rich and majestic after all the dust and emptiness of the others. It had more windows, 
too, and was a good deal lighter.
    
    I can hardly describe the clothes. The figures were all robed and had crowns on their 
heads. Their robes were of crimson and silvery grey and deep purple and vivid green: and 
there were patterns, and pictures of flowers and strange beasts, in needlework all over 
them. Precious stones of astonishing size and brightness stared from their crowns and 
hung in chains round their necks and peeped out from all the places where anything was 
fastened.
    
    "Why haven't these clothes all rotted away long ago?" asked Polly.
    
    "Magic," whispered Digory. "Can't you feel it? I bet this whole room is just stiff 
with enchantments. I could feel it the moment we came in."
    
    "Any one of these dresses would cost hundreds of pounds," said Polly.
    
    But Digory was more interested in the faces, and indeed these were well worth looking 
at. The people sat in their stone chairs on each side of the room and the floor was left 
free down the middle. You could walk down and look at the faces in turn.
    
    "They were nice people, I think," said Digory.
    
    Polly nodded. All the faces they could see were certainly nice. Both the men and 
women looked kind and wise, and they seemed to come of a handsome race. But after the 
children had gone a few steps down the room they came to faces that looked a little 
different. These were very solemn faces. You felt you would have to mind your P's and 
Q's, if you ever met living people who looked like that. When they had gone a little 
further, they found themselves among faces they didn't like: this was about the middle of 
the room. The faces here looked very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A 
little further on they looked crueller. Further on again, they were still cruel but they 
no longer looked happy. They were even despairing faces: as if the people they belonged 
to had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things. The last figure of all was 
the most interesting-a woman even more richly dressed than the others, very tall (but 
every figure in that room was taller than the people of our world), with a look of such 
fierceness and pride that it took your breath away. Yet she was beautiful too. Years 
afterwards when he was an old man, Digory said he had never in all his life known a woman 
so beautiful. It is only fair to add that Polly always said she couldn't see anything 
specially beautiful about her.
    
    This woman, as I said, was the last: but there were plenty of empty chairs beyond 
her, as if the room had been intended for a much larger collection of images.
    
    "I do wish we knew the story that's behind all this," said Digory. "Let's go back and 
look at that table sort of thing in the middle of the room."
    
    The thing in the middle of the room was not exactly a table. It was a square pillar 
about four feet high and on it there rose a little golden arch from which there hung a 
little golden bell; and beside this there lay a little golden hammer to hit the bell with.
    
    "I wonder... I wonder... I wonder..." said Digory.
    
    "There seems to be something written here," said Polly, stooping down and looking at 
the side of the pillar.
    
    "By gum, so there is," said Digory. "But of course we shan't be able to read it."
    
    "Shan't we? I'm not so sure," said Polly.
    
    They both looked at it hard and, as you might have expected, the letters cut in the 
stone were strange. But now a great wonder happened: for, as they looked, though the 
shape of the strange letters never altered, they found that they could understand them. 
If only Digory had remembered what he himself had said a few minutes ago, that this was 
an enchanted room, he might have guessed that the enchantment was beginning to work. But 
he was too wild with curiosity to think about that. He was longing more and more to know 
what was written on the pillar. And very soon they both knew. What it said was something 
like this-at least this is the sense of it though the poetry, when you read it there, was 
better:
    
    Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;  Strike the bell and bide the danger,  Or 
wonder, till it drives you mad,  What would have followed if you had.
    
    "No fear!" said Polly. "We don't want any danger."
    
    "Oh but don't you see it's no good!" said Digory. "We can't get out of it now. We 
shall always be wondering what else would have happened if we had struck the bell. I'm 
not going home to be driven mad by always thinking of that. No fear!"
    
    "Don't be so silly," said Polly. "As if anyone would! What does it matter what would 
have happened?"
    
    "I expect anyone who's come as far as this is bound to go on wondering till it sends 
him dotty. That's the Magic of it, you see. I can feel it beginning to work on me 
already."
    
    "Well I don't," said Polly crossly. "And I don't believe you do either. You're just 
putting it on."
    
    "That's all you know," said Digory. "It's because you're a girl. Girls never want to 
know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged."
    
    "You looked exactly like your Uncle when you said that," said Polly.
    
    "Why can't you keep to the point?" said Digory. "What we're talking about is-"
    
    "How exactly like a man!" said Polly in a very grownup voice; but she added hastily, 
in her real voice, "And don't say I'm just like a woman, or you'll be a beastly copy-cat."
    
    "I should never dream of calling a kid like you a woman," said Digory loftily.