Read Online A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet) by Madeleine L'Engle - Free Book Online

“Nnott yett. Nnott heere. Yyou mmay wwaitt.”
    “Now, don’t be frightened, loves,” Mrs Whatsit said. Her plump little body began to shimmer, to quiver, to shift. The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs Whatsit. She was a marble white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joysuch as Meg had never before seen. No, she thought, it’s not like a Greek centaur. Not in the least.
    From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry.
    Calvin fell to his knees.
    “No,” Mrs Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs Whatsit’s voice. “Not to me, Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.”
    “Ccarrry themm,” Mrs Which commanded.
    With a gesture both delicate and strong Mrs Whatsit knelt in front of the children, stretching her wings wide and holding them steady, but quivering. “Onto my back, now,” the new voice said.
    The children took hesitant steps toward the beautiful creature.
    “But what do we call you now?” Calvin asked.
    “Oh, my dears,” came the new voice, a rich voice with the warmth of a woodwind, the clarity of a trumpet, the mystery of an English horn. “You can’t go on changing my name each time I metamorphose. And I’ve had such pleasure being Mrs Whatsit I think you’d better keep to that.” She? he? it? smiled at them, and the radiance of the smile was as tangible as a soft breeze, as directly warming as the rays of the sun.
    “Come.” Charles Wallace clambered up.
    Meg and Calvin followed him, Meg sitting between the two boys. A tremor went through the great wings and then Mrs Whatsit lifted and they were moving through the air.
    Meg soon found that there was no need to cling to Charles Wallace or Calvin. The great creature’s flight wasserenely smooth. The boys were eagerly looking around the landscape.
    “Look.” Charles Wallace pointed. “The mountains are so tall that you can’t see where they end.”
    Meg looked upward and indeed the mountains seemed to be reaching into infinity.
    They left the fertile fields and flew across a great plateau of granite-like rock shaped into enormous monoliths. These had a definite, rhythmic form, but they were not statues; they were like nothing Meg had ever seen before, and she wondered if they had been made by wind and weather, by the formation of this earth, or if they were a creation of beings like the one on which she rode.
    They left the great granite plain and flew over a garden even more beautiful than anything in a dream. In it were gathered many of the creatures like the one Mrs Whatsit had become, some lying among the flowers, some swimming in a broad, crystal river that flowed through the garden, some flying in what Meg was sure must be a kind of dance, moving in and out above the trees. They were making music, music that came not only from their throats but from the movement of their great wings as well.
    “What are they singing?” Meg asked excitedly.
    Mrs Whatsit shook her beautiful head. “It won’t go into your words: I can’t possibly transfer it to your words. Are you getting any of it, Charles?”
    Charles Wallace sat very still on the broad back, on his face an intently listening look, the look he had when hedelved into Meg or his mother. “A little. Just a very little. But I think I could get more in time.”
    “Yes. You could learn it, Charles. But there isn’t time. We can only stay here long enough to rest up and make a few preparations.”
    Meg hardly listened to