The house really was very near.
First you had to count out seventeen trees, go past one and a half streams, turn around, count to four, take fifteen waltz steps to the right and then fourteen tango steps to the left and… there it was.
It was a castle, really, as big as a real castle, but I thought: That dwarf isn’t going to trick me again. I’m sure the castle is big on the outside and small on the inside, like the carriage.
And it was! It was very big on the outside but only little on the inside.
I wondered how so many people were going to fit inside the castle. But after all, we’d already overcome such a lot of problems I wasn’t going to get alarmed now over something so trivial.
Mister Carozo made me and Granddad go in first. We ducked down and managed to crawl through the door quite comfortably.
As soon as we had passed over the threshold, we heard a terrible sobbing behind us: it was Dailan Kifki, who was heartbroken because he really wasn’t going to fit inside. And he had noticed the divine smell of chocolate coming from the palace kitchen.
He cried so much and so excellently that I’m sure every single stamp in the Gulubú Post Office must have come unstuck.
I decided to ignore him and let him cry, which is what we usually do with badly brought up cry-babies, and as many of us as could fit made our way into the living room of Mister Dwarf’s castle. In other words, me and Granddad and one or two others.
It’s hard for me to describe how lovely that room was. One thing I can tell you: it wasn’t a room for spending time in, or sitting around or entertaining visitors. It was a room made just for staring at. It was full of windows, big and small, which didn’t keep still but moved whenever you moved. The colours were constantly shifting and changing. It was like being inside a kaleidoscope.
Can you picture it?
There were no chairs or bits of furniture or anything. Only those crazy windows and, in one corner, asleep on a crystal bed, a beautiful football that certainly must have been the one that made Mister Carozo champion.
“She’s asleep now,” said Mister Carozo, pointing at the ball with a serious expression on his face, “but when she wakes up, she’ll score a goal right away.”
“And what time does she wake up?” I asked.
“Quite eventually,” he replied mysteriously.
We decided to let the ball sleep in peace, and the owner of the house invited us through to the dining room where, he explained, we were being awaited by a big table covered in a very fine tablecloth, and on that tablecloth, more than eight hundred pretty little porcelain cups already containing the steaming chocolate.
We crawled through to the dining room after him.
We arranged ourselves around the table and saw that, yes, the eight hundred little cups were indeed laid out on the fine tablecloth, but… there wasn’t a single drop of chocolate left!
That shameless Dailan Kifki, angry at not being allowed into the palace, had found nothing better to do than to stick his trunk through the window and drink the chocolate from all the little cups, one by one.
Would you believe it?
Though I should point out in his favour that he had managed to suck out the chocolate so delicately that he hadn’t broken a single cup or spilt a single drop on that very fine starched tablecloth.
We were all looking sadly, desperately at the empty little cups, when suddenly… Ker-BLAM! from the living room we heard the sound of breaking glass. No sooner had we turned our heads to look than in burst the football, leaping about and spinning like a mad thing.
The uproar seemed to have woken her.
The ball started jumping about on the table, and broke several of the little cups.
“Supisichi, she’s awake,” muttered Mister Carozo.
After bouncing around happily for a good while, the ball escaped out the window and Dailan Kifki started playing with her in the palace garden.
I was most surprised that Mister Carozo, who was such a grouch, would put up with such a badly behaved ball!
Anyway, the owner of the house was just about to call his mysterious, invisible servants to replace the broken cups and prepare more chocolate, when…
I’d almost rather not remember what happened next.
It makes my hair stand on end.