The last hortus conclusus tableau in Dawn Treader incorporates all the motifs of the garden which have been discussed in previous depictions. It, however, is the most sublime. All laws of space and time are broken:
They [the three children and Reepicheep] saw a wonder ahead. It was as if a wall stood up between them and the sky, a greenish-gray, trembling, shimmering wall. Then up came the sun, and at its first rising they saw it through the wall and it turned into wonderful rainbow colors. Then they knew that the wall was really a long, tall wave-a wave endlessly fixed in one place as you may often see at the edge of a waterfall. (263-64)
The shimmering high wave that seems to be a boundary between the Narnian world and Aslan’s is actually surmountable. In some religious works, the terrestrial paradise is separated from the rest of the world by a body of water instead of a wall, based on Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 22:1-2 (Rhodes and Davidson 81): “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb.” Reepicheep, in his little coracle, will later glide up one side of it and down the other into Aslan’s Country. And even the huge sun is not an obstacle to their vision. Beyond it, the four travelers can see the high green mountains of Aslan’s Country beyond the borders of the world, which they will climb in The Last Battle towards the eternal garden. As the sun rises, the sight of the mountains disappears, again suggesting that light (Christ) is the source of all meaning in the universe. The travelers have reached a point where laws of time and space do not exist. This dynamic scene integrates all natural icons of the Narnian landscape (light, green mountains, trees, and water) with Aslan to suggest that Narnia and Aslan’s Country are actually linked, and Aslan is the Bridge Builder. The tableau invites the readers to conceive likewise of Earth and Heaven as more closely linked than they appear to be, and to recognize that our loci of our experience are in a real sense spiritually meaningful. Lewis himself states in Miracles that the physical and spiritual are actually one: “[t]hat archaic sort of thinking will become simply the correct sort when Nature and Spirit are fully harmonized-when Spirit rides Nature so perfectly that the two together make rather a Centaur than a mounted knight” (Miracles 164).
A short time later, the children waded into the calm water (a final stage of regeneration) to get to a flat open-spaced green meadow where, sure enough, sky and water meet. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here the sky did really come down and join the earth-a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else. And soon they were quite sure of it. It was very near now.
But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles’ eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb.
(Dawn Treader 267-68)
Later, as they eat the fish offered by the Lamb, suggesting both the Eucharist and Christ’s appearance to his disciples after the Resurrection, the Lamb transforms into Aslan. Two iconic images of Christ are unified here: “Then all in one moment there was a rending of the blue wall (like a curtain being torn) and a terrible white light from beyond the sky” (270). The children, as a group, are rewarded with a direct experience of Aslan’s presence.
The iconography in these last two scenes, the richest yet in Dawn Treader, pulls together all the preceding icons in a glorious finale. The lamb and the white light (magnified so that it is all that the children see for a moment) are icons of Christ (the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world) and can also be perceived as “the fruitfulness of Christ’s union with the church” (Stewart 168). The green meadow is one of the traditional motifs of the earthly and celestial garden. The image of glass mirrors the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation: “And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal” and “the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass” (Revelation 4:6 and 21:18, respectively). All of the natural icons in the East of Narnia are integrated into this collage with Aslan at the center. Rhodes and Davidson describe the same motifs in The Lyfe of saynt Brandon which, like Dawn Treader, is supposedly an actual voyage from island to island representing various visions of paradise. As in Dawn Treader, the travelers sail through a black cloud onto an island shining with light “as bryght as the Sonne,” with herbs and trees and “full of grene pasture whein were y whytest ā gretest shepe that euer they sawe” (sig. A3r-A3v). The last island is full of ripe fruits, clear light, and precious stones. Like Aslan’s Country, it is at the farthest eastward edge of the world and separated by a body of water (Rhodes and Davidson 79-80).