children's fiction
“The wind was blowing harder now, and the snow was coming down in thick flurries, which quickly turned the fronts of their clothes white and made it difficult either to see or hear; but Dora thought she heard a snatch of music. Then one of the little boys started jumping up and down and pointing. 'Look! Look! They're dancing! They're dancing!' Everyone looked where the little boy was pointing. On the far side of the snow-field, next to the fir trees, the snowmen and snow-women were moving.”
“They landed in a huge circle of white dust, with a rim of sharp-looking rocks all the way round the outside. Everything was bathed in harsh colourless light, like moonlight but ten times as powerful. In the middle of the circle of rock was a massive square stone slab, and on the slab, flat on his back, lay a giant with his eyes closed.”
The children fly with some owls to the moon, where they meet the Queen of the Night and hear the story of Pandora and Prometheus. The seventh chapter of twelve.
"The mouse did seem to be waiting: instead of scampering into the darkness it held itself almost completely still, except for small attentive movements of its ears and the constant trembling of its whiskers."
On the run from Urizen's henchmen, the children undertake a hazardous underground journey. At the bottom of a frozen cavern, they find out more about one of the clue cards.
"Urizen separated out a region from the rest of eternity, shrank it into solid matter, weighed it in his scales, measured it with his rods and plumblines, circumscribed it with his compasses, and wrote laws for it in his great brass-bound books. This sorry region, the region over which Urizen rules, is the universe in which we live..."
