Now in a short while was the ship come into Lookinghaven and alongside of the marble quay. There amid his folk stood Spitfire, who greeted them, saying, “I made all ready to bring three of you home in triumph from your ship, but Volle counselled against it. Glad am I that I took his counsel, and put by those things I had prepared. They had cut me to the heart to see them now.” Juss answered him, “O my brother, this noise of hammers in Lookinghaven, and these ten keels laid on the slips, show me ye have been busied on things nearer our needs than bay-leaves and the instruments of joy since thou camest home.” So they took horse, and while they rode they related to Spitfire all that had befallen since their faring to Carcë. In such wise came they north past the harbour, and so over Havershaw Tongue to Beckfoot where they took the upper path that climbs into Evendale close under the screes of Starksty Pike, and so came a little before noon to Galing. The black rock of Galing stands at the end of the spur that runs down from the south ridge of Little Drakeholm, dividing Brankdale from Evendale. On three sides the cliffs fall sheer from the castle walls to the deep woods of oak and birch and rowan tree which carpet the flats of Moongarth Bottom and feather the walls of the gill through which the Brankdale beck plunges in waterfall after waterfall. Only on the north-east may aught save a winged thing come at the castle, across a smooth grass-grown saddle less than a stone’s throw in width. Over that saddle runs the paven way leading from the Brankdale road to the Lion Gate, and within the gate is that garden of the grass walk between the yews where Lessingham stood with the martlet nine weeks before, when first he came to Demonland. • • • • • When night fell and supper was done, Juss walked alone on the walls of his castle, watching the constellations burn in the moonless sky above the mighty shadows of the mountains, listening to the hooting of the owls in the woods below and the faint distant tinkle of cow-bells, and breathing the fragrance borne up from the garden on the night wind that even in high summer tasted keen of the mountains and the sea. These sights and scents and voices of the holy night so held him in thrall that it wanted but an hour of midnight when he left the battlements, and called the sleepy house-carles to light him to his chamber in the south tower of Galing.