Mallington Moor, from all that they said of it, was hardly a likely place to find a thing by searching.  It was a huge high moor, very bleak and desolate and altogether trackless.  It seemed a lonely place from what they said.  The Normans when they came had called it Mal Lieu and afterwards Mallintown and so it changed to Mallington.  Though what a town can ever have had to do with a place so utterly desolate I do not know.  And before that some say that the Saxons called it Baplas, which I believe to be a corruption of Bad Place.

And beyond the mere rumour of a beautiful city all of white marble and with a foreign look up on Mallington Moor, beyond this I could not get.  None of them had seen it himself, “only heard of it like,” and my questions, rather than stimulating conversation, would always stop it abruptly.  I was no more fortunate on the road to Mallington until the Tuesday, when I was quite near it; I had been walking two days from the inn where I had heard the rumour and could see the great hill steep as a headland on which Mallington lay, standing up on the skyline:  the hill was covered with grass, where anything grew at all, but Mallington Moor is all heather; it is just marked Moor on the map; nobody goes there and they do not trouble to name it.  It was there where the gaunt hill first came into sight, by the roadside as I enquired for the marble city of some labourers by the way, that I was directed, partly I think in derision, to the old shepherd of Lingwold.  It appeared that he, following sometimes sheep that had strayed, and wandering far from Lingwold, came sometimes up to the edge of Mallington Moor, and that he would come back from these excursions and shout through the villages, raving of a city of white marble and gold-tipped minarets.  And hearing me asking questions of this city they had laughed and directed me to the shepherd of Lingwold.  One well-meant warning they gave me as I went—­the old man was not reliable.

And late that evening I saw the thatches of Lingwold sheltering under the edge of that huge hill that Atlas-like held up those miles of moor to the great winds and heaven.

They knew less of the city in Lingwold than elsewhere but they knew the whereabouts of the man I wanted, though they seemed a little ashamed of him.  There was an inn in Lingwold that gave me shelter, whence in the morning, equipped with purchases, I set out to find their shepherd.  And there he was on the edge of Mallington Moor standing motionless, gazing stupidly at his sheep; his hands trembled continually and his eyes had a blear look, but he was quite sober, wherein all Lingwold had wronged him.