Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

One warm day, Alice was sitting on the riverbank beside her sister and feeling terribly bored.

Her sister was reading a book.

Alice peeped over her shoulder twice and saw not a single picture inside.

“What is the use of a book,” she thought, “if it has no pictures and no conversations?”

The sun was warm. The grass smelled sweet. Alice was just about to make a daisy chain when a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran past.

A rabbit by itself did not surprise her very much.

But then the Rabbit said:

“I’m late! I’m terribly late!”

He pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket, looked at it, and ran faster.

That made Alice jump to her feet.

She had never seen a rabbit in a waistcoat. She had certainly never seen one with a pocket watch.

She ran after him across the field and saw him dive into a large rabbit hole beneath the hedge.

Alice did not stop to think for long.

She went in after him.

At first, the tunnel ran straight ahead, and then it suddenly dropped away like a very deep well.

Alice fell slowly. So slowly that she had time to look at shelves along the walls, cupboards, books, and maps.

On one shelf stood a jar labeled “Orange Marmalade.”

It was empty.

“What a disappointment,” Alice said, carefully placing the jar on another shelf as she floated past.

“I wonder how long I’ve been falling. Perhaps I’ll come out on the other side of the Earth.”

At last, she landed softly on a pile of dry leaves.

The White Rabbit flashed ahead.

“My ears and whiskers! I shall be late!”

Alice hurried after him, but he disappeared around a corner.

She found herself in a long hall filled with doors. Every one of them was locked.

In the middle stood a glass table. On it lay a tiny golden key.

The key did not fit the large doors, but it opened a tiny door hidden behind a curtain.

Beyond it was a beautiful garden filled with fountains, flowers, and bright paths.

There was only one problem: the little doorway was barely tall enough for a doll.

Alice returned to the table and saw a bottle that seemed not to have been there before. Its label said, “Drink Me.”

“First I should check for a warning,” Alice said sensibly.

There was none. She took a small sip.

The taste was strange: a little like cherry, a little like vanilla, a little like cake, and a little like something Alice could not name.

She began to shrink.

“Wonderful! Now I can get into the garden.”

But the key was still on the high table.

“Well done, Alice,” she sighed.

Beneath the table, she found a little cake marked “Eat Me.”

After one bite, Alice suddenly grew so tall that her head almost touched the ceiling.

“Now I can’t even bend down to the little door!”

She felt miserable and began to cry. She cried so much that before long, a whole lake of tears covered the floor.

Soon Alice became small again, slipped, and fell right into her own Pool of Tears.

A Mouse swam beside her, followed by a Duck, a Dodo, and several other soaked animals and birds.

“We must get dry,” declared the Dodo once everyone had reached the shore.

“How?”

“We shall have a No-Rules Race.”

“Where is the starting line?”

“Wherever we like.”

“And the finish?”

“Whenever we decide we’ve had enough.”

Everyone ran in every direction. A few minutes later, the Dodo announced:

“The race is over! Everyone has won!”

“And the prizes?”

Everyone looked at Alice.

She had to hand out candies that had somehow remained in her pocket.

“What a strange country,” Alice said.

“You have hardly seen anything yet,” replied the Dodo.

Before long, the White Rabbit appeared again.

He was so flustered that he mistook Alice for his maid.

“Mary Ann! Hurry home! Bring me my gloves and fan!”

Alice wanted to explain that she was not Mary Ann at all, but curiosity won.

Inside the Rabbit’s house, she found another bottle, took a sip, and suddenly began to grow.

One arm went out the window, and one foot pressed into the chimney.

“Not again!” groaned Alice.

Outside, she heard panic.

The Rabbit and his friends could not understand who had filled the entire house. They sent Bill the Lizard down the chimney, threw little stones through the window, and suggested increasingly ridiculous solutions.

The stones turned into tiny cakes the moment they landed on the floor.

Alice ate one and shrank.

She dashed from the house and hid in the forest.

There, sitting on a large mushroom, was a blue Caterpillar calmly blowing rings of smoke.

“Who are you?” asked the Caterpillar.

“I’m not entirely sure at the moment,” Alice replied. “I’ve changed so many times today.”

“Size does not answer the question of who you are.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You stay the same size all day.”

“Not all day,” the Caterpillar said dryly. “I shall change too.”

Alice remembered that caterpillars become butterflies and felt a little calmer.

The Caterpillar explained that one side of the mushroom would make her grow, while the other would make her shrink.

“Which side is which?” Alice asked.

“One and the other.”

“Very helpful.”

She broke off two pieces and, after several unsuccessful attempts, learned to adjust her height as she needed.

Before long, Alice came to a little house. Inside was complete chaos.

The Duchess held a baby, the cook put so much pepper into the soup that everyone kept sneezing, and a large cat sat on the stove grinning from ear to ear.

“Why is your cat smiling?” Alice asked.

“Because he is a Cheshire Cat,” replied the Duchess, as though that explained everything.

When Alice left the house, the Cheshire Cat appeared on a branch above the road.

“Which way should I go?” she asked.

“Where do you want to get to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then almost any road will do.”

“And who lives around here?”

“The Hatter lives that way. The March Hare lives the other way. Both are very strange.”

“I don’t want to visit strange people.”

The Cat smiled even wider.

“That is difficult around here.”

Then he began to disappear. First his tail, then his paws, then his body, then his head. At last, only the smile remained floating in the air.

“I’ve seen a cat without a smile,” Alice said, “but this is the first time I’ve seen a smile without a cat.”

She went to the March Hare’s house.

A long table stood outside. The Hare, the Hatter, and a Dormouse were seated around it. The Dormouse spent most of the time asleep.

“No room! No room!” shouted the Hare and the Hatter, although most of the table was empty.

“There’s plenty of room,” Alice said, and sat down.

“Would you like some wine?”

“Yes.”

There was no wine on the table.

“Then why offer it?”

“And why sit down without being invited?”

After that, the conversation became stranger still.

The Hatter asked riddles with no answers. The Hare poured tea into other people’s cups. The Dormouse woke for a few seconds at a time, told a story about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well, and fell asleep again.

“Why do you drink tea all the time?” Alice asked.

“Because Time is angry with me,” the Hatter explained. “For us, it is always six o’clock.”

“And you never wash the cups?”

“We simply move to the next place.”

Alice decided it was the least sensible tea party she had ever attended and left.

Beyond the trees, she finally found a door leading into the same beautiful garden she had seen at the beginning.

Near the rose bushes, three card-gardeners were painting white roses red.

“Why are you doing that?” Alice asked.

“We planted the wrong kind,” one whispered. “If the Queen notices, she’ll be furious.”

Just then, music sounded.

The Queen of Hearts came along the path, followed by the King, courtiers, and an entire procession of cards.

The Queen saw Alice.

“Who is this?”

“Alice.”

“And who are those?” She pointed at the gardeners.

“How should I know?” Alice replied. “I don’t work here.”

The Queen turned red.

“Off with her head!”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said. “That’s nonsense.”

Everyone froze.

The King coughed quietly.

“Perhaps we should play croquet first?”

And so Alice found herself in the strangest game in the world.

Instead of mallets, the players held flamingos. Instead of balls, hedgehogs crawled across the grass. The arches were playing cards standing on their hands and feet.

The flamingos twisted their heads. The hedgehogs ran away. The Queen angrily ordered people to be taken away, but no one obeyed very carefully, so almost everyone soon came back.

During the game, the head of the Cheshire Cat appeared in the air.

“How do you like the Queen?” he asked.

“Very loud,” Alice whispered.

The Queen happened to be standing behind her.

“What did you say?”

“I said you… run the game very loudly.”

The Cat grinned.

The King wanted to have him removed, but that created a problem: how do you remove a head when there is no body?

While everyone argued, the Cat simply disappeared.

After the croquet game, the Queen ordered the Gryphon to take Alice to see the Mock Turtle.

The Mock Turtle sat on a rock, sighing heavily.

“Why is he sad?” Alice asked.

“That is his favorite activity,” said the Gryphon.

The Mock Turtle began telling Alice about school beneath the sea.

“We studied Reading, Writing, Diving, Silence, and also Lessening.”

“Lessening?”

“Each day, the lessons were one hour shorter. By the eleventh day, there were none left at all.”

Then the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle showed Alice the Lobster Quadrille. They spun across the sand, counted steps, argued about who was supposed to be the lobster, and sang a song whose rhymes kept running off in directions no one expected.

Alice was beginning to get used to the fact that in Wonderland, no one was surprised by their own nonsense.

Suddenly, a shout came from far away:

“The trial is beginning!”

In a great hall, the King and Queen sat on a throne. Before them stood the Knave of Hearts.

A tray of tarts rested on a table.

The White Rabbit read the accusation:

“The Queen baked some tarts, and someone took them. The Knave is suspected.”

The card-jurors carefully wrote down every word, including their own names so they would not forget them before the trial ended.

The first witness called was the Hatter. He arrived holding a cup of tea.

“When did you see the Knave?” asked the King.

“I don’t remember.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Tea.”

“This is an important matter!”

“Tea is important to me too.”

The trial looked less and less like a trial.

Then the White Rabbit found a sheet of paper with an unsigned poem.

“Here is evidence!”

“Why is it evidence?” Alice asked.

“Because it is written down.”

“But no one knows who wrote it.”

“That is exactly why it is very suspicious,” declared the King.

Alice felt herself beginning to grow again.

She no longer wanted to keep silent simply because everyone around her spoke with confidence.

“That is not evidence,” she said. “You decided first who was guilty, and now you are trying to make everything else fit that decision.”

The Queen sprang to her feet.

“Sentence first! We can work out what happened afterward!”

“You can’t do that.”

“Who gave you permission to argue?”

Alice stood at her full height.

“Common sense.”

The hall fell silent.

The Queen waved her arms.

“Get her out of here!”

The cards flew into the air and whirled around Alice.

She raised her hands to protect herself.

And suddenly, she woke.

Leaves rustled above her. Her head rested in her sister’s lap. There were no cards at all, only a few dry leaves that had fallen from the tree onto her face.

“What a strange dream!” Alice cried.

She quickly told her sister about the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the Queen, the croquet game, and the trial.

Her sister listened and smiled.

“Now run home. It is time for tea.”

Alice ran across the field.

Her sister remained beside the river for a little while longer with her eyes closed.

In the rustling grass, she could almost hear the hurried patter of rabbit feet. The buzzing of insects sounded like the murmur of a strange tea party. Somewhere far away, a child laughed, and for a moment it seemed that the Cheshire Cat was smiling.

She thought about how Alice would grow up one day. Perhaps she would become a serious adult with many things to do.

But it would be good if she never forgot one important thing: sometimes the world becomes easier to understand precisely when you are not afraid to ask a simple question.

“Why?”

And better still, when you do not agree with nonsense simply because a Queen has said it very loudly.

And better still, when you do not agree with nonsense simply because a Queen has said it very loudly.