Escape from the Enchanter's Tower is a decisive reversal from imprisonment to self-directed flight. The children, Moon-Face, Silky, and the Saucepan Man are first confined by the Enchanter inside a tower in the Land of Spells, but a small jar of Whizz-Away Ointment turns an apparently ordinary table and bench into magical escape craft. The episode joins danger, ingenuity, comic disorder, and the recurring movement between enclosed rooms and open routes through the Faraway Tree's worlds.

Causes and Background

The crisis begins after the travelers enter a cellar filled with sacks of gold. A door above opens, sunlight falls across the stone steps, and a tall man in a pointed hat appears. Moon-Face recognizes him as an enchanter, while the man immediately calls the visitors robbers, thieves, and burglars and orders servants to capture them. The charge places the group in immediate danger, whether or not the accusation is justified: they are inside the Enchanter's property, and the opened sacks make their presence look incriminating.

The group gains a temporary advantage when Moon-Face captures Mr. Change-About inside a kettle and uses that feat to intimidate the Enchanter. The Enchanter appears to surrender and waves everyone toward a door, promising that they may leave at once. The apparent release is a trap. Instead of leading outdoors, the door opens onto hundreds of stairs that climb upward into a round room with a single small window, a bench, and a table. The architecture converts promised freedom into vertical confinement: the travelers are moved away from the cellar but not out of captivity.

The Enchanter then announces that he will fetch Wizard Wily, who will decide how to deal with the supposed robbers. Jo understands that the group is worse off than before, because the tower's height and the small window make ordinary escape impossible. The physical arrangement of the room therefore creates the event's central problem: the only plausible exit is too narrow for a normal departure, and the captors are approaching from below.

The Ointment and the Escape Plan

The solution is discovered in Jo's belongings rather than supplied by the Enchanter's world. While searching their pockets for food, the boys find string, paper, a pencil, marbles, and a very small, heavy pink jar. Jo explains that he bought the jar after seeing a witch sell Whizz-Away Ointment for broomsticks in the Land of Spells. He had intended to rub it on his mother's broomstick merely to see it fly, but the unused ointment now becomes the means of escape.

Moon-Face immediately recognizes the jar's importance. Its power is not presented as a mysterious new discovery but as a remembered property of an object already carried by the children. This makes preparation and resourcefulness more important than strength. The group has no workable path down the tower, yet it possesses a substance designed to make objects move through the air.

Jo organizes the escape around the two pieces of furniture. Moon-Face, Silky, and the Saucepan Man sit on the bench, while the children sit on the table. Everyone takes a place before the approaching footsteps become too near. Jo rubs the ointment on the furniture and gives the exact command “Whizz-Away Home!” The phrase makes the intended destination explicit: the aim is not merely to leave the tower, but to return to safety through the familiar network of the Faraway Tree.

The Table Breaks Through

The enchantment begins slowly, then gathers force. The bench and table move as though learning how to fly, while the children react with squeals and surprise. The table rises toward the small window but initially sticks because its full shape cannot pass through the opening. This pause turns the escape into a test rather than an effortless spell.

The table solves the obstruction by tipping itself upward. Once angled, it can squeeze through the window, carrying the children as they cling to its legs. It then sails away upside down, with its four legs in the air, over the Land of Spells. The inverted flight echoes the topsy-turvy spatial logic encountered elsewhere in the tree's worlds, but here inversion is not a social rule imposed by a policeman; it is a practical adjustment that enables freedom.

The table leaves first, while the bench must wait. The delay exposes the adults to renewed danger. Just as the bench is about to rise, the Enchanter and Wizard Wily rush into the room. The Saucepan Man prevents them from stopping the escape by throwing the kettle that contains Mr. Change-About. The lid comes off, Mr. Change-About leaps out, and he enlarges himself almost to the size of a giant before striking the Enchanter for having put him into the kettle.

The resulting fight is chaotic because identities and intentions are briefly confused. Wizard Wily attacks Mr. Change-About without recognizing who he is or where he came from. The Enchanter tries to seize the departing bench, but Mr. Change-About punches him in the nose and knocks him over again. From the bench, Moon-Face urges Mr. Change-About to hit harder. In this comic reversal, the captors' own magical resources disrupt their control, and the conflict inside the tower becomes the cover that allows the remaining travelers to escape.

Flight, Return, and Significance

The bench finally sails through the window with Moon-Face, Silky, and the Saucepan Man clinging to it. The two vehicles separate in the distance: the table carries the children ahead, while the bench follows after the fight. Jo worries that the table may not know the way home, a concern that briefly restores uncertainty after the physical escape has succeeded.

The table does know its way. It flies over hills, woods, and even the sea before Jo recognizes the dark wood below as the Enchanted Wood. The destination confirms that “home” is not only a fixed domestic address but also a route through the enchanted geography that connects the travelers to safety. The escape therefore ends not with a final defeat of magic, but with the group's ability to redirect magical movement toward a known place.

The episode also establishes a recurring spatial pattern. The travelers repeatedly cross thresholds by jumping a ditch into the wood, climbing the topmost branch of the Faraway Tree, passing through a hole in the cloud, and descending a ladder or sliding through the tree. In the tower, the expected exit is blocked and the route must be reinvented through a window. Later magical journeys similarly depend on objects that move through the air: a bed treated with the same ointment can carry travelers back toward the Faraway Tree, and the group eventually descends the tree by the Slippery-Slip. Across these episodes, enclosure is never simply the opposite of adventure; it is the pressure that makes a new passage visible.

As an event, Escape from the Enchanter's Tower combines the escape plot with a comic underdog reversal. The Enchanter controls the cellar, the tower, the servants, and the supposed legal authority to imprison the visitors, but his deception produces the very confinement that makes the table and bench necessary. The children contribute the crucial object and command, Moon-Face contributes confidence and improvisation, the Saucepan Man supplies the decisive interruption, and Mr. Change-About's uncontrolled transformation turns pursuit into protection. Freedom is achieved collectively, through coordination, remembered knowledge, and the conversion of furniture into a route home.