Alice climbs through the drawing-room mirror into a backwards country laid out as a chessboard, where she is a white pawn who must cross to the eighth rank to be crowned. She passes a talking egg who pays his words extra to mean whatever he likes, twin brothers who recite a poem about weeping oysters, and a White Knight forever sliding off his horse. Carroll's sequel to Wonderland swaps the falling dream for a walking one and lays it out with the cold symmetry of a chess problem — mirror-writing, backwards logic, and some of the most quotable nonsense in the language.