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The Magician’s Nephew
Pauline Baynes
C. S. Lewis
Illustrations in this ebook appear in vibrant full colour on a full colour ebook device, and in rich black and white on all other devices.Narnia . . . where Talking Beasts walk . . . where a witch waits . . . where a new world is about to be born.On a daring quest to save a life, two friends are hurled into another world, where an evil sorceress seeks to enslave them. But then the lion Aslan's song weaves itself into the fabric of a new land, a land that will be known as Narnia. And in Narnia, all things are possible.The Magician’s Nephew is the first book in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, a series that has become part of the canon of classic literature, drawing readers of all ages into a magical land with unforgettable characters for over fifty years. This is a stand-alone novel, but if you would like to journey back to Narnia, read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the second book in The Chronicles of Narnia.
THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW
C. S. LEWIS
Illustrated by Pauline Baynes
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 1955
First published by Collins in paperback in 1980
Colour edition first published in 1998
The Magician’s Nephew
Copyright © 1955 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.
Original interior art by Pauline Baynes; copyright © 1955
C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.
Coloured interior art by Pauline Baynes; copyright © 1998 by C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.
Although The Magician’s Nephew was written several years after C.S. Lewis first began THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
, he wanted it to be read as the first book in the series. HarperCollins is happy to present these books in the order in which Professor Lewis preferred.
The Chronicles of Narnia
, Narnia
and all book titles, characters and locales original to The Chronicles of Narnia are trademarks of C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Use without permission is strictly prohibited.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006716839
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007325047
Version: 2017-09-25
To the Kilmer Family
Contents
Cover (#u6a00826d-84a3-5f86-8782-8c1a6005f62b)
Title Page (#u6d1fed08-43fb-5fad-9d73-840ebdd5f09a)
Copyright
The Magician’s Nephew
Chapter One - The Wrong Door
Chapter Two - Digory and his Uncle
Chapter Three - The Wood between the Worlds
Chapter Four - The Bell and the Hammer
Chapter Five - The Deplorable Word
Chapter Six - The Beginning of Uncle Andrew’s Troubles
Chapter Seven - What Happened at the Front Door
Chapter Eight - The Fight at the Lamp-post
Chapter Nine - The Founding of Narnia
Chapter Ten - The First Joke and Other Matters
Chapter Eleven - Digory and his Uncle are Both in Trouble
Chapter Twelve - Strawberry’s Adventure
Chapter Thirteen - An Unexpected Meeting
Chapter Fourteen - The Planting of the Tree
Chapter Fifteen - The End of this Story and the Beginning of all the Others
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also by Author
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW
The secret passage to the house next door leads to a brand new world.
NARNIA . . . where horses sometimes grow wings and Talking Beasts are called to life ... a new world full of magic, where the adventures begin.
Digory and Polly meet and become friends one cold, wet summer in London. Their lives burst into adventure when Uncle Andrew, who thinks he is a magician, sends them hurtling to . . . somewhere else. They find their way to a new land – Narnia! But when they awaken an evil sorceress, Polly and Digory are sent on a quest to stop her before she destroys the world they’ve just discovered!
Chapter One
The Wrong Door
This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began.
In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road. In those days, if you were a boy you had to wear a stiff Eton collar every day, and schools were usually nastier than now. But meals were nicer; and as for sweets, I won’t tell you how cheap and good they were, because it would only make your mouth water in vain. And in those days there lived in London a girl called Polly Plummer.
She lived in one of a long row of houses which were all joined together. One morning she was out in the back garden when a boy scrambled up from the garden next door and put his face over the wall. Polly was very surprised because up till now there had never been any children in that house, but only Mr Ketterley and Miss Ketterley, a brother and sister, old bachelor and old maid, living together. So she looked up, full of curiosity. The face of the strange boy was very grubby. It could hardly have been grubbier if he had first rubbed his hands in the earth, and then had a good cry, and then dried his face with his hands. As a matter of fact, this was very nearly what he had been doing.
“Hullo,” said Polly.
“Hullo,” said the boy. “What’s your name?”
“Polly,” said Polly. “What’s yours?”
“Digory,” said the boy.
“I say, what a funny name!” said Polly.
“It isn’t half so funny as Polly,” said Digory.
“Yes, it is,” said Polly.
“No, it isn’t,” said Digory.
“At any rate I do wash my face,” said Polly. “Which is what you need to do; especially after—” and then she stopped. She had been going to say “After you’ve been blubbing,” but she thought that wouldn’t be polite.
“All right, I have then,” said Digory in a much louder voice, like a boy who was so miserable that he didn’t care who knew he had been crying. “And so would you,” he went on, “if you’d lived all your life in the country and had a pony, and a river at the bottom of the garden, and then been brought to live in a beastly Hole like this.”
“London isn’t a Hole,” said Polly indignantly. But the boy was too wound up to take any notice of her, and he went on –
“And if your father was away in India – and you had to come and live with an Aunt and an Uncle who’s mad (who would like that?) – and if the reason was that they were looking after your Mother – and if your Mother was ill and was going to – going to – die.” Then his face went the wrong sort of shape as it does if you’re trying to keep back your tears.
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” said Polly humbly. And then, because she hardly knew what to say, and also to turn Digory’s mind to cheerful subjects, she asked:
“Is Mr Ketterley really mad?”
“Well, either he’s mad,” said Digory, “or there’s some other mystery. He has a study on the top floor and Aunt Letty says I must never go up there. Well, that looks fishy to begin with. And then there’s another thing. Whenever he tries to say anything to me at meal times – he never even tries to talk to her – she always shuts him up. She says, ‘Don’t worry the boy, Andrew’, or, ‘I’m sure Digory doesn’t want to hear about that’, or else, ‘Now, Digory, wouldn’t you like to go out and play in the garden?’ ”
“What sort of things does he try to say?”
“I don’t know. He never gets far enough. But there’s more than that. One night – it was last night in fact – as I was going past the foot of the attic stairs on my way to bed (and I don’t much care for going past them either) I’m sure I heard a yell.”
“Perhaps he keeps a mad wife shut up there.”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that.”
“Or perhaps he’s a coiner.”
“Or he might have been a pirate, like the man at the beginning of Treasure Island, and be always hiding from his old shipmates.”
“How exciting!” said Polly, “I never knew your house was so interesting.”
“You may think it interesting,” said Digory. “But you wouldn’t like it if you had to sleep there. How would you like to lie awake listening for Uncle Andrew’s step to come creeping along the passage to your room? And he has such awful eyes.”
That was how Polly and Digory got to know one another: and as it was just the beginning of the summer holidays and neither of them was going to the sea that year, they met nearly every day.
Their adventures began chiefly because it was one of the wettest and coldest summers there had been for years. That drove them to do indoor things: you might say, indoor exploration. It is wonderful how much exploring you can do with a stump of candle in a big house, or in a row of houses. Polly had discovered long ago that if you opened a certain little door in the box-room attic of her house you would find the cistern and a dark place behind it which you could get into by a little careful climbing. The dark place was like a long tunnel with brick wall on one side and sloping roof on the other. In the roof there were little chunks of light between the slates. There was no floor in this tunnel: you had to step from rafter to rafter, and between them there was only plaster. If you stepped on this you would find yourself falling through the ceiling of the room below. Polly had used the bit of the tunnel just beside the cistern as a smugglers’ cave. She had brought up bits of old packing cases and the seats of broken kitchen chairs, and things of that sort, and spread them across from rafter to rafter so as to make a bit of floor. Here she kept a cash-box containing various treasures, and a story she was writing and usually a few apples. She had often drunk a quiet bottle of ginger-beer in there: the old bottles made it look more like a smugglers’ cave.
Digory quite liked the cave (she wouldn’t let him see the story) but he was more interested in exploring.
“Look here,” he said. “How long does this tunnel go on for? I mean, does it stop where your house ends?”
“No,” said Polly. “The walls don’t go out to the roof. It goes on. I don’t know how far.”
“Then we could get the length of the whole row of houses.”
“So we could,” said Polly. “And oh, I say!”
“What?”
“We could get into the other houses.”
“Yes, and get taken up for burglars! No thanks.”
“Don’t be so jolly clever. I was thinking of the house beyond yours.”
“What about it?”
“Why, it’s the empty one. Daddy says it’s always been empty since we came here.”
“I suppose we ought to have a look at it then,” said Digory. He was a good deal more excited than you’d have thought from the way he spoke. For of course he was thinking, just as you would have been, of all the reasons why the house might have been empty so long. So was Polly. Neither of them said the word “haunted”. And both felt that once the thing had been suggested, it would be feeble not to do it.
“Shall we go and try it now?” said Digory.
