at that moment, out of the sky, someone descended very fast on the end of a long silken rope, which did not appear to be attached to anything. Two shiny black shoes arrived, with a little skip, and above them someone long and thin and black—a four-limbed creature, which resolved itself into a human shape, female, with a long black skirt and a white bonnet, shading a little white face with large hornrimmed glasses on a sharp nose. She was wrapped in a long, silvery cloak. This person rolled in the silk rope out of the blue, and coiled it at her feet.

‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘You appear to be troubled.’

‘I am about to be eaten alive by dragons and serpents.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘These are my friends, Deilephila Elpenor, and Cerura Vinula. They are quite as much afraid of you as you are of them. They tell terrible lies about themselves, and blow themselves up to horrify those they think might hurt them. I don’t think this creature will hurt you,’ she said to the dragons. ‘You have frightened him very efficiently. That is enough for now. You must hurry, and eat more. There is not long to go.’

Seth said, ‘They look very terrible and dangerous.’

‘They will be pleased to hear that. Won’t you, Elpenor? Won’t you, Vinula? Look closely at Vinula, Sir, and you will see that his
real
jaws occupy a small space underneath that
great Mask he shows the world. And watch Elpenor deflate himself, and you will see that his terrible eyes are only the spots on his saddle, puffed out to dwarf his real head, which is small enough. Really, he has a dear little snout, more like a piglet than a great Dragon. Things are not always what they seem, you know. May I know your name?’

‘It is Seth.’

‘And I am Mistress Mouffet.’ She held out a thin hand. ‘Would you like to share my picnic? I think you must have escaped from the Sties, and I may be able to help you, if you will trust me.’

So Seth sat down with Mistress Mouffet on the top of the wall, and she gave him bread and cheese and apples from her basket, all of which were the right size for him in his present state, and for her too. And she looked at him kindly with her shining eyes behind her spectacles, and told him about the Garden.

‘It belongs to Dame Cottitoe Pan Demos, who uses it to ripen fruit and vegetables for her table, and flowers to decorate her boudoir and her drawing-room, and likes to walk about in it, as you see, for Dame Cottitoe is a good gardener, and her plants flourish mightily. But there are other creatures who spend time here, and are not subject to the rule of Dame Cottitoe—who came from beyond-the-wall, and have other purposes. Elpenor and Vinula are such creatures in a sense, or will
become
such creatures, as I hope you may see, for although they were born in this Garden, and have no memory of any other place, they are not subject to the laws of the Garden and will leave it. And many other creatures sail into the Garden on umbrellas of silk, or long threads as I do. And many more come in through burrows and cracks in the earth, for the Garden is part of the realm of a much more powerful Fairy than Dame Cottitoe, who allows her to tend it, but likes to see how its creatures fare, and to send and receive messages from within the wall. Look at the grass, and you will see that it is all laced over and over with silken ropes, such as I came
on—each belonging to a spiderling, who will make her nest here, and spin her web, and keep watch. And the birds too, and the winged seeds of the trees, which spin in and out, and the clouds of pollen from others, and the parasols of the cow parsley and the dandelion, all carry messages.’

‘And who is this Fairy? And would She help me, and my poor enchanted companions? And who are
you?
’

‘I am the Recorder of this Garden, or you might say the Spy, for Dame Cottitoe does not know of my existence. I look after creatures such as Elpenor and Vinula, and yourself, as it turns out. A relation of mine, in another world, was one of the great Namegivers, one of the great historians of this Garden. It was he, indeed, who named Elpenor and Vinula, and their names are like delightful poems, you know. I got into a poem myself—“Little Miss Muffet” my poem is entitled—but it is a garbled thing, associating me with spiders, it is true, but suggesting that I, the cousin of the author of
Theatrum Insectorum sive Animalium Minimorum
might be
afraid
of a spider, when I am in fact a recorder of their names and natures, and their good friend.’

‘Tell me about the poetic names of Elpenor and Vinula, Mistress Mouffet. For I too come from a country family, where namegiving is a family occupation.’

‘Elpenor, you must know, was the name of a Greek sailor, who was turned into a swine by a relative of Mistress Cottitoe, named Circe, and my father chose this name for him because of the snout-like nature of his ordinary nose. He has a junior relative called Porcellus, a pigling, for the same reason. And Vinula’s name is Cerura Vinula—Cerura for two Greek words,
(
keras
) a horn, and
(
oura
) a tail, for his tail, you see, is forked like two horns, and hard into the bargain. And my relative called Vinula “an
elegant
caterpillar, by Jove, and beautiful beyond belief”. Names, you know, are a way of weaving the world together, by relating the creatures to other creatures and a kind of
metamorphosis
, you might say, out of a
metaphor
, which is a figure of speech for carrying one idea into another.’