excerpt

Their dwarf companions were a funny mixture of gloom and cheer. A lifetime of living and working among rocks had made them rather solid and slow in their thoughts and speech, yet they made a number of jokes. These jokes were very funny, apparently, but it was a little hard to tell. They relied so heavily on an intimate understanding of stone and involved so many bits of mining slang that they were largely incomprehensible to the two humans. Yet after every joke, the dwarves would all burst into gales of hysterical laughter; without, however, changing their glum expressions.