have come from
somewhere. Where they came from we can go to. O and Ahoh!" he called.

"Why do you call 'Ahoh!' Thumb?" whispered Nod, with tight-shut eyes.

"Both together, Thimbulla," muttered Thumb. "Ahoh, ahoh, ahoh!" they
bawled.

Their voices sounded small and far-away. Only a bird screamed in answer
from the chasm beneath. The sun blazed shadowlessly over the peak of
Kush upon the three Mulgars, standing motionless, pressed close against
the steaming rock. To Nod the minutes crawled like hours, while he
crouched sick and trembling, clutching Thumb's rags to keep him from
falling.

"Thimble, my brother," at last called Thumb softly, "could you, if
little Nod twisted himself round, straddle your legs enough to let him
creep through? We old gluttonous fellows were never meant for
mountain-climbing. And standing here over the great misty pot----" But
just then it seemed to Thumb he felt, light as the wind, something
softly pluck at his wool hat. Very, very slowly, and without a word, he
lifted his head and looked up--looked straight up into the sorrowful
hairy face of a Man of the Mountains dangling, the last of a long chain,
from a rocky parapet above.

"Why?" says Thumb, looking into his face. "What then?"

"Up, up!" said he, in a thin, lisping Munza-tongue, making a step or
loop of his long fringed arms.

This, then, was the stairs or ladder on which the travellers must climb
into safety. But Thumb could barely touch him with the tips of his
fingers. He stood in doubt, staring up. And presently down that living
rope of Mulgars yet another Man of the Mountains softly descended, and
his arms just reached Thumb's elbows.

"Tread gently, Mulla-mulgar," said this last, with a doleful smile. "You
are fat, and our ladder is slender."

Thumb, with one white, doglike glance into the deeps, took firm hold,
and slowly, heavily, he climbed on from trembling Mulgar to trembling
Mulgar till at length he reached the top.

"Now, Nizza-neela," said the last Man of the Mountains, "it is your
turn." Up clambered Nod after Thumb, groping carefully with the palms of
his feet from hairy loop to loop. But he was glad that the Men of the
Mountains, as their custom generally is, dangled with their faces to the
rock, and could not see into his eyes.

At last all three were safely up, and found themselves on a wide,
smooth, shelving ledge of the mountain, about fifty Mulgar paces wide,
with here and there a tree or tuft of gras