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 recptacle (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-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”; to touch the berries that are there for a
purpose, on the right side going down; and so to come to the guardian
on his pedestal who had slept for a thousand years and should be
sleeping still; and go in through the open window. One man was to wait
outside by the crack in the World until the others came out with the
golden box, and, should they cry for help, he was to threaten at once to
unfasten the iron clamp that kept the crack together. When the box was
secured they were to travel all night and all the following day, until
the cloud-banks that wrapped the slopes of Mluna were well between them
and Owner of the Box.
The door in the cliff was open. They passed without a murmur down
the cold steps, Slith leading them all the way. A glance of longing, no
more, each gave to the beautiful berries. The guardian upon his pedestal
was still asleep. Slorg climbed by a ladder, that Slith knew where to
find, to the iron clamp across the crack in the World, and waited beside
it with a chisel in his hand, listening closely for anything untoward,
while his friends slipped into the house; and no sound came. And presently
Slith and Sippy found the golden box: everything seemed happening as
they had planned, it only remained to see if it was the right one and to
escape with it from that dreadful place. Under the shelter of the
pedestal, so near to the guardian that they could feel his warmth, which
paradoxically had the effect of chilling the blood of the boldest of
them, they smashed the emerald hasp and opened the golden box; and there
they read by the light of ingenious sparks which Slith knew how to
contrive, and even this poor light they hid with their bodies. What was
their joy, even at that perilous moment, as they lurked between the
guardian and the abyss, to find that the box contained fifteen peerless
odes in the alcaic form, five sonnets that were by far the most beautiful
in the world, nine ballads in the manner of Provence that had no equal
in the treasuries of man, a poem addressed to a moth in twenty-eight
perfect stanzas, a piece of blank verse of over a hundred lines on a
level not yet known to have been attained by man, as well as fifteen
lyrics on which no merchant would dare to set a price. They would have
read them again, for they gave happy tears to a man and memories of dear
things done in infancy, and brought sweet voices from far sepulchres;
but Slith pointed imperiously to the way by which they had come, and
extinguished the light; and Slorg and Sippy sighed, then took the box.
The guardian still slept the sleep that survived a thousand
years.
As they came away they saw that indulgent chair close by the edge
of the World in which Owner of the Box had lately sat reading selfishly
and alone the most beautiful songs and verses that poet ever dreamed.
They came in silence to the foot of the stairs; and then it
befell that as they drew near safety, in the night’s most secret hour,
some hand in an upper chamber lit a shocking light, lit it and made no
sound.
For a moment it might have been an ordinary light, fatal as even
that could very well be at such a moment as this; but when it began to
follow them like an eye and to grow redder and redder as it watched
them, then even optimism despaired.
And Sippy very unwisely attempted flight, and Slorg even as
unwisely tried to hide; but Slith, knowing well why that light was lit
in that secret upper chamber and who
it was as that lit it, leaped over the edge of the World and is
falling from us still through the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.
<<---
From Your Dark Side
