<SPAN name="chap13"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER 13 </h3>
<h3> The Cobs' Creatures </h3>
<p>About this time the gentlemen whom the king had left behind him to
watch over the princess had each occasion to doubt the testimony of his
own eyes, for more than strange were the objects to which they would
bear witness. They were of one sort—creatures—but so grotesque and
misshapen as to be more like a child's drawings upon his slate than
anything natural. They saw them only at night, while on guard about
the house. The testimony of the man who first reported having seen one
of them was that, as he was walking slowly round the house, while yet
in the shadow, he caught sight of a creature standing on its hind legs
in the moonlight, with its forefeet upon a window-ledge, staring in at
the window. Its body might have been that of a dog or wolf, he
thought, but he declared on his honour that its head was twice the size
it ought to have been for the size of its body, and as round as a ball,
while the face, which it turned upon him as it fled, was more like one
carved by a boy upon the turnip inside which he is going to put a
candle than anything else he could think of. It rushed into the
garden. He sent an arrow after it, and thought he must have struck it;
for it gave an unearthly howl, and he could not find his arrow any more
than the beast, although he searched all about the place where it
vanished. They laughed at him until he was driven to hold his tongue,
and said he must have taken too long a pull at the ale-jug.</p>
<p>But before two nights were over he had one to side with him, for he,
too, had seen something strange, only quite different from that
reported by the other. The description the second man gave of the
creature he had seen was yet more grotesque and unlikely. They were
both laughed at by the rest; but night after night another came over to
their side, until at last there was only one left to laugh at all his
companions. Two nights more passed, and he saw nothing; but on the
third he came rushing from the garden to the other two before the
house, in such an agitation that they declared—for it was their turn
now—that the band of his helmet was cracking under his chin with the
rising of his hair inside it. Running with him into that part of the
garden which I have already described, they saw a score of creatures,
to not one of which they could give a name, and not one of which was
like another, hideous and ludicrous at once, gambolling on the lawn in
the moonlight. The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of their
faces, the length of legs and necks in some, the apparent absence of
both or either in others, made the spectators, although in one consent
as to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the evidence of
their own eyes—and ears as well; for the noises they made, although
not loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and could be
described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor howls nor barks
nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor mews nor shrieks, but
only as something like all of them mingled in one horrible dissonance.
Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a few moments to recover
themselves before the hideous assembly suspected their presence; but
all at once, as if by common consent, they scampered off in the
direction of a great rock, and vanished before the men had come to
themselves sufficiently to think of following them.</p>
<p>My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them full
information concerning them. They were, of course, household animals
belonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their ancestors
many centuries before from the upper regions of light into the lower
regions of darkness. The original stocks of these horrible creatures
were very much the same as the animals now seen about farms and homes
in the country, with the exception of a few of them, which had been
wild creatures, such as foxes, and indeed wolves and small bears, which
the goblins, from their proclivity towards the animal creation, had
caught when cubs and tamed. But in the course of time all had
undergone even greater changes than had passed upon their owners. They
had altered—that is, their descendants had altered—into such
creatures as I have not attempted to describe except in the vaguest
manner—the various parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently
arbitrary and self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments.
Indeed, so little did any distinct type predominate in some of the
bewildering results, that you could only have guessed at any known
animal as the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be
more one of general expression than of definable conformation. But
what increased the gruesomeness tenfold was that, from constant
domestic, or indeed rather family association with the goblins, their
countenances had grown in grotesque resemblance to the human.</p>
<p>No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them,
even amongst the fishes, it may be with a dimness and vagueness
infinitely remote, yet shadows the human: in the case of these the
human resemblance had greatly increased: while their owners had sunk
towards them, they had risen towards their owners. But the conditions
of subterranean life being equally unnatural for both, while the
goblins were worse, the creatures had not improved by the
approximation, and its result would have appeared far more ludicrous
than consoling to the warmest lover of animal nature. I shall now
explain how it was that just then these animals began to show
themselves about the king's country house.</p>
<p>The goblins, as Curdie had discovered, were mining on—at work both day
and night, in divisions, urging the scheme after which he lay in wait.
In the course of their tunnelling they had broken into the channel of a
small stream, but the break being in the top of it, no water had
escaped to interfere with their work. Some of the creatures, hovering
as they often did about their masters, had found the hole, and had,
with the curiosity which had grown to a passion from the restraints of
their unnatural circumstances, proceeded to explore the channel. The
stream was the same which ran out by the seat on which Irene and her
king-papa had sat as I have told, and the goblin creatures found it
jolly fun to get out for a romp on a smooth lawn such as they had never
seen in all their poor miserable lives. But although they had partaken
enough of the nature of their owners to delight in annoying and
alarming any of the people whom they met on the mountain, they were, of
course, incapable of designs of their own, or of intentionally
furthering those of their masters.</p>
<p>For several nights after the men-at-arms were at length of one mind as
to the fact of the visits of some horrible creatures, whether bodily or
spectral they could not yet say, they watched with special attention
that part of the garden where they had last seen them. Perhaps indeed
they gave in consequence too little attention to the house. But the
creatures were too cunning to be easily caught; nor were the watchers
quick-eyed enough to descry the head, or the keen eyes in it, which,
from the opening whence the stream issued, would watch them in turn,
ready, the moment they should leave the lawn, to report the place clear.</p>
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