Alice had to fairly iron her way between Birdcaging girls and Briefcasing boys and the mutated Spectaclemen joined at the topiary to Newspapering people of bicycle and bone! Alice felt ever so lonely, pushing her way through that crowd of strangely strange strangers, especially when they all seemed to press against her so, and to stare at her so, and to whisper abusive words at her, just so!
As though Alice herself was the strange one!
"The disease that's called Newmonia seems to be troubling nearly everything!" Alice sighed to herself. "So many of these creatures resemble Pablo Ogden's sculptures, and yet they seem to be perfectly real rather than perfectly automated. I suppose I must only do my best to ignore the stares and the whispers, and to continue my search for Whippoorwill and Celia and the five remaining jigsaw pieces. But the police will be searching for Captain Ramshackle; and they will also be searching for me!"
Indeed, Alice did then notice a policedogman growling at the edges of the crowd, so she immediately pushed her way deeper into the tumult of strangeness, hoping to find a breathing space there. But the crowd pushed and brushed and tushed against her so much that Alice was eventually squashed up against a stone statue in the centre of Albert Square. Alice noticed that it was carved into the exact resemblance of Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha: in other words, Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. "So this is why they call this place Albert Square," Alice realized: "Prince Albert must have died a long, long time ago, just like I must have died a long, long time ago; after all, we do share the same first syllabub." (A syllabub is, of course, a dessert made from cream beaten with sugar, wine and lemon juice; I really do think that Alice meant to say syllable!) "Alice and Albert," Alice continued to herself; "maybe I was correct when I pretended to Doctor Sniffer that I was dead..."
Alice was so full of sadness at her own demise. "Am I dead, or am I not dead?" she wondered, with a small cry. "And when is a garden not a garden? And is a bean here, or is a bean not here?" Alice was becoming ever so confused with her own beanness.
But Alice quickly shrugged off her confusion, so determined was she to find her way out of this puzzle. She started marching once again through the clinging crowd until she arrived at the Town Hall's grand entrance. Here she encountered a liveried doormandog -- half a man, half a guard dog -- who demanded to know her name and her business. "My name is Alice," Alice replied, "and my business is to retrieve a spidery jigsaw piece that rightfully belongs to me. I believe that the Civil Serpents are keeping it inside the Town Hall."
"I'm afraid I cannot allow you entrance," the doorman-dog growled back; "that would be more than my bone's worth. You have no business here!" And the doormandog growled so fiercely then that Alice was forced to run backwards into the crowd of Newmonia sufferers, through which a whole pack of policemandogs was now snuffling, asking questions of everybody. Alice decided to hide herself behind a rather colourful Umbrellawoman.
"I really am getting nowhere at all," she cried, once hidden. "The future seems to be so completely against me; how can I possibly hope to presently find my past?" Alice then looked up towards the large and impressive clock face that adorned the Town Hall's tower; the time was rushing towards noon. "Oh dear!" Alice added and subtracted to herself. "I must have spent simply hours in the police cell! It's coming up to exactly twelve, and in nearly exactly two hours' time and also nearly exactly one hundred and thirty-eight years ago I should have been present at my writing lesson with Great Aunt Ermintrude!"
Alice then saw that a single green-and-yellow feather was floating above the Square. "Why, that looks like one of Whippoorwill's feathers," she cried. "Maybe the whole parrot himself is flying around this Square somewhere? I must look out for him!" And Alice did look out for Whippoorwill, but only the single feather of him was to be seen, floating along on a slight breeze. "Whippoorwill!" cried Alice to the single feather (having nothing further to cry to). "If you keep on losing feathers at this rate, why, very soon you will not be able to fly at all!" She then dug deep into her pinafore pocket for her feather. Of course, she found only the seven jigsaw pieces. "Oh flutterings!" Alice howled. "That's my feather floating up there! I must have dropped it getting out of the auto-hearse!" Alice reached up into the air to recapture the feather, but no matter how high she reached, she could never quite reach it.
And just as Alice was reaching her very highest high in order to grab at Whippoorwill's escaping feather, the Town Hall clock started to slowly ding-dong its clanging song of middaying chimes. At the very first of the chimes, Alice felt a soft hand softly stroking at her shoulder. She thought that it must be the paw of a policedogman, come to rearrest her, and she pushed it away, but when she eventually spun around to view the stroker, imagine her surprise to find a normal man waiting for her there. This normal man was utterly and only a normal man -- not a single trace of animality -- and he was jacketed in a deep and blue velvety suit, complete with a deep and blue and peaked and velvety cap. Over his left shoulder lay the straps of a deep and blue and velvety bag. Everything about him was velvety!
"Who are you?" asked Alice.
"They call me Zenith O'Clock," responded the normal man.
"Who do?"
"Time calls me Zenith O'Clock, because I was born upon this very minute exactly thirty-eight years ago, when the sun was at its veritable height." Zenith reached up to point at the Town Hall clock (which was ever-so-slowly chiming its way through the second of its dozen ding-dongs).
"It's your birthday?" Alice cried.
"It is indeed the anniversary of my birth."
"Many happy returns!"
"I sincerely hope never to return to this day."
"Why ever not?"
This is a dreadful day for me, a dreadful day, I tell you! And very sad I am to be living it. Your name is Alice, isn't it? Your full name is Alice Pleasance Liddell?"
"My full name is Alice Pleasance Liddell, but how in the world did you know that?"
"I've seen you before, but only in books."
"Only in books?" asked Alice.
"Only in books, as you say. Only! Books can never be only; they can only be always. Oh, but all this talk of books is bringing back my sadness!"
"But it's your birthday, Mister O'Clock!" cried Alice. "Upon this day you should only be happy!"
"I cannot be happy," Zenith replied, "because I'm suffering from a terrible disease."
"But you look perfectly healthy to me," Alice responded. "I'm so glad to have met another purely human being. Surely you can't be suffering from the Newmonia?"
"I have a more deadly disease: I'm infested with the Crickets, you see."
"You're infested with cricket?" misheard Alice. "The game with a bat, a ball, three stumps and an umpire?"
"Crickets, I said! Not cricket! Cricket in the plural and with a capital C: that ravenous cloud of reviewing insects. I'm a writer, you see."
"And what do you write, Mister O'Clock? Timetables?" (Alice was quite pleased with her joke.)
"No, no," replied Zenith, "I have found it impossible to time a table, although I once tried. A table is much too wooden to make more than a breath of a move, once every nine hours: except at dinnertime, when it may well make a sudden run for the kitchen."
"So what do you write?" insisted Alice. "Fiction or non-fiction?"
"I write neither fiction nor non-fiction. Rather I write Friction."
"And what is Friction, pray?"
"I write in the language called Frictional. I'm a writer of Wrongs."
"Whatever's a Wrong?"
"A Wrong is a book that the Crickets don't consider to be right, preferring their stories to be told in Simpleton rather than Frictional. They rub their dry wings together, these Crickets, making a terrible respond to my work in the noisepapers."