Михаэль Энде - The Neverending Story

“Let me show you something, my Bastian,” she said. “Look into my eyes.”

Bastian obeyed, though his heart was pounding and he felt dizzy.

In the golden mirror of her eyes, he saw, small at first as though far in the distance, a reflection which little by little grew larger and more distinct. It was a boy of about his own age; but this boy was slender and wonderfully handsome. His bearing was proud and erect, his face was noble, manly—and lean. He looked like a young prince from the Orient. His turban was of blue silk and so was the silver-embroidered tunic which reached down to his knees. His high boots, made of the softest red leather, were turned up at the toes. And he was wearing a silver-glittering mantle which hung down to the ground. But most beautiful of all were the boy’s hands, which, though delicately shaped, gave an impression of unusual strength.

Bastian gazed at the image with wonder and admiration. He couldn’t get enough of it. He was just going to ask who this handsome young prince might be when it came to him in a flash that this was his very own self—his reflection in Moon Child’s golden eyes.

In that moment he was transported, carried out of himself, and when he returned, he found he had become the handsome boy whose image he had seen.

He looked down, and saw exactly what he had seen in Moon Child’s eyes: the soft, red-leather boots, the blue tunic embroidered with silver, the resplendent long mantle. He touched his turban and felt his face. His face was the same too.

And then he turned toward Moon Child.

She was gone!

He was alone in the round room which the glowing thicket had formed.

“Moon Child!” he shouted. “Moon Child!” There was no answer.

Feeling utterly lost, he sat down. What was he to do now? Why had she left him alone? Where should he go—that is, if he was free to go anywhere, if he wasn’t caught in a trap?

While he was wondering why Moon Child should have vanished without a word of explanation, without so much as bidding him goodbye, his fingers started playing with a golden medallion that was hanging from his neck.

He looked at it and let out a cry of surprise.

It was AURYN, the Gem, the Childlike Empress’s amulet, which made its bearer her representative. Moon Child had given him power over every creature and thing in Fantastica. And as long as he wore that emblem, it would be as though she were with him.

For a long while Bastian looked at the two snakes, the one light, the other dark, which were biting each other’s tail, and formed an oval. Then he turned the amulet over and to his surprise found an inscription on the reverse side. It consisted of four words in strangely intricate letters:

Do

What You

Wish

There had been no mention of such an inscription in the Neverending Story. Could it be that Atreyu hadn’t noticed it?

But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that the words gave him permission, ordered him in fact, to do whatever he pleased.

Bastian approached the wall of luminous plants to see if he could slip through somewhere. To his delight he found that the wall could easily be thrust aside like a curtain. Out he stepped.

In the meantime, the night plants had kept on growing, gently but irresistibly, and Perilin had become a forest such as no human eye had ever beheld.

The great trunks were now as high and thick as church towers, and still growing. In places these shimmering, milky-white pillars were so close together that it was impossible to pass between them. And seeds were still falling like a shower of sparks.

On his way through the luminous forest, Bastian tried hard not to step on the glittering seeds that lay on the ground, but this soon proved impossible. There simply wasn’t a foot’s breadth of ground from which nothing was sprouting. So he stopped worrying and went wherever the giant trees left a path open for him.

Bastian was delighted at being handsome. It didn’t bother him that there was no one to admire him. On the contrary, he was glad to have the pleasure all to himself. He didn’t care a fig for being admired by the lugs who had always made fun of him. If he thought of them at all, it was almost with pity.

In this forest, where there were no seasons and no alternation of day and night, the feeling of time was entirely different from anything Bastian had ever known. He had no idea how long he had been on his way. But little by little his pleasure in being handsome underwent a change. He began to take it for granted. Not that he was any less happy about it; but now he had the feeling that he had never been any different.

For this there was a reason which Bastian was not to discover until much later. The beauty that had been bestowed on him made him forget, little by little, that he had ever been fat and bowlegged.

Even if he had known what was happening, he would hardly have regretted the loss of this particular memory. As it happened, he didn’t even realize that he had forgotten anything. And when the memory had vanished completely, it seemed to him that he had always been as handsome as he was now.

At that point a new wish cropped up. Just being handsome wasn’t as wonderful as he had thought. He also wanted to be strong, stronger than anybody! The strongest in the world!

While going deeper and deeper into the Night Forest, he began to feel hungry. He picked off a few of the strangely shaped luminous fruits and nibbled gingerly to see if they were edible. Edible was no word for it; some were tart, some sweet, some slightly bitter, but all were delicious. He ate as he walked, and felt a miraculous strength flowing into his limbs.

In the meantime the glowing underbrush around him had become so dense that it cut off his view on all sides. To make matters worse, lianas and aerial roots were becoming inextricably tangled with the thicket below. Slashing with the side of his hand as if it had been a machete, Bastian opened up a passage. And the breach closed directly behind him as if it had never been.

On he went, but the wall of giant tree trunks blocked his path. Bastian grabbed hold of two great tree trunks and bent them apart. When he had passed through, the wall closed soundlessly behind him.

Bastian shouted for joy.

He was the Lord of the Jungle!

For a while he amused himself opening paths for himself, like an elephant that has heard the Great Call. His strength did not abate, he had no need to stop for breath. He felt no stitch in his side, and his heart didn’t thump or race.

But after a while he wearied of his new sport. The next thing he wanted was to look down on his domain from above, to see how big it was.

He spat on his hands, took hold of a liana, and pulled himself up hand over hand, without using his legs, as he had seen acrobats do in the circus. For a moment a vision—a pale memory of the past—came to him of himself in gym class, dangling like a sack of flour from the bottommost end of the rope, while the rest of the class cackled with glee. He couldn’t help smiling. How they would gape if they saw him now! They’d be proud to know him. But he wouldn’t even look at them.

Without stopping once he finally reached the branch from which the liana was hanging, climbed up and straddled it. The branch gave off a red glow. He stood up and, balancing himself like a tightrope walker, made his way to the trunk. Here again a dense tangle of creepers barred his way, but he had no difficulty in opening up a passage through it.

At that height the trunk was still so thick that five men clasping hands could not have encircled it. Another, somewhat higher branch, jutting from the trunk in a different direction, was beyond his reach. So he leapt through the air, caught hold of an aerial root, swung himself into place, made another perilous leap, and grabbed the higher branch. From there he was able to pull himself up to a still higher one. By then he was high above the ground, at least three hundred feet, but the glowing branches and foliage still obstructed his view.