Such peaks and troughs, such mountains and valleys, such deep depths. To look at it all shifting and moving, stinking and cracking, it was such a thing! Heaving and humming! It is not possible for an Iremonger not to be proud of the dirtheaps, proud and of course fearful. I could have stayed there and watched it in its glory, I could perhaps have caught the Heap Blindness that so many Iremongers before me had succumbed to. My Second Cousin Roota who, unhappy in her school hours, bullied and shunned, sticked and stoned, word-hurt and bruised, took herself up to these roofs day after day for comfort, until at last, she fell in love with the heaps and gave her heart to them, and one day, bully-bled and hurting head and heart, she wandered the rooftops and looking out at the waves of rolling filth, she gave herself entirely up to them and threw herself from the rooftops. She sailed wonderfully, soaring at first but then the grace was over and turned into a hurried plummeting down.

Then, suddenly, there was something other than the heaps, something else moving. The hatchway where I had escaped was opening up once more and a top hat began to emerge, like a chimney breaking through a roof. More top hat came and more yet; though the hat was certainly scratched and dented it continued to sit atop the long man.

The long man, the long man was coming.

I scrambled on then, as fast as I could. I prayed he had not seen me. How could he have survived the bats? On I rushed, on and on, scuttling seagulls who snapped at me in complaint, and I made it at last to the Forest on the roof.

The Forest on the Roof

The Forest was what we called all the chimney stacks that Grandfather, in his wisdom, had had gathered up from all over London town, small pots or great organ pipes, so many, many stacks, only some of which connected to the vertical passageways down below. There were several thousand of these upright dominoes and among them I now rushed, screaming, as behind me, through that fog of seagulls and their things, the long man with his long hat and long face, long arms and long legs marched.