The_Complete_Chronicles_of_Narnia_(volumes_1-7,_in_order_of_publication)

had given the blow would drop his hammer and howl with pain because it had stung his
fingers. But he was so stupid that he would do exactly the same thing a minute later. This
was a good thing in the long run, for by the end of an hour all the giants were so hurt that
they sat down and began to cry. When they sat down, their heads were below the edge of
the gorge, so that you saw them no more; but Jill could hear them howling and
blubbering and boo-booing like great babies even after the place was a mile behind.
That night they bivouacked on the bare moor, and Puddleglum showed the children how
to make the best of their blankets by sleeping back to back. (The backs keep each other
warm and you can then have both blankets on top.) But it was chilly even so, and the
ground was hard and lumpy. The Marsh-wiggle told them they would feel more
comfortable if only they thought how very much colder it would be later on and farther
north; but this didn't cheer them up at all.
They travelled across Ettinsmoor for many days, saving the bacon and living chiefly on
the moor-fowl (they were not, of course, talking birds) which Eustace and the wiggle
shot. Jill rather envied Eustace for being able to shoot; he had learned it on his voyage
with King Caspian. As there were countless streams on the moor, they were never short
of water. Jill thought that when, in books, people live on what they shoot, it never tells
you what a long, smelly, messy job it is plucking and cleaning dead birds, and how cold it
makes your fingers. But the great thing was that they met hardly any giants. One giant
saw them, but he only roared with laughter and stumped away about his own business.
About the tenth day, they reached a place where the country changed. They came to the
northern edge of the moor and looked down a long, steep slope into a different, and
grimmer, land. At the bottom of the slope were cliffs: beyond these, a country of high
mountains, dark precipices, stony valleys, ravines so deep and narrow that one could not
see far into them, and rivers that poured out of echoing gorges to plunge sullenly into
black depths. Needless to say, it was Puddleglum who pointed out a sprinkling of snow
on the more distant slopes.
"But there'll be more on the north side of them, I shouldn't wonder," he added.
It took them some time to reach the foot of the slope and, when they did, they looked
down from the top of the cliffs at a river running below them from west to east. It was
walled in by precipices on the far side as well as on their own, and it was green and
sunless, full of rapids and waterfalls. The roar of it shook the earth even where they
stood.
"The bright side of it is," said Puddleglum, "that if we break our necks getting down the
cliff, then we're safe from being drowned in the river."
"What about that?" said Scrubb suddenly, pointing upstream to their left. Then they all
looked and saw the last thing they were expecting - a bridge. And what a bridge, too! It
was a huge, single arch that spanned the gorge from cliff-top to cliff-top; and the crown
of that arch was as high above the cliff-tops as the dome of St Paul's is above the street.