icks had a book on
the top of them because there were no more inkstands. And when he had
passed through the three silver arches, he stopped.

Beyond lay a sort of velvety darkness with white gleams in it. And as
his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was in a
great hall of silver pillars, gigantic silver candlesticks they seemed
to be, and they went in long vistas this way and that way and every way,
like the hop-poles in a hop-field, so that whichever way you turned, a
long pillared corridor lay in front of you.

Philip had no idea which way he ought to go. It seemed most unlikely
that he would find Lucy in a dark hall with silver pillars.

'All the same,' he said, 'it's not so dark as it was, by long chalks.'

It was not. The silver pillars had begun to give out a faint soft glow
like the silver phosphorescence that lies in sea pools in summer time.

'It's lucky too,' he said, 'because of the holes in the floor.'

The holes were the spots on the dominoes with which the pillared hall
was paved.

'I wonder what part of the city where Lucy is I shall come out at?'
Philip asked himself. But he need not have troubled. He did not come
out at all. He walked on and on and on and on and on. He thought he was
walking straight, but really he was turning first this way and then
that, and then the other way among the avenues of silver pillars which
all looked just alike.

He was getting very tired, and he had been walking a long time, before
he came to anything that was not silver pillars and velvet black under
invisible roofs, and floor paved with dominoes laid very close together.

'Oh, I am glad!' he said at last, when he saw the pavement narrow to a
single line of dominoes just like the path he had come in by. There was
an arch too, like the arch by which he had come in. And then he
perceived in a shock of miserable surprise that it was, in fact, the
same arch and the same domino path. He had come back, after all that
walking, to the point from which he had started. It was most mortifying.
So silly! Philip sat down on the edge of the domino path to rest and
think.

'Suppose I just walk out and don't believe in magic any more?' he said
to himself. 'Helen says magic can only happen to people who believe in
magic. So if I just walked out and didn't believe as hard as ever I
could, I should be my own right size again, and Lucy would be back, and
there wouldn't _be_ any magic.'

[Illustration: He wa