CHAPTER IX.

      THE GREEN LIGHT THAT FILLED THE SHADOWED-LAND WAS DARKENING. AS THE GREEN FOREST DARKENS AT DUSK. THE SUN MUST LONG SINCE HAVE DIPPED BENEATH THE PEAKS CIRCLING THAT ILLUSORY FLOOR WHICH WAS THE SKY OF THE SHADOWED-LAND. YET HERE THE GLOW FADED SLOWLY, AS THOUGH IT WERE NOT WHOLLY DEPENDENT UPON THE SUN, AS THOUGH THE PLACE HAD SOME LUMINOSITY OF ITS OWN.

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      We sat beside the tent of Evalie. It was pitched on a rounded knoll not far from the entrance of her lair within the cliff. All along the base of the cliff were the lairs of the Little People, tiny openings through which none larger than they could creep into the caves that were their homes, their laboratories, their workshops, their storehouses and granaries, their impregnable fortresses.

      It had been hours since we had followed her over the plain between the watch-tower and her tent. The golden pygmies had swarmed from every side, curious as children, chattering and trilling, questioning Evalie, twittering her answers to those on the outskirts of the crowd. Even now there was a ring of them around the base of the knoll, dozens of little men and little women, staring up at us with their yellow eyes, chirping and laughing. In the arms of the women were babies like tiniest dolls, and like larger dolls were the older children who clustered at their knees.

      Child-like, their curiosity was soon satisfied; they went back to their occupations and their play. Others, curiosity not yet quenched, took their places.

      I watched them dancing upon the smooth grass. They danced in circling measures to the lilting rhythm of their drums. There were other knolls upon the plain, larger and smaller than that on which we were, and all of them as rounded and as symmetrical. Around and over them the golden pygmies danced to the throbbing of the little drums.

      They had brought us little loaves of bread, and oddly sweet but palatable milk and cheese, and unfamiliar delicious fruits and melons. I was ashamed of the number of platters I had cleaned. The little people had only watched, and laughed, and urged the women to bring me more. Jim said, laughingly:

      “It’s the food of the Yunwi Tsundsi you’re eating. Fairy food, Leif! You can never eat mortal food again.”

      I looked at Evalie, and at the wine and amber beauty of her. Well, I could believe Evalie had been brought up on something more than mortal food.

      I studied the plain for the hundredth time. The slope on which stood the squat towers was an immense semi-circle, the ends of whose arcs met the black cliffs. It must enclose, I thought, some twenty square miles. Beyond the thomed vines were the brakes of the giant fern; beyond them, on the other side of the river, I could glimpse the great trees. If there were forests on this side, I could not tell. Nor what else there might be of living things. There was something to be guarded against, certainly, else why the fortification, the defences?

      Whatever else it might be, this guarded land of the golden pygmies was a small Paradise, with its stands of grain, its orchards, its vines and berries and its green fields.

      I thought over what Evalie had told us of herself, carefully and slowly tuning down the trilling syllables of the little people into vocables we could understand. It waa an ancient tongue she spoke — one whose roots struck far deeper down in the soil of Time than any I knew, unless it were the archaic Uighur itself. Minute by minute I found myself mastering it with ever greater ease, but not so rapidly as Jim. He had even essayed a few trills, to the pygmies’ delight. More than that, however, they had understood him. Each of us could follow Evalie’s thought better than she could ours.

      Whence had the Little People come into the Shadowed-land? And where had they learned that ancient tongue? I asked myself that, and answered that as well ask how it came that the Sumerians, whose great city the Bible calls Ur of the Chaldees, spoke a Mongolian language. They, too, were a dwarfish race, masters of strange sorceries, students of the stars. And no man knows whence they came into Mesopotamia with their science full-blown. Asia is the Ancient Mother, and to how many races she has given birth and watched blown away in dust none can say.

      The transformation of the tongue into the bird-like speech of the Little People, I thought I understood. Obviously, the smaller the throat, the higher are the sounds produced. Unless by some freak, one never hears a child with a bass voice. The tallest of the Little People was no bigger than a six-year-old child. They could not, perforce, sound the gutturals and deeper tones; so they had to substitute other sounds. The natural thing, when you cannot strike a note in a lower octave, is to strike that same note in a higher. And so they had, and in time this had developed into the overlying pattern of trills and pipings, beneath which, however, the essential structure persisted.

      She remembered, Evalie had told us, a great stone house. She thought she remembered a great water. She remembered a land of trees which had become “white and cold”. There had been a man and a woman . . . then there was only the man . . . and it was all like mist. All she truly remembered was the Little People . . . she had forgotten there had ever been anything else . . . until we had come. She remembered when she had been no bigger than the Little People . . . and how frightened she was when she began to be bigger than they. The Little People, the Rrrllya — it is the closest I can come to the trill — loved her; they did as she told them to do. They had fed and clothed and taught her, especially the mother of Sri, whose life I had saved from the Death Flower. Taught her what? She looked at us oddly, and only repeated —“taught me”. Sometimes she danced with the Little People and sometimes she danced for them — again the oddly secretive, half-amused glance. That was all. How long ago had she been as small as the Little People? She did not know — long and long ago. Who had named her Evalie? She did not know.

      I studied her, covertly. There was not one thing about her to give a clue to her race. Foundling, I knew, she must have been, the vague man and woman her father and mother. But what had they been — of what country? No more than could her lips, did her eyes or hair, colouring or body hint at answer.

      She was more changeling than I. A changeling of the mirage! Nurtured on food from Goblin Market!

      I wondered whether she would change back again into everyday woman if I carried her out of the Shadowed-land.

      I felt the ring touch my breast with the touch of ice.

      Carry her away! There was Khalk’ru to meet first — and the Witch-woman!

      The