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 rang 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 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