Chapter Chapter 13 · The Cobs' Creatures

. The Cobs' Creatures

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.