Not since reading Vern’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, have I encountered a monster either on land or at sea. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a volume within The Chronicles of Narnia, makes mention of a dragon.
In this chapter the crew of the Dawn Treader arrives at yet a non-named island. Eustace the priggish cousin of Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, decides to make himself scarce and gets himself helplessly lost. Being thirsty and seeing a pool up a head Eustace heads toward the pool for a drink. As he finishes refreshing himself he becomes horrified as he notices, what looks like a dragon heading toward the same pool he had just taken a drink from. Too scared to run Eustace steps back into the shadows and keeps a keen watch on the dragon.
The dragon moves very slowly toward the pool. The dragon takes a couple of laps from the pool and then becomes very still. After what seems like a life time Eustace waits to see what is to become of the dragon. The dragon seems to go to sleep, but after a while Eustace notices that the dragon seems to have stopped breathing. The dragon had dragged itself out to pool to give itself a drink and to die.
Eustace was ecstatic, of course he would be, but all that excitement made him very sleepy. Eustace wanders over to the dragon’s lair and notices gems and articles of gold upon the floor of the cave. He stuffs his pockets with the gems and slides a golden bracelet on his arm and lays down to sleep.
When Eustace awakes he perceives that he had taken up residence with the dragons mate for he perceives steam coming from her nostrils. There was no other dragon, however during the night Eustace had become a dragon. So the dragon in which he sensed was actually Eustace.
In the chapter that follows “How the Adventure Ended” the crew and passengers of the Dawn Treader had left the island, which King Caspian aptly names the, Dragon Island, and were on their way to find the lost lords. They weren’t too far out from Dragon Island when a look-out noticed what looked like a set of rocks a way in the distance. It wasn’t too long afterward when it was noticed that these semi-submersion objects were seemingly following them and were getting closer all the time. The lumps that had been mistaken as rocks were the fins or the humps of a large sea serpent.
The sea serpent coiled itself around the ship. The ship’s crew and passengers worked diligently to remove the serpent from the ship by sliding its body off the ship. They were successful, however the decorative ships stern, which was fashioned after a tail of a sea serpent was lost to this monster of the deep.
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