Land of Unreason by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt

Mr.
Plum-spook's hash. But he had no ax^ not even a knife; no matches to experiment
with burning the thing down, and was not enough of a Boy Scout to start a fire
by rubbing sticks.
     
                The plums were well out of
reach. A cast among the other trees gave him a dead branch, but it was not long
enough. Two or three efforts to cast it javelin-wise gave no result.
     
                Barber dropped the branch,
wiped his hands, gripped the trunk of the plum and started to climb. The bark
seemed to crawl beneath his hands—imagination probably. About him the malformed
leaves rustled and the big old trunk heaved ever so slightly, as though in the
grip of a stormwind. It creaked till he wondered whether it would break beneath
him.
     
                The branch with the fruit
was one of the uppermost, and when he reached it Barber was driven to the
uncomfortable expedient of swinging out along it, hand after hand, with his
toes just balancing him on a lighter branch beneath. Under his weight the upper
branch curved till he had difficulty keeping his grip, but the distance to the
ground was not so great that he need fear a fall, so he kept on. Toward the
end, he let go with one hand and grabbed. The fruit floated irritatingly away
from his fingers, but at the fourth snatch he made it and tucked the plum in
his jacket. Another effort gave him a second, and he dropped to the ground.
     
                Close up, the plum looked
even more unappetizing than from a distance, and a tentative nibble assured him
that it tasted even worse—like a sour dried prune. No two ways about it,
though; when you have to—
     
                Cr-rrack! He looked
up just in time to catch a glimpse of a big dead branch, unaccountably broken
loose from the tree's morbid top, hurtling down at him. He jumped like a
grasshopper, and sought the shelter of a friendly looking oak to finish his
unpleasant snack. As he ate, he noted that the back of his jacket seemed
tighter. Perhaps the wings were growing; but if so they were no use to him yet,
so he set out to trudge his way along the banks of the stream.
     
                The forest was very quiet in
the dawnlight, almost as quiet as the strange parkland through which he had
passed before, and he moved on without incident for a couple of hours till the
trees on the left bank began to thin. Among their trunks he could see a line of
yellow-brown where they stopped altogether, so crossed and made toward it. But
when he got nearer he perceived that what he had taken for the packed earth of
a sun-splashed plain was in fact a low, brown wall of some kind of adobe. It
enclosed a space considerable both in length and in width, and entirely filled
with rank on rank of gravestones, all alike in size except one very large one
which faced a kind of gate a hundred yards from them.
     
                Barber found the sight
surprising; he had always supposed the inhabitants of Fairyland to be immortal,
or nearly so. The wall was only about knee-high. He hopped over it and went to
investigate this curious cemetery, in which the ground was not humped as it
would be over real graves. The stones were very old; all the inscriptions had
been weathered from them except a letter here and there. To make matters worse,
the first two he examined had been lettered in Greek, a language with which he
had had no contact since college days. From the next the lettering had
disappeared entirely; there was only just visible the incised outline of a
violin and a pair of musical notes. The next bore a book open, with the letters veri , a gap, and as . Then came one that had a crude
representation of a telescope, another with faded armorial bearings, and one
with the academic mortarboard cap. All had some symbol, and as Barber wandered
among them he was struck by the fact that none of these symbols could by any
imagination be considered either military or religious in