one could get real salt, and the waiter
spoke English and where one had a name instead of a number; and though
the tablecloth might be dirty the windows opened so that the air was
clean, where one had the excellent company of farmers and men of the
wold, who could not be thoroughly vulgar, because they had not the
money to be so even if they had wished it. At first the novelty was
delightful, and then one day in a queer old inn up Uthering way,
beyond Lingwold, I heard for the first time the rumour of the city
said to be on Mallington Moor. They spoke of it quite casually over
their glasses of beer, two farmers at the inn. "They say the queer
folk be at Mallington with their city," one farmer said. "Travelling
they seem to be," said the other. And more came in then and the rumour
spread. And then, such are the contradictions of our little likes and
dislikes and all the whims that drive us, that I, who had come so far
to avoid cities, had a great longing all of a sudden for throngs again
and the great hives of Man, and then and there determined on that
bright Sunday morning to come to Mallington and there search for the
city that rumour spoke of so strangely.

Mallington Moor, from all that they said of it, was hardly a likely
place to find a thing by searching. It was a huge high moor, very
bleak and desolate and altogether trackless. It seemed a lonely place
from what they said. The Normans when they came had called it Mal Lieu
and afterwards Mallintown and so it changed to Mallington. Though what
a town can ever have had to do with a place so utterly desolate I do
not know. And before that some say that the Saxons called it Baplas,
which I believe to be a corruption of Bad Place.

And beyond the mere rumour of a beautiful city all of white marble and
with a foreign look up on Mallington Moor, beyond this I could not
get. None of them had seen it himself, "only heard of it like," and my
questions, rather than stimulating conversation, would always stop it
abruptly. I was no more fortunate on the road to Mallington until the
Tuesday, when I was quite near it; I had been walking two days from
the inn where I had heard the rumour and could see the great hill
steep as a headland on which Mallington lay, standing up on the
skyline: the hill was covered with grass, where anything grew at all,
but Mallington Moor is all heather; it is just marked Moor on the map;
nobody goes there and they do not trouble to name it. It was t