from abyss to abyss, came at
last to higher things, and is wise and eternal still. For who knows of
madness whether it is divine or whether it be of the pit?

PROBABLE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE LITERARY MEN

When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the
question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On the
one hand, many had sought the golden box, the receptacle (as the
Aethiopians know) of poems of fabulous value; and their doom is still
the common talk of Arabia. On the other hand, it was lonely to sit
around the camp-fire by night with no new songs.

It was the tribe of Heth that discussed these things one evening upon
the plains below the peak of Mluna. Their native land was the track
across the world of immemorial wanderers; and there was trouble among
the elders of the nomads because there 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 after-glow,
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