strode away, and his mother only sighed and
let him go.

She knew that today he would not drink at the stream coming down from
the terraces of Varpa Niger, the inner land of the mountains, that
today he would not wonder awhile at the sunset and afterwards trot
back to the cavern again to sleep on rushes pulled by rivers that know
not Man. She knew that it was with him as it had been of old with his
father, and with Goom the father of Jyshak, and long ago with the
gods. Therefore she only sighed and let him go.

But he, coming out from the cavern that was his home, went for the
first time over the little stream, and going round the corner of the
crags saw glittering beneath him the mundane plain. And the wind of
the autumn that was gilding the world, rushing up the slopes of the
mountain, beat cold on his naked flanks. He raised his head and
snorted.

"I am a man-horse now!" he shouted aloud; and leaping from crag to
crag he galloped by valley and chasm, by torrent-bed and scar of
avalanche, until he came to the wandering leagues of the plain, and
left behind him for ever the Athraminaurian mountains.

His goal was Zretazoola, the city of Sombelene. What legend of
Sombelene's inhuman beauty or of the wonder of her mystery had ever
floated over the mundane plain to the fabulous cradle of the centaurs'
race, the Athraminaurian mountains, I do not know. Yet in the blood of
man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin
to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far
away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered:
and this spring-tide of current that visits the blood of man comes from
the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it
takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to
ancient song. So it may be that Shepperalk's fabulous blood stirred in
those lonely mountains away at the edge of the world to rumours that
only the airy twilight knew and only confided secretly to the bat, for
Shepperalk was more legendary even than man. Certain it was that he
headed from the first for the city of Zretazoola, where Sombelene in her
temple dwelt; though all the mundane plain, its rivers and mountains,
lay between Shepperalk's home and the city he sought.

When first the feet of the centaur touched the grass of that soft
alluvial earth he blew for joy upon the silver horn, he pranced and
caracoled, he gambolled over the leagues; p