ted a
great many blocks of stone, with cement, ready for building up the weak
place--well enough known to the goblins. Although there was not room
for more than two to be actually building at once, they managed, by
setting all the rest to work in preparing the cement and passing the
stones, to finish in the course of the day a huge buttress filling the
whole gang, and supported everywhere by the live rock. Before the hour
when they usually dropped work, they were satisfied the mine was secure.

They had heard goblin hammers and pickaxes busy all the time, and at
length fancied they heard sounds of water they had never heard before.
But that was otherwise accounted for when they left the mine, for they
stepped out into a tremendous storm which was raging all over the
mountain. The thunder was bellowing, and the lightning lancing out of
a huge black cloud which lay above it and hung down its edges of thick
mist over its sides. The lightning was breaking out of the mountain,
too, and flashing up into the cloud. From the state of the brooks, now
swollen into raging torrents, it was evident that the storm had been
storming all day.

The wind was blowing as if it would blow him off the mountain, but,
anxious about his mother and the princess, Curdie darted up through the
thick of the tempest. Even if they had not set out before the storm
came on, he did not judge them safe, for in such a storm even their
poor little house was in danger. Indeed he soon found that but for a
huge rock against which it was built, and which protected it both from
the blasts and the waters, it must have been swept if it was not blown
away; for the two torrents into which this rock parted the rush of
water behind it united again in front of the cottage--two roaring and
dangerous streams, which his mother and the princess could not possibly
have passed. It was with great difficulty that he forced his way
through one of them, and up to the door.

The moment his hand fell on the latch, through all the uproar of winds
and Waters came the joyous cry of the princess:

'There's Curdie! Curdie! Curdie!'

She was sitting wrapped in blankets on the bed, his mother trying for
the hundredth time to light the fire which had been drowned by the rain
that came down the chimney. The clay floor was one mass of mud, and
the whole place looked wretched. But the faces of the mother and the
princess shone as if their troubles only made them the merrier.