Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Letters with macrons have been represented with [=o], [=u] |
| and [=a]. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
THE THREE MULLA-MULGARS
[Illustration: "OH, BUT IF I MIGHT BUT HOLD IT IN MY HAND ONE MOMENT, I
THINK THAT I SHOULD NEVER EVEN SIGH AGAIN!"]
THE THREE
MULLA-MULGARS
BY
WALTER DE LA MARE
ILLUSTRATED BY
DOROTHY P LATHROP
[Illustration]
_New York_ ALFRED·A·KNOPF _Mcmxxv_
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Published, December, 1919
Second Printing, February, 1925_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
F. AND D.
AND
L. AND C.
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Oh, but if I might but hold it in my hand one
moment, I think I should never even sigh again!" _Frontispiece_
"The Queen of the Mountains is in the Forest--with fingers
of frost" 42
The Wonderstone 75
Nod was never left alone 80
He jumped, he reared, he kicked, he plunged, he wriggled,
he whinnied 90
Nod danced the Jaqquas' war-dance, ... stooping and
crooked, "wriggle and stamp" 129
He felt a sudden darkness above his head, and a cold terror
crept over his skin 132
With sticks and staves and flaring torches they turned on the
fierce birds that came sweeping and swirling out of the dark 189
"What is it, brother? Why do you crouch and stare?" 218
"For there stood as if frozen in the moonlight the monstrous
silver-haired Meermuts of Mulgarmeerez, guarding the
enchanted orchards of Tishnar" 224
They feasted on fruits they never before had tasted nor
knew to grow on earth 232
A Mulgar of a presence and a strangeness, who was without
doubt of the Kingdom of Assasimmon 274
THE THREE MULLA-MULGARS
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
On the borders of the Forest of Munza-mulgar lived once an old grey
fruit-monkey of the name of Mutt-matutta. She had three sons, the eldest
Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela,
Ummanodda. And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble, and
Nod. The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had
been built 319 Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or
Portingal, lost in the forest 22,997 leagues from home. After he was
dead, there came scrambling along on his fours one peaceful evening a
Mulgar (or, as we say in English, a monkey) named Zebbah. At first sight
of the hut he held his head on one side awhile, and stood quite still,
listening, his broad-nosed face lit up in the blaze of the setting sun.
He then hobbled a little nearer, and peeped into the hut. Whereupon he
hobbled away a little, but soon came back and peeped again. At last he
ventured near, and, pushing back the tangle of creepers and matted
grasses, groped through the door and went in. And there, in a dark
corner, lay the Portingal's little heap of bones.
The hut was dry as tinder. It had in it a broken fire-stone, a kind of
chest or cupboard, a table, and a stool, both rough and insect-bitten,
but still strong. Zebbah sniffed and grunted, and pushed and peered
about. And he found all manner of strange and precious stuff half buried
in the hut--pots for Subbub; pestles and basins for Manaka-cake, etc.;
three bags of great beads, clear, blue, and emerald; an old rusty
musket; nine ephelantoes' tusks; a bag of Margarita stones; and many
other things, besides cloth and spider-silk and dried-up fruits and
fishes. He made his dwelling there, and died there. This Mulgar, Zebbah,
was Mutta-matutta's great-great-great-grandfather. Dead and gone were
all.
Now, one day when Mutta-matutta was young, and her father had gone into
the forest for Sudd-fruit, there came limping along a most singular
Mulgar towards the house. He was bent and shrunken, shivering and
coughing, but he walked as men walk, his nut-shaped head bending up out
of a big red jacket. His shoulder and the top of his head were worn bare
by the rubbing of the bundle he carried. And behind him came stumbling
along another Mulgar, his servant, with a few rags tied round his body,
who could not at first speak, his tongue was so much swollen from his
having bitten in the dark a poison-spider in his nuts. The name of his
master was Seelem; his own name was Glint. This Seelem fell very sick.
Mutta-matutta nursed him night and day, with the sourest monkey-physic.
He was pulled crooked with pain and the shivers, or rain-fever. The tips
of the hairs on his head had in his wanderings turned snow-white. But he
bore his pain and his sickness (and his physic) without one groan of
complaint.
And Glint, who fetched water and gathered sticks and nuts, and
helped Mutta-matutta, told her that his master, Seelem, was a
Mulla-mulgar--that is, a Mulgar of the Blood Royal--and own brother
to Assasimmon, Prince of the Valleys of Tishnar.
He told her, also, that his master had wearied of Assasimmon's
valley-palace, his fine food and dishes, his music of shells and
strings, his countless Mulgar-slaves, beasts, and groves and gardens;
and that, having chosen three servants, Jacca, Glutt, and himself, he
had left his brother's valleys, to discover what lay beyond the
Arakkaboa Mountains. But Jacca had perished of frost-bite on the
southern slopes of the Peak of Tishnar, and Glutt had been eaten by the
Minimuls.
He was very silent and gloomy, this Mulla-mulgar, Seelem, but glad to
rest his bruised and weary bones in the hut. And when Mutta-matutta's
father died from sleeping in the moon-mist at Sudd-ripening, Seelem
untied his travelling bundle and made his home in the hut. Mutta-matutta
was a lonely and rather sad Mulgar, so at this she rejoiced, for she had
grown from fearing to love the royal old wanderer. And she helped him to
put away all that was in his bundles into the Portingal's chest--three
shirts of cotton; two red jackets, like his own, with metal hooks; a
sheep's-coat, with ivory buttons and pocket-flaps; three skin shoes (for
one had been lost out of his bundle in the forest); a cap of Mamasul
skin (very precious); besides knives, fire-strikers, a hollow cup of
ivory, magic physic-powder, two combs of Impaleena-horn, a green
serpent-skin for sweetening water, etc., and, beyond and above all, the
milk-white Wonderstone of Tishnar.
Here they lived, Seelem and Mutta (as he called her), in the Portingal's
old hut, for thirteen years. And Mutta was happy with Seelem and her
three sons, Thumb, Thimble, and Nod. They had a water-spring,
honey-boxes or baskets for the bees in the Ollaconda-trees, a shed or
huddle of green branches, for Glint, and a big patch of Ummuz-cane. Nod
slept in a kind of hole or burrow in the roof, with a tiny peeping-hole,
from which he used to scare the birds from his father's Ummuz.
Mutta wished only that Seelem was not quite so grim and broody; that the
Munza-mulgars (forest-monkeys) would not come stealing her Subbub and
honey; and that the Portingal's hut stood quite out of the silvery
moon-mist that rose from the swamp; for she suffered (as do most
fruit-monkeys) from the bones-ache. Seelem was gentle and easy in his
own moody way with Mutta and his three sons, but, most of all, he
cheered his heart with tiny Nod, the Nizza-neela. Sometimes all day long
this old travel-worn Mulla-mulgar never uttered a sound, save at
evening, when he sang or droned his evening hymn to Tishnar.[1] He kept
a thick stick, which he called his Guzza, to punish his three sons when
they were idle and sullen, or gluttonous, or with Munza tricks pestered
their mother. And he never favoured Nod beyond the others more than all
good fathers favour the youngest, the littlest, and the gaysomest of
their children.
[1] Tishnar is a very ancient word in Munza, and means that
which cannot be thought about in words, or told, or
expressed. So all the wonderful, secret, and quiet world
beyond the Mulgars' lives is Tishnar--wind and stars, too,
the sea and the endless unknown. But here it is only the
Beautiful One of the Mountains that is meant. So beautiful
is she that a Mulgar who dreams even of one of her Maidens,
and wakes still in the presence of his dream, can no longer
be happy in the company of his kind. He hides himself away
in some old hole or rocky fastness, lightless, matted, and
uncombed, and so thins and pines, or becomes a Wanderer or
Môh-mulgar. But it is rare for this to be, for very few
Mulgars dream beyond the mere forest, as it were; and fewer
still keep the memories of their dreams when the livelong
vision of Munza returns to their waking eyes. The Valleys
of Tishnar lie on either flank of the Mountains of
Arakkaboa, though she herself wanders only in the stillness
of the mountain snows. She is shown veiled on the rude pots
of Assasimmon and in Mulgar scratch-work, with one
slim-fingered hand clasping her robe of palest purple, her
head bent a little, as if hearkening to her thoughts; and
she is shod with sandals of silver. Of these things the
wandering Oomgar-nuggas, or black men, tell. From Tishnar,
too, comes the Last Sleep--the sleep of all the World. The
last sleep just of their own life only is
N[=o][=o]manossi--darkness, change, and the unreturning. And
Immanâla is she who preys across these shadows, in this
valley. So, too, the Mulgars say, "N[=o][=o]ma, N[=o][=o]ma,"
when they mean shadow, as "In the sun paces a leopard's
N[=o][=o]ma at her side." Meermut, which means in part also
shadow, is the shadow, as it were, of lesser light lost in
Tishnar's radiance, just as moonlight may cast a shadow of
a pine-tree across a smouldering fire. There is, too, a
faint wind that breathes in the first twilight and
starshine of Munza called the Wind of Tishnar. It was, I
think, the faint murmur of this wind that echoed in the ear
of Mutta-matutta as she lay dying, for in dying one hears,
it is said, what in life would carry no more tidings to the
mind than light brings to the hand. Nod's bells that he
heard, and thought were his father's, must have been the
Zevveras' bells of Tishnar's Water-middens, all wandering
Meermuts. These Water-middens, or Water-maidens, are like
the beauty of the moonlight. The countless voices of
fountain, torrent, and cataract are theirs. They, with
other of Tishnar's Maidens, come riding on their belled
Zevveras, and a strange silence falls where their little
invisible horses are tethered; while, perhaps, the Maidens
sit feasting in a dell, grey with moonbeams and ghostly
flowers. Even the sullen Mullabruk learns somehow of their
presence, and turns aside on his fours from the silvery
mist of their glades and green alleys, just as in the same
wise a cold air seems to curdle his skin when some haunting
N[=o][=o]ma passes by. All the inward shadows of the
creatures of Munza-mulgar are N[=o][=o]manossi's; all their
phantoms, spirits, or Meermuts are Tishnar's. And so there
is a never-ending changeableness and strife in their short
lives. The leopard (or Roses, as they call her, for the
beauty of her clear black spots) is Meermut to her cubs,
N[=o][=o]ma to the dodging Skeetoes she lies in wait for,
stretched along a bough. Her beauty is Tishnar's; the
savagery of her claws is N[=o][=o]manossi's. So Munza's
children are dark or bright, lovely or estranging,
according as Meermut or N[=o][=o]ma prevails in their
natures. And thus, too, they choose the habitation of their
bodies. Yet because dark is but day gone, and cruelty
unkindness, therefore even the heart-shattering
N[=o][=o]manossi, even Immanâla herself, is only absent
Tishnar. But there, as everyone can see, I am only
chattering about what I cannot understand.
One of the first things that Nod remembered was Glint's tumbling from
the great Ukka-tree, which he had climbed at ripening-time, bough up to
bough from the bottom, cracking shells and eating all the way, until,
forgetting how heavy he had become, he swung his fat body on to a
slender and withered branch, and fell all a-topple from top to bottom on
to the back of his thick skull. Beneath this same dark-leaved tree
Seelem buried his servant, together with a pot of subbub, seven loaves
or cakes, and a long stick of Ummuz-cane. But Mutta-matutta after his
death would never touch an Ukka-nut again.
Seelem taught his sons how to make fire, what nuts and roots and fruits
and grasses were wholesome for eating; what herbs and bark and pith for
physic; what reeds and barks for cloth. He taught them how to take honey
without being stung; how to count; how to find their way by the chief
and brightest among the stars; to cut cudgels, to build leaf-huts and
huddles against heat or rain. He taught them, too, the common tongue of
the Forest-monkeys--that is the language of nearly all the Mulgars that
live in the forests of Munza--Jacquet-mulgars, Mullabruks, purple-faced
and saffron-headed Mulgars, Skeetoes, tuft-waving Manquabees,
Fly-catchers and Squirrel-tails, and many more than I can mention.
Seelem taught them also a little of the languages of the dreaded
Gunga-mulgars, of the Collobs, and the Babbab[=o][=o]mas. But the
Minimul-mulgars' and the Oomgars' or man-monkeys' languages (white,
black, or yellow) he could not teach, because he did not know them.
When, however, they were alone together they spoke the secret language
of the Mulla-mulgars dwelling north of the Arakkaboas--that is,
Mulgar-royal. This language in some ways resembles that of the
Portugalls, in some that of the Oggewibbies, and, here and there--but in
very little--Garniereze. Seelem, of course, taught his sons, and
especially Thumb, many other things besides--more, certainly, than would
contain itself in a little book like this. But, above all, he taught
them to walk upright, never to taste blood, and never, unless in danger
or despair, to climb trees or to grow a tail.
But now, after all these thirteen years of absence from Assasimmon's
palace in the beautiful Valleys of Tishnar, Seelem began to desire more
and more to see again his home and his brother, with whom as a child he
had walked in scarlet and Mamasul, and drunk his syrup from an ivory
cup. He grew more gloomy and morose than ever, squatted alone, his eyes
fixed mournfully in the air. And Mutta would whisper to Nod: "Sst, zun
nizza-neela, tus-weeta zan nuome."
The more cunning of the Forest-mulgars at first had come in troops to
Seelem, laden with gifts of nuts and fruits, because they were afraid of
him. But he would sit in his red jacket and merely stare at them as if
they were no better than flies. And at last they began in revenge to do
him as much mischief as their wits could contrive, until he grew
utterly weary of their scuffling and quarrelling, their thumbs and
colours, fleas and tails. At last he could hear himself no longer, and
one morning, in the first haze of sunrise over the sleeping forest, he
called Mutta and his three sons to where he sat in the shadow of Glint's
great budding Ukka-tree. And he told them he was going on a long
journey--"beyond and beyond, forest and river, forest swamp and river,
the mountains of Arakkaboa, leagues, leagues away"--to seek again the
Valleys of Tishnar. "And I will come back," he said, leaning his hand
upon the ground and blinking at Nod, "with slaves and scarlet and
food-baskets and Zevveras, and bring you all there with me. But first I
must go alone and find the way through dangers thick as flies, O
Mulla-mulgars. Wait here and guard your old mother, Mutta-matutta, my
sons, her Ummuz and ukkas. And grow strong, O tailless ones, till I
return. Zu zoubé seese muglareen, een suang no nouano zupbf!" And that
was all he said.
But Mutta-matutta, though she could not hide her grief at his going,
helped him in every way she could to be quickly gone. He seemed beside
himself, this white, old, crooked Mulla-mulgar. His eyes blazed; he went
muttering; he'd throw up his hands and snuff and snuff, as if the very
wind bore Tishnar on its wings. And even at night he'd rise up in the
darkness and open the door and listen as if out of the immeasurable and
solitudinous forests he heard voices calling him from far away. At
length, in his last shirt (which had been carefully kept these thirteen
years, with a dead kingfisher and a bag of civet, to keep off the
cockroaches); in his finest red jacket and his cap of Mamasul-skin;
with a great bundle of Manaka-cake and Ummuz-cane, knife and
fire-striker and physic, and the old Portingal's rusty musket on his
shoulder, he was ready to be off. In the early morning he came stooping
under the little hut-door. He looked at his hut and his water-spring, at
his bees and canes; he looked at his three sons, and at old
Mutta-matutta, with a great frown, and trembled. And Mutta could not
bear to say good-bye; she lifted her crooked hands above her old head,
the tears running down her cheeks, and she went and hid herself in the
hut till he was gone. But his three sons went a little way with him.
Thumb and Thimble hopped along with his heavy bundle on a stick between
them to the branching of the Mulgar-track, which here runs nearly two
paces wide into the gloom of Munza-mulgar; while Nod sat on Seelem's
shoulder, sucking a stick of Ummuz-cane, and clutching the long, cold,
rusty barrel of his musket. The trees of the forest lifted their
branches in a trembling haze of heat, hung with grey thorny ropes, and
vines and trailing creepers of Cullum and Samarak, vivid with leaves,
and with large cuplike waxen flowers, moon-white, amber, mauve, and
scarlet. Butterflies like blots and splashes of flame, wee Tominiscoes,
ruby and emerald and amethyst, shimmered and spangled and sipped and
hovered. And a thin, twangling, immeasurable murmur like the strings of
N[=o][=o]manossi's harp rose from the tiny millions that made their
nests and mounds and burrows in the forest.
Seelem took his sons one by one by the shoulders, and looked into their
eyes, and touched noses. And they lifted their hands in salutation, and
watched him till he was gone from sight. But though his grey face was
all wizened up with trouble and wet with tears, he never so much as once
looked behind him, lest his sons should cry after him, or he turn back.
So, presently, after they all three lifted their hands once more, as if
his Meermut[2] might still haunt near; and then they went home to their
mother.
[2] "Meermut" is shadow, phantom, spectre, or even the pictured
remembrance of anything in the mind.
But the rains came; he did not return. The long days strode softly by,
the chatter and screams of Munza at dawn, the long-drawn, moaning shout
of Mullabruk to Mullabruk as darkness deepened. Nod would sometimes
venture a little way into the forest, hoping to hear the gongs that his
father had told him the close-shorn slaves of Assasimmon tie with
leopard-thongs about their Zevveras' necks. He would sit in the gigantic
shadows of evening, watching the fireflies, and saying to himself: "Sst,
Nod, see what they say--to-morrow!" But the morrow never came that
brought him back his father.
Mutta-matutta cared and cooked for them. She made a great store of
Manaka-cake, packed for coolness all neatly in plantain-leaves;
Nano-cheese, and two or three big pots of Subbub. She kept them clean
and combed; plastered and physicked them; taught them to cook, and many
things else, until, as one by one they grew up, they knew all that she
_could_ teach them, except the wisdom to use what they had learnt. She
would often, too, in the first hush of night, tell them stories of their
father, and of her own father, back even to Zebbah, and the Portingal
dangling with his bunch of wild-cats' tails in the corner.
But as the years wasted away, she grew thin and mournful, and fell ill
of pining and grief and age, and even had at last to keep to her bed of
moss and cotton in the hut.
Her sons worked hard for her, pushing into the forest and across the
narrow swamp in search of fruits to tempt her appetite. Nod heaped up
fresh leaves for her bed, and sang in his shrill, quavering voice every
evening Tishnar's hymn to his poor old mother. He baked her sweet
potatoes and Nanoes wrapped in leaves, and would dance round, "wriggle
and stamp--wriggle and stamp," as Seelem had told him dance the
Oomgar-nuggas, to try to make her cheerful. But by-and-by she began to
languish, her teeth chattering, her eyes burning, unable to eat.... And
one still afternoon, when only Nod was near (his brothers, tired of the
heat and buzzing in the green hut, having gone to gather nuts and sticks
in the forest), as Mutta-matutta sat dozing and muttering in her corner,
came the voice of Tishnar, calling in the hush of evening: and she knew
she must die.
Nod crept close to her, thinking at first the strange voice singing
was the sound of Seelem's Zevveras' distant gongs, and he held the
hard thin hand between his. When Thumb and Thimble returned with their
bags and faggots of smoulder-wood, she called them all three, and told
them she too must go away now, perhaps even, if only in Meermut, to
find their father. And she besought them to be always true and faithful
one to another, and to be brave. "Five fingers serve one hand, my good
men," she said. "And oh, remember this always: that you are all three
Mulla-mulgars, sons of Seelem, whose home is far from here--Mulla-mulgars
who never do walk flambo--that is, on all fours--never taste blood, and
never, unless in danger and despair, climb trees or grow a tail."
It was hot and gloomy in the tangled little hut, lit only by the violet
of the dying afterglow. And when she had rested a little while to
recover her breath, she told them that Seelem, the night before he left
them, had said that, should he perish on his journey and not return, in
seven Munza years they were, as best they could, bravely to follow after
him. In time they would perhaps reach the Valleys of Tishnar, and their
uncle, Prince Assasimmon, would welcome them.
"His country lies beyond and beyond," she said, "forest and river,
forest, swamp and river, the Mountains of Arakkaboa--leagues, leagues
away."
And, as she paused, a feeble wind sighed through the open window,
stirring the dangling bones of the Portingal, so that, with their faint
clicking, they too, seemed to echo, "leagues, leagues away."
"It will be a long and dreary journey, my sons. But the Prince
Assasimmon, Mulla-mulla of the Mulgars, is great and powerful, and has
for hut a palace of ivory and Azmamogreel, with scarlet and Mamasul,
slaves and peacocks, and beasts uncountable; and leagues of Ukka and
Barbary-nuts; and boundless fields of Ummuz, and orchards of fruit, and
bowers of flowers and pleasure. And his, too, is the Rose of all the
Mulgars." And as he listened Thimble shuffled from foot to foot, his
heart uneasy, to hear her cry so hollowly the beauty of that Rose. And
at her bidding, out of the cupboard they took the civeted bundles of all
the stuff and little Mulgar treasures she had been hoarding up all
these years for them against this last day.
She gave Thumb and Thimble each a red Oomgar's jacket with curved metal
hooks, and to Nod the little coat of mountain-sheep's wool, with its
nine ivory buttons. She divided and shared everything between
them--their father's knives and cudgels, the beads blue and emerald, the
Margarita stones. The Portingal's rusty hatchet, burned with a cross on
its stock, she gave to Thumb; a little fat black greasy book of sorcery,
made of Exxswixxia leaves, to Thimble; and to Nod, last of all, picking
it out of the stitched serpent-skin lining of her great wool cap, she
gave the Wonderstone.
"I give this to Nod," she said to his brothers, "because he is a
Nizza-neela, and has magic in him. Come close, my sons, Thumb and
Thimble, and see. His winking [or left][3] eye has green within the
hazel; his thumbs grow lean and long; he still keeps two milk-teeth; and
bears the Nizza-neela tuft betwixt his ears." With her hot skinny
fingers she stroked softly back his hair, and showed his brothers the
little velvety patch, or tuft, or badge, or crest, on the top of his
head, above the parting. "O Mulla-mulgars, how I begged your father to
take this Wonderstone with him on his journey! but he would not. He
said, 'Keep it, and let my sons, if need be, carry it after me to the
kingdom of my brother. He will know by this one thing that they are
indeed my sons, Mulla-mulgars, Princes of Tishnar, sibbetha eena manga
Môh!'"
[3] On the right or cudgel side, the Mulgars say, sits Bravery;
on the winking, woman, or left side, Craft.
"Never, little Nod," said his old dying mother--"never lose, nor give
away, nor sport with, nor even lend this Wonderstone; and if in your
long journey you are in danger of the Third Sleep,[4] or lost, or in
great fear, spit with your spittle on the stone, and rub softly three
times with your left thumb, Samaweeza: Tishnar will hear you; help will
come."
[4] First Sleep is night-sleep; Second Sleep is swoon-sleep;
Third Sleep is death, or N[=o][=o]manossi. So, too, the
Mulgars say, the first is "Little-go," the second is
"Great-go," and the third is "Come-no-more"; as if their
bodies were a lodging, and sleep a kind of out-of-doors.
Then, with her small, clumsy fingers, she tied up the sleeping
milk-white Wonderstone in the hem of his woolly sheep's coat, and lay
back in her bed, too feeble to speak again. Thumb, Thimble, and Nod sat
all three, each with his little heap of house-stuff before him, which it
seemed hateful now to have, staring through the doorway. In the purple
gloom the fireflies were mazily flickering. Night was still, like a
simmering pot, with heat. And out of the swamp they heard the Ooboë
calling to its mate, singing marvellous sweet and clear in the darkness
above its woven nest; while over their heads the tiny Nikka-nakkas, or
mouse-owls, sat purring in the thatch. And Nod said: "Listen, Mutta,
listen; how the Ooboë's telling secrets!" And she smiled with tight-shut
lids, wagging her wizened head.
And in the deepest dead of night, when Thimble sat sleeping, his long
arms thrown out over the Portingal's rough table, and Thumb crouching at
the door, Nod heard in the silence a very faint sigh. He crept to his
mother's bed. She softly raised her hand to him, and her eyes closed.
So her three sons dug her a deep grave beside Glint's, under the
Ukka-tree, as she had bidden them. And many of the Forest-mulgars,
specially those of her own kind and kindred, came down solemnly out of
the forest towards evening of that day, and keened or droned for
Mutta-matutta, squatting together at some little distance from the
Portingal's hut. Beyond their counting (though that is not a hard
matter) was the number of the years she and her father and her father's
father, back even to Zebbah, had lived in the hut. But they did not come
near, because they feared the Portingal's yellow bones hung up in the
corner.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]