[Illustration: NOD WAS NEVER LEFT ALONE.]
His quick eyes caught sight of the thin smoke winding silently up from the logs. Somewhere that must escape into the air. But on high it was so dim he could scarcely see the roof, only the steep walls, ragged with snake-skins, and the huge pods of the silky poison-seed. He crept stealthily under one of the arches hung at the entrance with the dried carcass of a little fierce-faced, snow-white Gunga cub, and presently came to where, all in their sandy beds, with their tails curled up, side by side in double rows, the mousey Earth-mulgars slept. He returned to the kitchen, and called softly in the hollow cavern, "Thumb, Thumb!"
Only his own voice echoed back to him. Yet a sound feeble as this awoke the light-sleeping Minimuls. For their mounds echo more than mere hollowness would seem to make them. The lightest stir or footfall of beast walking above in Munza may be heard. Nod had only just time enough to scamper up his own narrow corridor and throw himself on his mat before a score of shuffling footfalls followed, and he felt many glassy eyes peering closely into his face.
All the rest of that night (and for the few nights that followed) Minimuls stood behind his bed beating faintly on their skin Z[=o][=o]ts or tambours, while two others sat one on each side of him with fans of soporiferous Moka-wood. But though they might lull Nod's lids asleep, they couldn't still his busy brain. He dreamed and dreamed. Now, in his dreams he was come in safety to his Uncle Assasimmon's, and they were all rejoicing at a splendid feast, and he was dressed in beads from neck to heel, with a hat of stained ivory and a peacock's feather. Now he was alone in the forest in the dark, and a Talanteuti was lamenting in his ear, "N[=o][=o]m-anossi, N[=o][=o]m-anossi." And now it seemed he sat beneath deep emerald waters in the silver courts of the Water-middens, amid the long gold of their streaming hair. But he would awake babbling with terror, only to smell the creeping odour on the air of broiling Mulgar.
One day came many Earth-mulgars from distant mounds to see this Prince of Magic whom their kinsmen had captured in the forest. They stared at him, sniffed, bowed, and burned smoulder-sticks, and then were led off to stare too at fat Thumb and fattening Thimble. And that same day the Minimuls dragged into their kitchen a long straight branch of iron-wood, which with much labour they turned by charring into a prodigious spit. And Nod knew his hour was come, that there was no time to be lost.