Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Read online

  'But who are these workers?' asked Augustus Gloop.

  'All in good time, my dear boy!' said Mr Wonka, smiling at Augustus. 'Be patient! You shall see everything as we go along! Are all of you inside? Good! Would you mind closing the door? Thank you!'

  Charlie Bucket found himself standing in a long corridor that stretched away in front of him as far as he could see. The corridor was so wide that a car could easily have been driven along it. The walls were pale pink, the lighting was soft and pleasant.

  'How lovely and warm!' whispered Charlie.

  'I know. And what a marvellous smell!' answered Grandpa Joe, taking a long deep sniff. All the most wonderful smells in the world seemed to be mixed up in the air around them - the smell of roasting coffee and burnt sugar and melting chocolate and mint and violets and crushed hazelnuts and apple blossom and caramel and lemon peel...

  And far away in the distance, from the heart of the great factory, came a muffled roar of energy as though some monstrous gigantic machine were spinning its wheels at breakneck speed.

  'Now this, my dear children,' said Mr Wonka, raising his voice above the noise, 'this is the main corridor. Will you please hang your coats and hats on those pegs over there, and then follow me. That's the way! Good! Everyone ready? Come on, then! Here we go!' He trotted off rapidly down the corridor with the tails of his plum-coloured velvet coat flapping behind him, and the visitors all hurried after him.

  It was quite a large party of people, when you came to think of it. There were nine grown-ups and five children, fourteen in all. So you can imagine that there was a good deal of pushing and shoving as they hustled and bustled down the passage, trying to keep up with the swift little figure in front of them. 'Come on!' cried Mr Wonka. 'Get a move on, please! We'll never get round today if you dawdle like this!'

  Soon, he turned right off the main corridor into another slightly narrower passage.

  Then he turned left.

  Then left again.

  Then right.

  Then left.

  Then right.

  Then right.

  Then left.

  The place was like a gigantic rabbit warren, with passages leading this way and that in every direction.

  'Don't you let go my hand, Charlie,' whispered Grandpa Joe.

  'Notice how all these passages are sloping downwards!' called out Mr Wonka. 'We are now going underground! All the most important rooms in my factory are deep down below the surface!'

  'Why is that?' somebody asked.

  'There wouldn't be nearly enough space for them up on top!' answered Mr Wonka. 'These rooms we are going to see are enormous! They're larger than football fields! No building in the world would be big enough to house them! But down here, underneath the ground, I've got all the space I want. There's no limit - so long as I hollow it out.'

  Mr Wonka turned right.

  He turned left.

  He turned right again.

  The passages were sloping steeper and steeper downhill now.

  Then suddenly, Mr Wonka stopped. In front of him, there was a shiny metal door. The party crowded round. On the door, in large letters, it said: THE CHOCOLATE ROOM

  15

  The Chocolate Room

  'An important room, this!' cried Mr Wonka, taking a bunch of keys from his pocket and slipping one into the keyhole of the door. 'This is the nerve centre of the whole factory, the heart of the whole business! And so beautiful! I insist upon my rooms being beautiful! I can't abide ugliness in factories! In we go, then! But do be careful, my dear children! Don't lose your heads! Don't get over-excited! Keep very calm!'

  Mr Wonka opened the door. Five children and nine grown-ups pushed their ways in - and oh, what an amazing sight it was that now met their eyes!

  They were looking down upon a lovely valley. There were green meadows on either side of the valley, and along the bottom of it there flowed a great brown river.

  What is more, there was a tremendous waterfall halfway along the river - a steep cliff over which the water curled and rolled in a solid sheet, and then went crashing down into a boiling churning whirlpool of froth and spray.

  Below the waterfall (and this was the most

  astonishing sight of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling! They really were enormous, those pipes. There must have been a dozen of them at least, and they were sucking up the brownish muddy water from the river and carrying it away to goodness knows where. And because they were made of glass, you could see the liquid flowing and bubbling along inside them, and above the noise of the waterfall, you could hear the never-ending suck-suck-sucking sound of the pipes as they did their work.

  Graceful trees and bushes were growing along the riverbanks - weeping willows and alders and tall clumps of rhododendrons with their pink and red and mauve blossoms. In the meadows there were thousands of buttercups.

  ' There!' cried Mr Wonka, dancing up and down and pointing his gold-topped cane at the great brown river. 'It's all chocolate! Every drop of that river is hot melted chocolate of the finest quality. The very finest quality. There's enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well! Isn't it terrific? And just look at my pipes! They suck up the chocolate and carry it away to all the other rooms in the factory where it is needed! Thousands of gallons an hour, my dear children! Thousands and thousands of gallons!'

  The children and their parents were too flabbergasted to speak. They were staggered. They were dumbfounded. They were bewildered and dazzled. They were completely bowled over by the hugeness of the whole thing. They simply stood and stared.

  'The waterfall is most important!' Mr Wonka went on. 'It mixes the chocolate! It churns it up! It pounds it and beats it! It makes it light and frothy! No other factory in the world mixes its chocolate by waterfall! But it's the only way to do it properly! The only way! And do you like my trees?' he cried, pointing with his stick. 'And my lovely bushes? Don't you think they look pretty? I told you I hated ugliness! And of course they are all eatable! All made of something different and delicious! And do you like my meadows? Do you like my grass and my buttercups? The grass you are standing on, my dear little ones, is made of a new kind of soft, minty sugar that I've just invented! I call it swudge! Try a blade! Please do! It's delectable!'

  Automatically, everybody bent down and picked one blade of grass - everybody, that is, except Augustus Gloop, who took a big handful.

  And Violet Beauregarde, before tasting her blade of grass, took the piece of world-record-breaking chewing-gum out of her mouth and stuck it carefully behind her ear.

  'Isn't it wonderful!' whispered Charlie. 'Hasn't it got a wonderful taste, Grandpa?'

  'I could eat the whole field!' said Grandpa Joe, grinning with delight. T could go around on all fours like a cow and eat every blade of grass in the field!'

  'Try a buttercup!' cried Mr Wonka. 'They're even nicer!'

  Suddenly, the air was filled with screams of excitement. The screams came from Veruca Salt. She was pointing frantically to the other side of the river. 'Look! Look over there!' she screamed. 'What is it? He's moving! He's walking! It's a little person! It's a little man!. Down there below the waterfall!'

  Everybody stopped picking buttercups and stared across the river.

  'She's right, Grandpa!' cried Charlie. 'It is a little man! Can you see him?'

  'I see him, Charlie!' said Grandpa Joe excitedly.

  And now everybody started shouting at once.

  'There's two of them!'

  'My gosh, so there is!'

  'There's more than two! There's one, two, three, four, five!'

  'What are they doing?'

  'Where do they come from?'

  'Who are they?'

  Children and parents alike rushed down to the edge of the river to get a closer look.

  'Aren't they fantastic!'

  'No higher than my knee!'

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