‘A what?’ said Charlie.
‘We’ve struck chocolate again, my boy. That’ll be a rich new field. Oh, what a beautiful gusher! Just look at it go!’
On they roared, heading downward more steeply than ever now, and hundreds, literally hundreds of astonishing sights kept flashing by outside. There were giant cog-wheels turning and mixers mixing and bubbles bubbling and vast orchards of toffee-apple trees and lakes the size of football grounds filled with blue and gold and green liquid, and everywhere there were Oompa-Loompas!
‘You realize,’ said Mr Wonka, ‘that what you saw earlier on when you went round the factory with all those naughty little children was only a tiny corner of the establishment. It goes down for miles and miles. And as soon as possible I shall show you all the way around slowly and properly. But that will take three weeks. Right now we have other things to think about and I have important things to tell you. Listen carefully to me, Charlie. I must talk fast, for we’ll be there in a couple of minutes.
‘I suppose you guessed,’ Mr Wonka went on, ‘what happened to all those Oompa-Loompas in the Testing Room when I was experimenting with Wonka-Vite. Of course you did. They disappeared and became Minuses just like your Grandma Georgina. The recipe was miles too strong. One of them actually became Minus eighty-seven! Imagine that!’
‘You mean he’s got to wait eighty-seven years before he can come back?’ Charlie asked.
‘That’s what kept bugging me, my boy. After all, one can’t allow one’s best friends to wait around as miserable Minuses for eighty-seven years . . .’
‘And get subtracted as well,’ said Charlie. ‘That would be frightful.’
‘Of course it would, Charlie. So what did I do? “Willy Wonka,” I said to myself, “if you can invent Wonka-Vite to make people younger, then surely to goodness you can also invent something else to make people older!”‘
‘Ah-ha!’ cried Charlie. ‘I see what you’re getting at. Then you could turn the Minuses quickly back into Pluses and bring them home again.’
‘Precisely, my dear boy, precisely — always supposing, of course, that I could find out where the Minuses had gone to!’
The Elevator plunged on, diving steeply toward the centre of the Earth. All was blackness outside now. There was nothing to be seen.
‘So once again,’ Mr Wonka went on, ‘I rolled up my sleeves and set to work. Once again I squeezed my brain, searching for the new recipe . . . I had to create age . . . to make people old . . . old, older, oldest . . . “Ha-ha!” I cried, for now the ideas were beginning to come. “What is the oldest living thing in the world? What lives longer than anything else?”‘
‘A tree,’ Charlie said.
‘Right you are, Charlie! But what kind of a tree? Not the Douglas Fir. Not the Oak. Not the Cedar. No no, my boy. It is a tree called the Bristlecone Pine that grows upon the slopes of Wheeler Peak in Nevada, U.S.A. You can find Bristlecone Pines on Wheeler Peak today that are over four thousand years old! This is fact, Charlie. Ask any dendrochronologist you like (and look that word up in the dictionary when you get home, will you, please?). So that started me off. I jumped into the Great Glass Elevator and rushed all over the world collecting special items from the oldest living things . . .
A PINT OF SAP FROM A 4000-YEAR-OLD BRISTLECONE PINE
THE TOE-NAIL CLIPPINGS FROM A 168-YEAR-OLD RUSSIAN FARMER CALLED PETROVITCH GREGOROVITCH
AN EGG LAID BY A 200-YEAR-OLD TORTOISE BELONGING TO THE KING OF TONGA
THE TAIL OF A 51-YEAR-OLD HORSE IN ARABIA
THE WHISKERS OF A 36-YEAR-OLD CAT CALLED CRUMPETS
AN OLD FLEA WHICH HAD LIVED ON CRUMPETS FOR 36 YEARS
THE TAIL OF A 207-YEAR-OLD GIANT RAT FROM TIBET
THE BLACK TEETH OF A 97-YEAR OLD GRIMALKIN LIVING IN A CAVE ON MOUNT POPOCATEPETL
THE KNUCKLEBONES OF A 700-YEAR-OLD CATTALOO FROM PERU . . .
. . . All over the world, Charlie, I tracked down very old and ancient animals and took an important little bit of something from each one of them — a hair or an eyebrow or sometimes it was no more than an ounce or two of the jam scraped from between its toes while it was sleeping. I tracked down THE WHISTLE-PIG, THE BOBOLINK, THE SKROCK, THE POLLY-FROG, THE GIANT CURLICUE, THE STINGING SLUG AND THE VENOMOUS SQUERKLE who can spit poison right into your eye from fifty yards away. But there’s no time to tell you about them all now, Charlie. Let me just say quickly that in the end, after lots of boiling and bubbling and mixing and testing in my Inventing Room, I produced one tiny cupful of oily black liquid and gave four drops of it to a brave twenty-year-old Oompa-Loompa volunteer to see what happened.’