Then I want to take my daemon with me when I go to the land of the dead," she said firmly. "And I want to come back again. Has it ever been known, for people to do that?" The vast trunk, supported in the grove by its torn-up roots and out on the grass by the mass of branches, was high above their heads. Some of those branches, crushed and broken, were themselves as big around as the biggest trees Will had ever seen; the crown of the tree, tight-packed with boughs that still looked sturdy, leaves that were still green, towered like a ruined palace into the mild air. "But excuse me, sir," said Lyra, "I hope you don't mind me asking, but how can we have come this far if we en't dead? Because this is the world of the dead, isn't it?" They climbed up beside the waterfalls and refilled Will's canteen before striking off across the plateau toward the ridge where the alethiometer told Lyra that Iorek had gone. "And had he settled?" said Lyra. A drift of gray was leaving the Clouded Mountain, a slowly spreading smudge against the blue sky. But it couldn't have been smoke: it was drifting against the wind that tore at the clouds. "If you do not find a way out of the world of the dead, we shall not meet again, because I have no ghost. My body will remain on the earth, and then become part of it. But if it turns out that you and I both survive, then you will always be a welcome and honored visitor to Svalbard; and the same is true of Will. Has he told you what happened when we met?" "And if you found her so easily...” When Atal had had enough, she set herself on the wheels again and moved away to help with the evening meal. Mary turned back to her lacquer, and almost at once she made her discovery. But someone else came from nowhere to help them: Balthamos, in a blur of desperation, hurled himself between the children and the soldiers. The men fell back, amazed, as this apparition shimmered into being in front of them. And then a strange thing happened. Little by little (as she reinforced those sense-memories, adding others, tasting an iced margarita in California, sitting under the lemon trees outside a restaurant in Lisbon, scraping the frost off the windshield of her car), she felt the Dust wind easing. The pressure was lessening. "If they got hold of us," said Pantalaimon, meaning him and Lyra, "and got their stings ready to stick in us, Will’d have to do what they said." She was trembling. She felt very young as he held her to his side. "Are they still there, somewhere else? Will we see them again?"