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sir, the bustle and fuss! They said you could come here from Dolly Sisters or even down in the Shambles, and post a letter to yourself, and you’d have to run like the blazes, sir, the very blazes , sir, to beat the postman to your door! And the uniforms, sir, royal blue with brass buttons! You should’ve seen them! And—”
    Moist looked over the babbling man’s shoulders to the nearest mountain of pigeon guano, where Mr. Pump had paused in his digging. The golem had been prodding at the fetid, horrible mess and, as Moist watched him, he straightened up and headed toward them with something in his hand.
    “—and when the big coaches came in, sir, all the way from the mountains, you could hear the horns miles away! You should’ve heard them, sir! And if any bandits tried anything, there was men we had, who’d go out and—”
    “Yes, Mr. Pump?” said Moist, halting Groat in midhistory.
    “A Surprising Discovery, Postmaster. The Mounds Are Not, As I Surmised, Made Of Pigeon Dung. No Pigeons Could Achieve That Amount In Thousands of Years, Sir.”
    “Well, what are they made of, then?”
    “Letters, Sir,” said the golem.
    Moist looked down at Groat, who shifted uneasily.
    “Ah, yes,” said the old man. “I was coming to that.”

    L ETTERS …
    …there was no end to them. They filled every room of the building and spilled out into the corridors. It was technically true that the postmaster’s office was unusable because of the state of the floor; it was twelve feet deep in letters. Whole corridors were blocked off with them. Cupboards had been stuffed full of them; to open a door incautiously was to be buried in an avalanche of yellowing envelopes. Floorboards bulged suspiciously upwards. Through cracks in the sagging ceiling plaster, paper protruded.
    The sorting room, almost as big as the main hall, had drifts reaching to twenty feet in places. Here and there, filing cabinets rose out of the paper sea like icebergs.
    After half an hour of exploration Moist wanted a bath. It was like walking through desert tombs. He felt he was choking on the smell of old paper, he felt as though his throat was filled with yellow dust.
    “I was told I had an apartment here,” he croaked.
    “Yes, sir,” said Groat. “Me and the lad had a look for it the other day. I heard that it was the other side of your office. So the lad went in on the end of a rope, sir. He said he felt a door, sir, but he’d sunk six feet under the mail by then and he was suffering, sir, suffering… so I pulled him out.”
    “The whole place is full of undelivered mail?”
    They were back in the locker room. Groat had topped up the black kettle from a pan of water, and it was steaming. At the far end of the room, sitting at a neat little table by the stove, Stanley was counting his pins.
    “Pretty much, sir, except in the basements and the stables,” said the old man, washing a couple of tin mugs in a bowl of not very clean water.
    “You mean even the postm— my office is full of old mail but they never filled the basements? Where’s the sense in that?”
    “Oh, you couldn’t use the basements, sir, oh, not the basements,” said Groat, looking shocked. “It’s far too damp down here. The letters’d be destroyed in no time.”
    “Destroyed,” said Moist flatly.
    “Nothing like damp for destroying things, sir,” said Groat, nodding sagely.
    “Destroying mail from dead people to dead people,” said Moist in the same flat voice.
    “We don’t know that, sir,” said the old man. “I mean, we’re got no actual proof.”
    “Well, no. After all, some of those envelopes are only a hundred years old!” said Moist. He had a headache from the dust and a sore throat from the dryness, and there was something about the old man that was grating on his raw nerves. He was keeping something back. “That’s no time at all to some people. I bet the zombie and vampire population are still waiting by the letterbox every day, right?”
    “No