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Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland
Kapitel 1:
Down the rabbit-hole, Lewis Carroll, Seite 2 ( von 3 )
Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?" (and she tried to
curtsey as she spoke - fancy
curtseying as
you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) "And
what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to
ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere."
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking
again. "Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!" (Dinah
was the cat) "I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time.
Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the
air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you
know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?" And here Alice began to get rather
sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, "Do cats
eat bats? Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes, "Do bats eat cats?"
for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter
which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to
dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and was saying to her very
earnestly, "Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?"
when suddenly, thumb! thumb! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry
leaves, and the fall was over.
Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she
looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage,
and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a
moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear
it say, as it turned a corner, "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's
getting!" She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the
Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which
was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice
had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she
walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass;
there was nothing on it but a tiny golden key, and Alice's first idea was that
this might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks
were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any
of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had
not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high:
she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it
fitted!
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much
larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the
loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and
wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but
she could not even get her head through the doorway; "and even if my head
would go through," thought poor Alice, "it would be of very little
use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I
think I could, if I only knew how to begin." For, you see, so many
out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that
very few things indeed were really impossible.
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to
the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book
of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little
bottle on it, ("which certainly was not here before," said Alice,)
and tied round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words
"DRINK ME" beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say "Drink me," but the wise little Alice was
not going to do that in a hurry.
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