CHAPTER 4
Which is about the meeting with Snufkin and a terrible
experience with a giant lizard.
Day after day the world was shrouded in a greyness, but it never rained. Columns of cloud rolled endlessly across the sky, and below them from the earth lay waiting. Moomintroll and Sniff floated farther and farther east on their raft. They weren’t used to being without the sun, and became melancholy and quiet. Sometimes they had a game of poker or wrote a poem or caught a fish for the pot, but mostly they just sat watching the banks float by. Now and then Moomintroll contemplated the clouds and wondered whether he would see the comet it they divided. But they never did.
Often he longed to tell Sniff about the great sky-monster that they were going out to look for, but it was too much of a risk that sniff would only get in a panic.
Three times they saw the Hattifatteners, the little white creatures who are for ever wandering restlessly from place to place in their aimless quest for nobody knows what. Once they were fording a the river in a shallow place and twice passing in their small light boats. They seemed more restless than usual, hopping along at great speed, but as they can neither hear nor speak it wasn’t much use Sniff and Moomintroll even saying ‘hullo’ to them.
The banks looked different now. Silver poplars, plum-trees and oaks had dissapeared, and dark trees with heavy branches stood alone on the deserted sand, while in the distance greyish-yellow mountains climbed steeply towards the sky.
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Moomintroll. ‘Isn’t this river ever going to end?’
‘Shall we have a game of poker?’ suggested Sniff.