Not even fabulous beasts were near him now, nor strange demoniac trees—­nothing but snow and the clean bare crag above it on which was Tong Tong Tarrup.  All day he climbed and evening found him above the snow-line; and soon he came to the stairway cut in the rock and in sight of that grizzled man, the long porter of Tong Tong Tarrup, sitting mumbling amazing memories to himself and expecting in vain from the stranger a gift of bash.

It seems that as soon as the stranger arrived at the bastion gateway, tired though he was, he demanded lodgings at once that commanded a good view of the Edge of the World.  But the long porter, that grizzled man, disappointed of his bash, demanded the stranger’s story to add to his memories before he would show him the way.  And this is the story, if the long porter has told me the truth and if his memory is still what it was.  And when the story was told, the grizzled man arose, and, dangling his musical keys, went up through door after door and by many stairs and led the stranger to the top-most house, the highest roof in the world, and in its parlour showed him the parlour window.  There the tired stranger sat down in a chair and gazed out of the window sheer over the Edge of the World.  The window was shut, and in its glittering panes the twilight of the World’s Edge blazed and danced, partly like glow-worms’ lamps and partly like the sea; it went by rippling, full of wonderful moons.  But the traveller did not look at the wonderful moons.  For from the abyss there grew with their roots in far constellations a row of hollyhocks, and amongst them a small green garden quivered and trembled as scenes tremble in water; higher up, ling in bloom was floating upon the twilight, more and more floated up till all the twilight was purple; the little green garden low down was hung in the midst of it.  And the garden down below, and the ling all round it, seemed all to be trembling and drifting on a song.  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.