THE GOBLIN MINERS
THAT same night several of the servants were having a chat together
before going to bed.
"What can that noise be?" said one of the housemaids, who had been
listening for a moment or two.
"I've heard it the last two nights," said the cook. "If there were any
about the place, I should have taken it for rats, but my Tom keeps them
far enough."
"I've heard though," said the scullery-maid, "that rats move about in
great companies sometimes. There may be an army of them invading us. I
heard the noises yesterday and to-day too."
"It'll be grand fun then for my Tom and Mrs. Housekeeper's Bob," said
the cook. "They'll be friends for once in their lives, and fight on the
same side. I'll engage Tom and Bob together will put to flight any
number of rats."
"It seems to me," said the nurse, "that the noises are much too loud for
that. I have heard them all day, and my princess has asked me several
times what they could be. Sometimes they sound like distant thunder, and
sometimes like the noises you hear in the mountain from those horrid
miners underneath."
"I shouldn't wonder," said the cook, "if it was the miners after all.
They may have come on some hole in the mountain through which the
noises reach to us. They are always boring and blasting and breaking,
you know."
As he spoke there came a great rolling rumble beneath them, and the
house quivered. They all started up in affright, and rushing to the hall
found the gentlemen-at-arms in consternation also. They had sent to wake
their captain, who said from their description that it must have been an
earthquake, an occurrence which, although very rare in that country, had
taken place almost within the century; and then went to bed again,
strange to say, and fell fast asleep without once thinking of Curdie, or
associating the noises they had heard with what he had told them. He had
not believed Curdie. If he had, he would at once have thought of what he
had said, and would have taken precautions. As they heard nothing more,
they concluded that Sir Walter was right, and that the danger was over
for perhaps another hundred years. The fact, as discovered afterward,
was that the goblins had, in working up a second sloping face of stone,
arrived at a huge block which lay under the cellars of the house, within
the line of the foundations. It was so round that when they succeeded,
after hard work, in dislodging it without blasting, it rolled thundering
down the slope with a bounding, jarring roll, which shook the
foundations of the house. The goblins were themselves dismayed at the
noise, for they knew, by careful spying and measuring, that they must
now be very near, if not under, the king's house, and they feared giving
an alarm. They, therefore, remained quiet for awhile, and when they
began to work again, they no doubt thought themselves very fortunate in
coming upon a vein of sand which filled a winding fissure in the rock
on which the house was built. By scooping this away they soon came out
in the king's wine-cellar.
No sooner did they and where they were, than they scurried back again,
like rats into their holes, and running at full speed to the goblin
palace, announced their success to the king and queen with shouts of
triumph. In a moment the goblin royal family and the whole goblin people
were on their way in hot haste to the king's house, each eager to have a
share in the glory of carrying off that same night the Princess Irene.
The queen went stumping along in one shoe of stone and one of skin. This
could not have been pleasant, and my readers may wonder that, with such
skillful workmen about her, she had not yet replaced the shoe carried
off by Curdie. As the king however had more than one ground of objection
to her stone shoes, he no doubt took advantage of the discovery of her
toes, and threatened to expose her deformity if she had another made. I
presume he insisted on her being content with skin-shoes, and allowed
her to wear the remaining granite one on the present occasion only
because she was going out to war.
They soon arrived in the king's wine-cellar, and regardless of its huge
vessels, of which they did not know the use, began as quietly as they
could to force the door that led upward.