It made him giddy even to keep his eyes fixed on the narrowing path before him, and shuffle up, up, up.
Suddenly, Thumb, who was wheezing and panting a few paces in front, came to a standstill.
"What is it, Thumb?" said Nod.
"Why do you stop, Nod?" said Thimble, who was last of all.
"Look, look!" said Thumb.
They slowly raised their eyes, and not a hundred paces beyond them, on the same narrow ledge of rock against the deep blue sky, came slowly winding down thirty at least of these same meagre and hairy Men of the Mountains, a few with long staves in their hands, and every one with his long tufted tail over his shoulder and a round shallow basket on his head. These Men of the Mountains have very weak eyes; and it was not until they were come close that they perceived the three travellers standing on their mountain-path. The first stopped, then he that was next, and so on, until they looked like a long black-and-white caterpillar, clinging to the precipice, with tiny tufts waving in the air.
Thumb raised his hand as if in peace. "We are, sirs, strangers to these rocks and hills. After the shade of Munza, our eyes dizzy with the heights. And we walk, journeying to the Courts of Assasimmon, in great danger of falling. How, then, shall we pass by?"
They heard a faint, shrill whispering all along the hairy row. Then the first of the Men of the Mountains came quite close, and told the three brothers to lie down flat on their faces, and he and his thirty would all walk gently over them. "But to go on has no end," he said, "and the travellers had better far turn back."
At this Thumb grew angry. "What does the old grey-beard mean?" he coughed out of the corner of his mouth. "Mulla-mulgars stoop on their faces to no one. Do you lie down on yours."
The old Mountain-mulgar blinked. "We are thirty; you are three," he said. Thumb laughed.