[7] I suppose, huts or burrowings.
CHAPTER XIX
The travellers marched slowly, keeping sharp watch, their cudgels ready in their hands. Behind them, paled by the moonlight, shook the fiery silver of the Salemnāgar. With this at their backs and that North Pole, Mōōt, in huge congealment, a little to their left, they made their way at an angle across the open snow, and approached the tangled thickets. Here they walked more closely together, with heads aslant and tails in air, like little old men, like pedlars, blinking and spying, wishing beyond measure they were sitting in comfort around their watch-fire. The farther they zigzagged betwixt the thorns, the more doubtful grew the way. For the thorn-trees rise all so equal in height and thickness they often with their tops shut out the stars, and there was nothing by which the travellers could mark what way they went.
Still they pressed on, their hairy faces to the night-wind, which Ghibba had observed before starting was drifting from the north. They shuffled crisply over the snow, coughing softly, and gurring in their throats, winding in and out between the trees, and casting lean, gigantic shadows across the open spaces. For so dazzling bright the moon gleamed, she almost put out the smoky flare of their torches. But it gave the Mulgars more courage to march encompassed with their own light. Their packs were heavy, the thickets sloped continually upward. But the poison-thorns curl backward beneath the drooping hood of their leaves by night—in the hours, that is, when, it is said, they distil their poison—so the travellers were no longer fretted by their stings. Thus, then, they gradually advanced till Mōōt was left behind them, and out of the grey night rose Mulgarmeerez, mightiest of Arakkaboa's peaks, whose snows have known no Mulgar footprints since the world began.
Only the whish of the travellers' feet on the snow was to be heard, when suddenly all with one accord stopped dead, as if a voice had cried, "Halt!"
Their torches faintly crackled, their smoke rising in four straight pillars towards the stars. And they heard, as if everywhere around them in the air, clear yet marvellously small voices singing with a thin and pining sound like glass. It floated near, this tiny, multitudinous music—so near that the travellers drew back their face with wide-open eyes. Then it seemed out of the infinite distance to come, echoing across the moonlit spars that towered above their heads.
And Ghibba said softly, jerking up his bundle and peering around him from beneath his eye-bandage: "Courage, my kinsmen! it is the danger-song of Tishnar we hear, who loves the fearless."
At this one of the Men of the Mountains thrust up his pointed chin, and said, wagging his head: "Why do we march like this at night, Mulla-moona? These are not our mountain-passes. Let us camp here while we are still alive, and burn a great watch-fire till morning."