Summary

Digory and Polly jump through the pool and end up standing on pavement with concrete buildings all around. It is dark and there is an eery red light cast on just about everything. There is a courtyard, surrounded by high walls. There are glass windows but all that can be seen is darkness. Red stone buildings adorn the landscape. The children feel afraid, as though someone is watching. The dead silence of this world is different from the silence of the Wood. Here it is cold and empty and nothing is growing. The children find another larger courtyard. This place seems to have been deserted for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Then they find a room that has hundreds of wax figures sitting in rows upon rows. The faces change from pleasant and happy to more and more ugly and twisted as they walk past the rows. Finally they see one wax figure in particular, a female, who is strikingly beautiful. Finally the children notice that in the middle of the room there is a square pillar with a golden arch - and a golden bell. Digory forces Polly to go along with him in tapping the bell with a hammer. Polly cries in anger as the noise, which sweet and not very loud at first, grows louder and louder until it sounds so disastrous, a roof at one end of the room collapses.