The Book of Wonder | Page 7

were no new songs;
while, untouched by human trouble, untouched as yet by the night that
was hiding the plains away, the peak of Mluna, calm in the afterglow,
looked on the Dubious Land. And it was there on the plain upon the
known side of Mluna, just as the evening star came mouse-like into
view and the flames of the camp-fire lifted their lonely plumes
uncheered by any song, that that rash scheme was hastily planned by
the nomads which the world has named The Quest of the Golden Box.
No measure of wiser precaution could the elders of the nomads have
taken than to choose for their thief that very Slith, that identical thief
that (even as I write) in how many school-rooms governesses teach
stole a march on the King of Westalia. Yet the weight of the box was
such that others had to accompany him, and Sippy and Slorg were no
more agile thieves than may be found today among vendors of the
antique.
So over the shoulder of Mluna these three climbed next day and slept
as well as they might among its snows rather than risk a night in the
woods of the Dubious Land. And the morning came up radiant and the
birds were full of song, but the forest underneath and the waste beyond
it and the bare and ominous crags all wore the appearance of an
unuttered threat.
Though Slith had an experience of twenty years of theft, yet he said
little; only if one of the others made a stone roll with his foot, or, later
on in the forest, if one of them stepped on a twig, he whispered sharply
to them always the same words: "That is not business." He knew that
he could not make them better thieves during a two-days' journey, and
whatever doubts he had he interfered no further.
From the shoulder of Mluna they dropped into the clouds, and from the
clouds to the forest, to whose native beasts, as well the three thieves
knew, all flesh was meat, whether it were the flesh of fish or man.
There the thieves drew idolatrously from their pockets each one a

separate god and prayed for protection in the unfortunate wood, and
hoped therefrom for a threefold chance of escape, since if anything
should eat one of them it were certain to eat them all, and they confided
that the corollary might be true and all should escape if one did.
Whether one of these gods was propitious and awake, or whether all of
the three, or whether it was chance that brought them through the forest
unmouthed by detestable beasts, none knoweth; but certainly neither
the emissaries of the god that most they feared, nor the wrath of the
topical god of that ominous place, brought their doom to the three
adventurers there or then. And so it was that they came to Rumbly
Heath, in the heart of the Dubious Land, whose stormy hillocks were
the ground-swell and the after-wash of the earthquake lulled for a while.
Something so huge that it seemed unfair to man that it should move so
softly stalked splendidly by them, and only so barely did they escape its
notice that one word ran and echoed through their three
imaginations--"If--if--if." And when this danger was at last gone by
they moved cautiously on again and presently saw the little harmless
mipt, half fairy and half gnome, giving shrill, contented squeaks on the
edge of the world. And they edged away unseen, for they said that the
inquisitiveness of the mipt had become fabulous, and that, harmless as
he was, he had a bad way with secrets; yet they probably loathed the
way that he nuzzles dead white bones, and would not admit their
loathing; for it does not become adventurers to care who eats their
bones. Be this as it may, they edged away from the mipt, and came
almost at once to the wizened tree, the goal-post of their adventure, and
knew that beside them was the crack in the world and the bridge from
Bad to Worse, and that underneath them stood the rocky house of the
Owner of the Box.
This was their simple plan: to slip into the corridor in the upper cliff; to
run softly down it (of course with naked feet) under the warning to
travellers that is graven upon stone, which interpreters take to be "It Is
Better Not"; not to touch the berries that are there for a purpose, on the
right side going down; and so to come to the guardian on his pedestal
who had slept for a thousand years and should be sleeping still; and go
in through the open window. One man was to wait outside by the