stirring themselves. They came
creeping, lean and hairy, out of their mushroom houses. Some fetched
water, some looped down over the brink by which the travellers had come
up. Some clambered up into little dark horseshoe courts cut in the rock
like martins' holes in sand, and came down carrying sacks or suchlike
out of their nut pantries and cheese-rooms. Some, too, of the elders sat
combing their long beards with a kind of teasel that grows in the
valleys, while their faint voices sounded in their gossiping like
hundreds of grasshoppers in a meadow. Nod watched them curiously. Even
the faces of quite the puny Mountain-mulgars were sad, with round and
feeble eyes. And he couldn't help nudging Thumb to look at these tiny
creatures gravely combing their hairy chops--for all had whiskers, from
the brindled and grey, whose hair fell below their knees, to the mouse
and cane coloured babies lying in basins or cradles of Ollaconda-bark,
kicking their toes towards the brightening stars.

The moonlight dwelt in silver on every crag. And, like things so
beautiful that they seem of another world, towered the mountains around
them, clear as emeralds, and crowned with never-melting snow.

Thimble, when he awoke, was fevered and aching. The heights had made his
head dizzy, and the mountain cheese was sickly and faint. He lay at full
length, with wandering eyes, refusing to speak. So, when the Mulla-moona
sent for the three travellers, only Thumb and Nod went together. He was
old, thin-haired and thick-skinned, and rather fat with eating of
cheese; he wore a great loose hat of leopard-skin on his head. And he
looked at them with his eyes wizened up as if they were creatures of no
account. And he asked one of the Mountain-mulgars who stood near, Who
were these strangers, and by whose leave they had come trespassing on
the hill-walks of the Mountain-mulgars. "Munza is your country," he
said. "The leaves are never still with you, thieves and gluttons,
squealing and fighting and swinging by your tails!"

Thumb opened his mouth at this. "We are three, and you are many, Old Man
of the Mountains," he barked, "but keep a civil tongue with us, for all
that. We are neither thieves nor gluttons. We fight, oh yes, when it
pleases us. But having no tails, we do not swing by them. We are
Mulla-mulgars, my brothers and I, and we go to the kingdom of our
father's brother, Assasimmon, Prince of the Valleys of Tishnar. He is a
Prince, O Mulla-moona,