Prince Caspian 贾思潘王子 Chapter 4　The Dwarf Tells of Prince Caspian -8

"Nay, my dear," said the old man. "This castle is a thing of yesterday. Your great-great-grandfather built it. But when the two sons of Adam and the two daughters of Eve were made Kings and Queens of Narnia by Aslan himself, they lived in the castle of Cair Paravel.

No man alive has seen that blessed place and perhaps even the ruins of it have now vanished.

But we believe it was far from here, down at the mouth of the Great River, on the very shore of the sea."

"Ugh!" said Caspian with a shudder. "Do you mean in the Black Woods? Where all the - the - you know, the ghosts live?"

"Your Highness speaks as you have been taught," said the Doctor. "But it is all lies. There are no ghosts there. That is a story invented by the Telmarines. Your Kings are in deadly fear of the sea because they can never quite forget that in all stories Aslan comes from over the sea.

They don't want to go near it and they don't want anyone else to go near it. So they have let great woods grow up to cut their people off from the coast.

But because they have quarrelled with the trees they are afraid of the woods. And because they are afraid of the woods they imagine that they are full of ghosts.

And the Kings and great men, hating both the sea and the wood, partly believe these stories, and partly encourage them.

They feel safer if no one in Narnia dares to go down to the coast and look out to sea towards Aslan's land and the morning and the eastern end of the world."

There was a deep silence between them for a few minutes. Then Doctor Cornelius said, "Come. We have been here long enough. It is time to go down and to bed."

"Must we?" said Caspian. "I'd like to go on talking about these things for hours and hours and hours."

"Someone might begin looking for us, if we did that," said Doctor Cornelius.