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 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 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 safely, 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 that lit it, leaped over the edge
of the World and is falling from us still through the unreverberate
blackness of the abyss.