g. For the
twilight was full of a song that sang and rang along the edges of the
World, and the green garden and the ling seemed to flicker and ripple
with it as the song rose and fell, and an old woman was singing it
down in the garden. A bumble-bee sailed across from over the Edge of
the World. And the song that was lapping there against the coasts of
the World, and to which the stars were dancing, was the same that he
had heard the old woman sing long since down in the valley in the
midst of the Northern moor.

But that grizzled man, the long porter, would not let the stranger
stay, because he brought him no bash, and impatiently he shouldered
him away, himself not troubling to glance through the World's
outermost window, for the lands that Time afflicts and the spaces that
Time knows not are all one to that grizzled man, and the bash that he
eats more profoundly astounds his mind than anything man can show him
either in the World we know or over the Edge. And, bitterly
protesting, the traveller went back and down again to the World.

. . . . .

Accustomed as I am to the incredible from knowing the Edge of the
World, the story presents difficulties to me. Yet it may be that the
devastation wrought by Time is merely local, and that outside the
scope of his destruction old songs are still being sung by those that
we deem dead. I try to hope so. And yet the more I investigate the
story that the long porter told me in the town of Tong Tong Tarrup the
more plausible the alternative theory appears--that that grizzled man
is a liar.

The Loot of Loma

Coming back laden with the loot of Loma, the four tall men looked
earnestly to the right; to the left they durst not, for the precipice
there that had been with them so long went sickly down on to a bank of
clouds, and how much further below that only their fears could say.

Loma lay smoking, a city of ruin, behind them, all its defenders dead;
there was no one left to pursue them, and yet their Indian instincts
told them that all was scarcely well. They had gone three days along
that narrow ledge: mountain quite smooth, incredible, above them, and
precipice as smooth and as far below. It was chilly there in the
mountains; at night a stream or a wind in the gloom of the chasm below
them went like a whisper; the stillness of all things else began to
wear the nerve--an enemy's howl would have braced them; they began to
wish t