THE worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake you have to get up because the ground is so hard that you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before. When Lucy had said—truly enough—that it was a glorious morning, there did not seem to be anything else nice to be said. Edmund said what everyone was feeling, “We've simply got to get off this island.”
When they had drunk from the well and splashed their faces they all went down the stream again to the shore and stared at the channel which divided them from the mainland.
“We'll have to swim,” said Edmund.
“It would be all right for Su,” said Peter (Susan had won prizes for swimming at school). “But I don't know about the rest of us.” By “the rest of us” he really meant Edmund who couldn't yet do two lengths at the school baths, and Lucy, who could hardly swim at all.
“Anyway,” said Susan, “there may be currents. Father says it's never wise to bathe in a place you don't know.”
“But, Peter,” said Lucy, “look here. I know I can't swim for nuts at home—in England, I mean. But couldn't we all swim long ago—if it was long ago—when we were Kings and Queens in Narnia? We could ride then too, and do all sorts of things. Don't you think—”
“Ah, but we were sort of grown-up then,” said Peter.
“We reigned for years and years and learned to do things. Aren't we just back at our proper ages again now?”
“Oh!” said Edmund in a voice which made everyone stop talking and listen to him.
“I've just seen it all,” he said.
“Seen what?” asked Peter.
“Why, the whole thing,” said Edmund. “You know what we were puzzling about last night, that it was only a year ago since we left Narnia but everything looks as if no one had lived in Cair Paravel for hundreds of years? Well, don't you see? You know that, however long we seemed to have lived in Narnia, when we got back through the wardrobe it seemed to have taken no time at all?”