h of Solmi's Valley, and her beams streamed aslant on
the hosts of the birds. Wherever Nod looked, the air was aflock with
eagles. His hand was torn and bleeding, a great piece of his
sheep's-jacket had been plucked out, and still those moon-gilded wings
swooped into the torchlight, beaks snapped almost in his face, and
talons clutched at him.

Suddenly a scream rose shrill above all the din around him. For a moment
the birds hung hovering, and then Nod perceived one of the biggest of
the eagles struggling in mid-air with something stretched and wrestling
upon its back. It was a Man of the Mountains floating there in space,
while the maddened eagle rose and fell, and poised itself, and shook and
beat its wings, vainly striving to tear him off. And now many other of
the eagles wheeled off from the Mulgars and swept in frenzy to and fro
over this struggling horse and rider, darting upon them, beating the
dying Mulgar with their wings, screaming their war-song, until at last,
gradually, lower and lower they all sank out of the moonlight into the
shadow of the valley, and were lost to sight. The few birds that
remained were soon beaten off. Five lay dead in their beautiful feathers
on the pass. And the breathless and bleeding Mulgars gathered together
on this narrow shelf of the precipice to bind up their wounds and rest
and eat. But three of them were nowhere to be found. They made no
answer, though their friends called and called, again and again, in
their shrill reedy voices. For one in fighting had stumbled and toppled
over, torch in hand, from the path, one had been slit up by an eagle's
claw, and one had been carried off by the eagles.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XVI

And now that the moon was near her setting, dark grew the air. The Men
of the Mountains had at last ceased to call their lost companions, and
on either side of the path were breaking up their faggots and building
fires, leaving two wide spaces beneath the beetling rock for their
encampment between the fires. Nod, sitting beside Thimble's litter,
watched them for some time, and presently he fancied he heard a distant
howling, not from the darkness below, but seemingly from the heights
above the Mulgar-pass. He rose and limped along to Ghibba, who was busy
about the fires. "Why are you heaping up such large fires?" he said,
"and whose, Man of the Mountains, are those howlings I heard from the
mountain-tops?"

Ghibba's face was scorched and bleed