Part II Chapter 14 Doctor Dolittle's Garden by Hugh Lofting
BLIND TRAVEL AGAIN
Chee-Chee was overjoyed. As the Doctor left the study to go to the kitchen, I moved towards the book-case. But the agile monkey was there before me. Scaling up the shelves as though they were a ladder, he had the big volume down off the top in less time than it takes to tell it. Together we carried it to the table and laid it down.
"Oh, my, Tommy," he whispered, "we're in luck!"
He began opening the pages. The first—how well I remembered it!—title page: "ATLAS OF THE WORLD. Giving the Latest Discoveries in Africa, the Arctic and Antarctic Continents, etc. Published by Green and Sons, Edinburgh, in the year," etc., etc. Then came the astronomic page—the signs of the Zodiac; phases of the Moon; precession of the Equinoxes, etc., etc.
"The Moon!" muttered Chee-Chee. "Poor old Doctor! He seems to have gone almost balmy about the Moon. My, but look at all the lands we might visit! Come on, Tommy, let's get to the kitchen and make him begin before he changes his mind."
Grabbing a sharp pencil off the Doctor's desk, I took the heavy volume under my arm and followed Chee-Chee out of the room.
In the kitchen we found all the family seated about the table waiting for us: Bumpo, Gub-Gub, Too-Too, Jip and the white mouse.
"Ah," said the Doctor, "you have the atlas, Stubbins—and a pencil? Good! Just hold back the dinner a moment, Dab-Dab, will you, while we see where we are to go?"
"Go? Go?-What does he mean?" asked Gub-Gub of Chee-Chee in an excited whisper.
"He has consented to play Blind Travel with us," Chee-Chee whispered back.
"What on earth is that?" asked Gub-Gub.
"Oh, you open the atlas with your eyes shut and put a pencil down. And whatever point it hits, that's the place you've got to go. Goodness, I'm all of a flutter! I do hope it's somewhere in Asia. I want to see the East."
Well, if Chee-Chee was in a flutter, as he called it, Gub-Gub was even more agitated over this momentous game we were about to play. He kept running around to a different place at the table, jumping up on some one else's chair, being sat on, upsetting people, overturning furniture and generally getting the whole gathering frazzled and confused.
Not that any of us were what you could call calm. A very great deal depended on this strange game which the Doctor had invented when he was a young man. Then it only affected him. In those days he was a free unattached bachelor and this odd method of determining his destination meant very little difference so far as preparations were concerned. But now (I did not yet know how many of the household he meant to take with him) its outcome might mean much for several of us.
"Listen," said the Doctor when he had the big book laid in the centre of the table: "Last time Stubbins held the pencil. How would it be if Bumpo did it this time? He is a lucky individual, I know."
"All right," said Bumpo. "But I hope I don't send you all to the middle of the Specific Ocean." (He was turning over the first few pages and had paused at one illustrating the proportions of the globe in land and water.)
"That's all right," said the Doctor. "One of the rules of the game is that if your pencil falls on water, you have a second try. And the same thing applies if you touch a town or a district where you have been before. You keep on trying till you strike land, land which you have never visited. Then you have to go there—have to—somehow."
"Very good," said Bumpo taking up the pencil and closing the book. "I hope this is one of my lucky nights."
"I hope so too," whispered Gub-Gub nosing up his snout on to the table between the Doctor's elbow and mine. "I would like a warm country where there is plenty of sugar-cane. It's years since I tasted sugar-cane. In the Canaries it was, when we were hiding away from those wretched pirates. You remember, Polynesia?"