For a moment she feared it meant to consume her next, and she backed away in fright. ‘But I’m not used to it!’ pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, ‘I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!’
‘You’ll get used to it in time,’ said the Wurm; and it continued to clean its mandibles. ‘Have you met the Red Queen yet?’
‘No, but I’ve heard such dreadful things about her that I’m sure I’d rather not meet her,’ said Alice, crossing her arms across her chest to show she meant business.
The Wurm squirmed a little closer and looked down at her, still working diligently at cleaning its gory mandibles. ‘You certainly don’t want her to see you in that state.’
‘What state?’ asked Alice.
‘The state which you are in,’ it replied.
‘I rather thought I was in a land, not a state,’ she said, quite pleased with her quick and logical wit.
‘She’s sure to show you, young lady,’ said the Wurm, not at all impressed with her play on words.
This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Wurm stopped cleaning itself and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the dead leaves and broken, rotting twigs, merely remarking as it went, ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.’
‘One side of what? The other side of what?’ thought Alice to herself.
‘Of the mushroom,’ said the Wurm, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment its squirming gray body was out of sight.
Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.
‘And now which is which?’ she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the left hand bit.
‘Come, my head’s free at last!’ said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of pale blue neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a tangle of spiny sharp dead branches and autumnal orange and brown leaves that lay far below her.
‘What can all that brown and orange stuff be?’ said Alice. ‘And where have my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?’ She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant dead leaves.
As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the dying branches, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large black raven had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its long black wings.
‘Serpent!’ screamed the Raven.
‘I’m not a serpent!’ said Alice indignantly. ‘Let me alone!’
‘Serpent, I say again!’ cawed the Raven, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, ‘I’ve tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!’
‘I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,’ said Alice.
‘I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges, and I’ve tried the gravestones and the tombs, too!’ the Raven went on, without attending to her; ‘but those serpents! There’s no pleasing them!’
Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Raven had finished.
‘As if it wasn’t trouble enough feeding off the corpses of the dead,’ said the Raven, flapping its shiny black wings; ‘but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!’
‘I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,’ said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning. But now as she got closer to the fat bird, she began to think of her hunger again, and her eyes lit up with a most dastardly eagerness. The Raven saw it and backed away on the branch upon which it was sitting. Alice smiled thinly, trying to pretend that she had not been just now thinking what the Raven might taste like if she grabbed it and plucked off its wings.
‘And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,’ continued the Raven, raising its voice to a shriek, ‘and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!’
‘But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!’ said Alice. ‘I’m a—I’m a—’
‘Well! What are you?’ said the Raven, beating those delicious looking wings once more in her face. ‘I can see you’re trying to invent something!’
‘I—I’m a little girl,’ said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.
‘A likely story indeed!’ said the Raven in a tone of the deepest contempt. ‘I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time-both alive and dead, young lady, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!’
‘I have tasted eggs, certainly,’ said Alice, who was a very truthful child; ‘but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.’ And maybe even nice fat ravens, she thought while licking her dry cold lips.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Raven; ‘but if they do, why then they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I can say. Oh, why can’t the Red Queen take better care of your kind? Why must I be frightened even this far above the ground? ’
This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Raven the opportunity of adding, ‘You’re looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?’
‘It matters a good deal to me,’ said Alice hastily; ‘but I’m not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want yours: I don’t like them raw.’
‘Well, be off, then!’ said the Raven in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest, and watching her with its beady mistrustful black eyes. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the skeleton branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual. ‘Come, there’s half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! Now if only I could find some creature willing to give me a bit of itself to eat, I would be just right! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful graveyard—how is that to be done, I wonder?’ As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.