الفصل الفصل 26 · The Goblin-Miners

. The Goblin-Miners

That same night several of the servants were having a chat together

before going to bed.

'What can that noise be?' said one of the housemaids, who had been

listening for a moment or two.

'I've heard it the last two nights,' said the cook. 'If there were any

about the place, I should have taken it for rats, but my Tom keeps them

far enough.'

'I've heard, though,' said the scullery-maid, 'that rats move about in

great companies sometimes. There may be an army of them invading us.

I've heard the noises yesterday and today too.'

'It'll be grand fun, then, for my Tom and Mrs Housekeeper's Bob,' said

the cook. 'They'll be friends for once in their lives, and fight on

the same side. I'll engage Tom and Bob together will put to flight any

number of rats.'

'It seems to me,' said the nurse, 'that the noises are much too loud

for that. I have heard them all day, and my princess has asked me

several times what they could be. Sometimes they sound like distant

thunder, and sometimes like the noises you hear in the mountain from

those horrid miners underneath.'

'I shouldn't wonder,' said the cook, 'if it was the miners after all.

They may have come on some hole in the mountain through which the

noises reach to us. They are always boring and blasting and breaking,

you know.'

As he spoke, there came a great rolling rumble beneath them, and the

house quivered. They all started up in affright, and rushing to the

hall found the gentlemen-at-arms in consternation also. They had sent

to wake their captain, who said from their description that it must

have been an earthquake, an occurrence which, although very rare in

that country, had taken place almost within the century; and then went

to bed again, strange to say, and fell fast asleep without once

thinking of Curdie, or associating the noises they had heard with what

he had told them. He had not believed Curdie. If he had, he would at

once have thought of what he had said, and would have taken

precautions. As they heard nothing more, they concluded that Sir

Walter was right, and that the danger was over for perhaps another

hundred years. The fact, as discovered afterwards, was that the

goblins had, in working up a second sloping face of stone, arrived at a

huge block which lay under the cellars of the house, within the line of

the foundations.

It was so round that when they succeeded, after hard work, in

dislodging it without blasting, it rolled thundering down the slope

with a bounding, jarring roll, which shook the foundations of the

house. The goblins were themselves dismayed at the noise, for they

knew, by careful spying and measuring, that they must now be very near,

if not under the king's house, and they feared giving an alarm. They,

therefore, remained quiet for a while, and when they began to work

again, they no doubt thought themselves very fortunate in coming upon a

vein of sand which filled a winding fissure in the rock on which the

house was built. By scooping this away they came out in the king's

wine cellar.

No sooner did they find where they were, than they scurried back again,

like rats into their holes, and running at full speed to the goblin

palace, announced their success to the king and queen with shouts of

triumph.

In a moment the goblin royal family and the whole goblin people were on

their way in hot haste to the king's house, each eager to have a share

in the glory of carrying off that same night the Princess Irene.

The queen went stumping along in one shoe of stone and one of skin.

This could not have been pleasant, and my readers may wonder that, with

such skilful workmen about her, she had not yet replaced the shoe

carried off by Curdie. As the king, however, had more than one ground

of objection to her stone shoes, he no doubt took advantage of the

discovery of her toes, and threatened to expose her deformity if she

had another made. I presume he insisted on her being content with skin

shoes, and allowed her to wear the remaining granite one on the present

occasion only because she was going out to war.

They soon arrived in the king's wine cellar, and regardless of its huge

vessels, of which they did not know the use, proceeded at once, but as

quietly as they could, to force the door that led upwards.