The Book of Dragons (9 page)

And these flames were the Aurora Borealis—which the children had seen as far away as Forest Hill.

The ground was quite flat, and covered with smooth, hard snow, which shone and sparkled like the top of a birthday cake which has been iced at home. The ones done at the shops do not shine and sparkle, because they mix flour with the icing-sugar.

“It is like a dream,” said Jane.

And George said, “It
is
the North Pole. Just think of the fuss people always make about getting here—and it was no trouble at all, really.”

“I daresay lots of people have
got
here,” said Jane, dismally; “it’s not the getting
here
—I see that—it’s the getting back again. Perhaps no one will ever know that
we
have been here, and the robins will cover us with leaves and—”

“Nonsense,” said George, “there aren’t any robins, and there aren’t any leaves. It’s just the North Pole, that’s all, and I’ve found it; and now I shall try to climb up and plant the British flag on the top—my handkerchief will do; and if it really
is
the North Pole, my pocket-compass Uncle James gave me will spin round and round, and then I shall know. Come on.”

So Jane came on; and when they got close to the clear, tall, beautiful flames they saw that there was a great, queer-shaped lump of ice all round the bottom of the Pole—clear, smooth, shining ice, that was deep, beautiful Prussian blue, like icebergs, in the thick parts, and all sorts of wonderful, glimmery,
shimmery, changing colors in the thin parts, like the cut-glass chandelier in grandmamma’s house in London.

“It is a very curious shape,” said Jane; “It’s almost like”—she drew back a step to get a better view of it—“it’s almost like a
dragon.”

“It’s much more like the lamp-posts on the Thames Embankment,” said George, who had noticed a curly thing like a tail that went twisting up the North Pole.

“Oh, George,” cried Jane, “it
is
a dragon; I can see its wings. Whatever shall we do?”

And, sure enough, it
was
a dragon—a great, shining, winged, scaly, clawy, big-mouthed dragon—made of pure ice. It must have gone to sleep curled round the hole where the warm steam used to come up from the middle of the earth, and then when the earth got colder, and the column of steam froze and was turned into the North Pole, the dragon must have got frozen in his sleep—frozen too hard to move—and there he stayed. And though he was very terrible he was very beautiful, too.

Jane said so, but George said, “Oh, don’t bother; I’m thinking how to get on to the Pole and try the compass without waking the brute.”

The dragon certainly was beautiful, with his deep, clear Prussian-blueness, and his rainbow-colored glitter. And rising from within the cold coil of the frozen dragon the North Pole shot up like a pillar made of one great diamond, and every now and then it cracked a little, from sheer coldness. The sound of the cracking was the only thing that broke the great white silence in the midst of which the dragon lay like an enormous jewel, and the straight flames went up all round him like the stalks of tall lilies.

Sure enough, it
was
a dragon

And as the children stood there looking at the most wonderful sight their eyes had ever seen, there was a soft padding of feet and a hurry-scurry behind them, and from the outside darkness beyond the flame-stalks came a crowd of little brown creatures running, jumping, scrambling, tumbling head over heels, and on all fours, and some even walking on their heads. They caught hands as they came near the fires, and danced round in a ring.

“It’s bears,” said Jane; “I know it is. Oh, how I wish we hadn’t come; and my boots are so wet.”

The dancing-ring broke up suddenly, and the next moment hundreds of furry arms clutched at George and Jane, and they found themselves in the middle of a giant, soft, heaving crowd of little fat people in brown fur dresses, and the white silence was quite gone.

“Bears, indeed,” cried a shrill voice; “you’ll wish we
were
bears before you’ve done with us.”

This sounded so dreadful that Jane began to cry. Up to now the children had only seen the most beautiful and wondrous things, but now they began to be sorry they had done what they were told not to, and the difference between “lawn” and “grass” did not seem so great as it had done at Forest Hill.

Directly Jane began to cry, all the brown people started back. No one cries in the Arctic regions for fear of being struck so by the frost. So that these people had never seen anyone cry before.

“Don’t cry
really,”
whispered George, “or you’ll get chilblains in your eyes. But
pretend
to howl—it frightens them.”

So Jane went on pretending to howl, and the real crying stopped: it always does when you begin to pretend. You try it.

Then, speaking very loud so as to be heard over the howls of Jane, George said: “Yah—who’s afraid? We are George and Jane—who are you?”

“We are the sealskin dwarfs,” said the brown people, twisting their furry bodies in and out of the crowd like the changing glass in kaleidoscopes; “we are very precious and expensive, for we are made, throughout, of the very best sealskin.”

“And what are those fires for?” bellowed George—for Jane was crying louder and louder.

“Those,” shouted the dwarfs, coming a step nearer, “are the fires we make to thaw the dragon. He is frozen now—so he sleeps curled up round the Pole—but when we have thawed him with our fires he will wake up and go and eat everybody in the world except us.”

“Whatever—do—you—want—him—to—do—that—for?” yelled George.

“Oh—just for spite,” bawled the dwarfs, carelessly—as if they were saying “Just for fun.”

Jane left off crying to say: “You
are
heartless.”

“No, we aren’t,” they said; “our hearts are made of the finest sealskin, just like little fat sealskin purses—”

And they all came a step nearer. They were very fat and round. Their bodies were like sealskin jackets on a very stout person; their heads were like sealskin muffs; their legs were like sealskin boas; and their hands and feet were like sealskin tobacco-pouches. And their faces were like seals’ faces, inasmuch as they, too, were covered with sealskin.

“Thank you so much for telling us,” said George. “Good evening. (Keep on howling, Jane!)”

But the dwarfs came a step nearer, muttering and whispering. Then the muttering stopped—and there was a silence so deep that Jane was afraid to howl in it. But it was a brown silence, and she had liked the white silence better.

Then the chief dwarf came quite close and said: “What’s that on your head?”

And George felt it was all up—for he knew it was his father’s sealskin cap.

The dwarf did not wait for an answer. “It’s made of one of
us,”
he screamed, “or else one of the seals, our poor relations. Boy, now your fate is sealed!”

And looking at the wicked seal-faces all around them, George and Jane felt that their fate was sealed indeed.

The dwarfs seized the children in their furry arms. George kicked, but it is no use kicking sealskin, and Jane howled, but the dwarfs were getting used to that. They climbed up the dragon’s side and dumped the children down on his icy spine, with their backs against the North Pole. You have no idea how cold it was—the kind of cold that makes you feel small and prickly inside your clothes, and makes you wish you had twenty times as many clothes to feel small and prickly inside of.

The sealskin dwarfs tied George and Jane to the North Pole, and, as they had no ropes, they bound them with snow-wreaths, which are very strong when they are made in the proper way, and they heaped up the fires very close and said:

“Now the dragon will get warm, and when he gets warm he will wake, and when he wakes he will be hungry, and when he is hungry he will begin to eat, and the first thing he will eat
will be you.”

The dwarfs seized the children

The little, sharp, many-colored flames sprang up like the stalks of dream lilies, but no heat came to the children, and they grew colder and colder.

“We shan’t be very nice when the dragon does eat us, that’s one comfort,” said George; “we shall be turned into ice long before that.”

Suddenly there was a flapping of wings, and the white grouse perched on the dragon’s head and said:

“Can I be of any assistance?”

Now by this time the children were so cold, so cold, so very, very cold, that they had forgotten everything but that, and they could say nothing else. So the white grouse said:

“One moment. I am only too grateful for this opportunity of showing my sense of your manly conduct about the firework!”

And the next moment there was a soft whispering rustle of wings overhead, and then, fluttering slowly, softly down, came hundreds and thousands of little white fluffy feathers. They fell on George and Jane like snowflakes, and, like flakes of fallen snow lying one above another, they grew into a thicker and thicker covering, so that presently the children were buried under a heap of white feathers, and only their faces peeped out.

“Oh, you dear, good, kind white grouse,” said Jane; “but you’ll be cold yourself, won’t you, now you have given us all your pretty dear feathers?”

The white grouse laughed, and his laugh was echoed by thousands of kind, soft bird-voices.

“Did you think all those feathers came out of one breast? There are hundreds and hundreds of us here, and every one of us can spare a little tuft of soft breast feathers to help to keep two kind little hearts warm!”

Thus spoke the grouse, who certainly had very pretty manners.

So now the children snuggled under the feathers and were warm, and when the sealskin dwarfs tried to take the feathers away, the grouse and his friends flew in their faces with flappings and screams, and drove the dwarfs back. They are a cowardly folk.

The dragon had not moved yet—but then he might at any moment get warm enough to move, and though George and Jane were now warm they were not comfortable, nor easy in their minds. They tried to explain to the grouse; but though he is polite, he is not clever, and he only said:

“You’ve got a warm nest, and we’ll see that no one takes it from you. What more can you possibly want?”

Just then came a new, strange, jerky fluttering of wings
far softer than the grouse’s, and George and Jane cried out together:

“Oh,
do
mind your wings in the fires!”

For they saw at once that it was the great white Arctic moth.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, settling on the dragon’s tail.

So they told him.

“Sealskin, are they?” said the moth; “just you wait a minute!”

He flew off very crookedly, dodging the flames, and presently he came back, and there were so many moths with him that it was as if a live sheet of white wingedness were suddenly drawn between the children and the stars.

And then the doom of the bad sealskin dwarfs fell suddenly on them.

For the great sheet of winged whiteness broke up and fell, as snow falls, and it fell upon the sealskin dwarfs; and every snowflake of it was a live, fluttering, hungry moth, that buried its greedy nose deep in the sealskin fur.

Grown-up people will tell you that it is not moths but moths’ children who eat fur—but this is only when they are trying to deceive you. When they are not thinking about you they say, “I fear the moths have got at my ermine tippet,” or,
“Your poor Aunt Emma had a lovely sable cloak, but it was eaten by moths.” And now there were more moths than have ever been together in this world before, all settling on the sealskin dwarfs.

The dwarfs did not see their danger till it was too late. Then they called for camphor and bitter apple, and oil of lavender, and yellow soap and borax; and some of the dwarfs even started to get these things, but long before any of them could get to the chemist’s all was over. The moths ate, and ate, and ate, till the sealskin dwarfs, being sealskin throughout, even to the empty hearts of them, were eaten down to the very life—and they fell one by one on the snow and so came to their end. And all round the North Pole the snow was brown with their flat bare pelts.