The Wood Between the Worlds
"The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sin overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing." (33)
The overwhelming image created here is one of absolute tranquility. Although the author is appealing to our visual senses, he also appeals to our auditory senses, precisely by providing no sound whatsoever, leaving the reader to imagine total and complete silence. One of the reasons for the tranquility is the preponderance of the color green, as even the sunlight appears green because the thick foliage is acting as a color filter. Many experts in color therapy consider green to be a very calming color, one ideal for creating a relaxing environment, and the green-tinged wood has a relaxing and almost soporific effect on the children when they first arrive.
Sunlight in Charn
"It wasn't like sunlight, or electric light, or lamps, or candles, or any other light they had ever seen. It was a dull, rather red light, not at all cheerful. It was steady and did not flicker... The sky was extraordinarily dark - a blue that was almost black. When you had seen that sky you wondered that there should be any light at all." (48)
The author again uses color and light to set the tone and mood of the environment. The colors in this description are not calming or friendly but actually rather threatening. The darkness of the sky mirrors the overwhelming darkness of the ambience, and the strange lighting seems to foreshadow events that will take place there.
The bell
"As soon as the bell was struck it gave out a note, a sweet note such as you might have expected, and not very loud. But instead of dying away again, it went on; and as it went on it grew louder. Before a minute has passed it was twice as loud as it had been to begin with. It was soon so loud that if the children had tried to speak (but they weren't thinking of speaking now - they were just standing with their mouths open) they would not have heard one another. Very soon it was so loud that they could not have heard one another even by shouting. And still it grew: all on one note, a continuous sweet sound, though the sweetness had something horrible about it, till all the air in that great room was throbbing with it and they could feel the stone floor trembling under their feet." (60-61)
Appealing to the reader's auditory sense, the author gives a tremendously long description of a single note. It does not waver in timbre, but merely grows louder and louder until it overwhelms everything else. Just as the tranquil silence in the wood between the worlds mirrored the beautiful calm greenness of the environment, the overpowering ringing mirrors the threatening darkness and the ugliness of the world they are in. The single note is also almost hypnotic, forcing the reader and the children to focus on only this noise.
The stars of Narnia
"The voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that all the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently, one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out -- single stars, constellations and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world." (115 - 116)
The imagery here is again a combination of sound and vision with the sound dictating the appearance and mood of the surroundings. The image also shows the voice as the creator of the stars and the bringer of light, in harmony with the theme of creation, which aligns Aslan with goodness as a Creator. The sound of his voice is a good sound as it brings light to the darkness quite suddenly and brilliantly, like a light being switched on in a sudden large-scale illumination. The description also uses onomatopoeia to let the reader know what the additional voices sound like - they are "tingling" and "silvery" which lets the reader know that they are vaguely metallic.
Aslan's voice
"The eastern sky changes from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose." (118)
The image created with this description is one of a benevolent Creator bringing majestic light and beauty to the world by ushering in the start of a new day. The colors of the sky begin softly and crescendo until the sky is gols; the sky's gradual transformation mirrors the voice, beginning gently and reaching a crescendo with a flash of gold and a sound so deeply resonant that the entire atmosphere swells and moves. This image of goodness and creation starkly contrasts the long ringing bell in Charn (described earlier in the novel) that had also made the earth vibrate but in a way that was threatening. With the descriptions of color and sound used to portray mood and tone, the author denotes good and bad events and foreshadow good or evil happenings.
