“’Ere,” said Lord Castlenorman some few weeks later to Messrs. Grosvenor and Campbell, “you aren’t ’arf taking your time about those emeralds.”

The Long Porter’s Tale

There are things that are known only to the long porter of Tong Tong Tarrup as he sits and mumbles memories to himself in the little bastion gateway.

He remembers the war there was in the halls of the gnomes; and how the fairies came for the opals once, which Tong Tong Tarrup has; and the way that the giants went through the fields below, he watching from his gateway:  he remembers quests that are even yet a wonder to the gods.  Who dwells in those frozen houses on the high bare brink of the world not even he has told me, and he is held to be garrulous.  Among the elves, the only living things ever seen moving at that awful altitude where they quarry turquoise on Earth’s highest crag, his name is a byword for loquacity wherewith they mock the talkative.

His favourite story if you offer him bash—­the drug of which he is fondest, and for which he will give his service in war to the elves against the goblins, or vice-versa if the goblins bring him more—­his favourite story, when bodily soothed by the drug and mentally fiercely excited, tells of a quest undertaken ever so long ago for nothing more marketable than an old woman’s song.

Picture him telling it.  An old man, lean and bearded, and almost monstrously long, that lolled in a city’s gateway on a crag perhaps ten miles high; the houses for the most part facing eastward, lit by the sun and moon and the constellations we know, but one house on the pinnacle looking over the edge of the world and lit by the glimmer of those unearthly spaces where one long evening wears away the stars:  my little offering of bash; a long forefinger that nipped it at once on a stained and greedy thumb—­all these are in the foreground of the picture.  In the background, the mystery of those silent houses and of not knowing who their denizens were, or what service they had at the hands of the long porter and what payment he had in return, and whether he was mortal.

Picture him in the gateway of this incredible town, having swallowed my bash in silence, stretch his great length, lean back, and begin to speak.

It seems that one clear morning a hundred years ago, a visitor to Tong Tong Tarrup was climbing up from the world.  He had already passed above the snow and had set his foot on a step of the earthward stairway that goes down from Tong Tong Tarrup on to the rocks, when the long porter saw him.  And so painfully did he climb those easy steps that the grizzled man on watch had long to wonder whether or not the stranger brought him bash, the drug that gives a meaning to the stars and seems to explain the twilight.  And in the end there was not a scrap of bash, and the stranger had nothing better to offer that grizzled man than his mere story only.