ck skins, their eyes aching with the darkness,
the three travellers, on the eighth day, broke out of the dense forest
into broad daylight and shining snow again. Down and down they descended
into a frozen swampy valley. And about noon, half hidden in the fume and
steam of their own breath, they saw a great herd or muster of
Ephelantoes feeding. They stood in a line beyond Nod's counting--big,
middling-sized, and little--tearing down the rime-laden branches of the
trees, whose leaves and fruits they first warmed with their
bellows-breath before stuffing them into their mouths. The swampy ground
shook with their tramplings. Nod gazed in wonder as he and his brothers,
marching abreast, paced softly but doggedly on. And very soon the
watchful eyes, that glitter small in the great stone-coloured heads of
these mountainous beasts, perceived the red jackets moving betwixt the
grasses. And a silence came; the beasts stopped feeding.

"Meelm[=u]tha glaren djhar!" muttered Thumb.

So the Mulla-mulgars pushed quietly and bravely on, without turning
their heads or letting their eyes wander. For it is said that there is
nothing frets and angers these monsters so much as a watchful eye. They
leave their feeding and wallowing, even the big Shes their suckling.
Their great bodies trembling, they stand in disquiet and unrest if but
just one small clear eye beneath its lid be fixed too close or earnestly
upon them. Oomgars, Mulgars, leopards--even down to the brooding
Mullabruk, with its clay-coloured face--they abhor all scrutiny. But why
this is so I cannot say.

It may be, then, that Nod, in his first wonder, dwelt too lingeringly
with his eye on these Lords of Munza: for a behemothian bull-Ephelanto,
with one of his tusks broken, lurched forward through the long grasses,
his tail stock-stiff behind him, and stood in their path. And as the
Mulgar travellers passed him by, he wound his long, two-fingered trunk
round Nod's belly, shook him softly, and lifted him high above the sedge
into the air.

At this many other of the Ephelantoes stamped across the swamp and stood
in the mist around him. Nod's hand was in his pocket and pressed against
his slim thigh-bone, and there, hard and round, he felt as in a dream
his Wonderstone. And he caught back his fears, and thus, up aloft,
twenty feet or more between earth and sky, he twisted his head and said
softly: "Deal with the Nizza-neela gently, Lord of the Forest; we are
servants of Tishna