有声英语儿童童话故事 海的女儿 第22章

Then the little mermaid went outfrom her garden and took the road to the foaming whirlpools, behind which thesorceress lived. She had never been that way before. Neither flowers nor grassgrew there; nothing but bare, gray, sandy ground stretched out to thewhirlpool, where the water, like foaming mill wheels, seized everything thatcame within its reach and cast it into the fathomless deep. Through the midstof these crushing whirlpools the little mermaid was obliged to pass before shecould reach the dominions of the sea witch. Then, for a long distance, the roadlay across a stretch of warm, bubbling mire, called by the witch her turf moor.

Beyond this was the witch’shouse, which stood in the center of a strange forest, where all the trees andflowers were polypi, half animals and half plants. They looked like serpentswith a hundred heads, growing out of the ground. The branches were long, slimyarms, with fingers like flexible worms, moving limb after limb from the root tothe top. All that could be reached in the sea they seized upon and held fast,so that it never escaped from their clutches.