None of it made any sense. Vast cans loomed above him. There were huge pieces of metal that had a made look about them. This was definitely apart of a human heaven. Humans liked metal.
He did skirt warily around a cigarette-end, and made a mental note to take it back for Torrit.
There were other lorries in this place, all of them silent. It was, Masklin decided, a lorry nest. Which meant that the only food in it was probably all.
He untensed a bit, and prodded about under a bench that towered against one wall like a house. There were drifts of waste paper there, and, led by a smell which here was even stronger than all, he found a whole apple core. It was going brown, but it was a pretty good find.
He slung it across one shoulder and turned around.
There was a rat watching him thoughtfully. It was considerably bigger and sleeker than the things that fought the nomes for the scraps from the waste-bin. It dropped on all fours and trotted towards him.
Masklin felt that he was on firmer ground here. All these huge dark shapes and cans and ghastly smells were quite beyond him, but he knew what a rat was all right, and what to do about one.
He dropped the core, brought his spear back slowly and carefully, aimed at a point just between the creature's eyes.
Two things happened at once.
Masklin noticed that the rat had a little red collar.
And a voice said: 'Don't! He took a long time to train. Bargains Galore! Where did you come from?' The stranger was a nome. At least, Masklin had to assume so. He was certainly nome height, and moved like a nome.
But his clothes. .
The basic colour for a practical nome's clothes is mud. That was common sense. Grimma knew fifty ways of making dyes from wild plants and they all yielded a colour that was, when you came right down to it, basically muddy. Sometimes yellow mud, sometimes brown mud, sometimes even greenish mud but still, well, mud. Because any nome who ventured out wearing jolly reds and blues would have a life expectancy of perhaps half an hour before something digestive happened to him.