Night after night brought him sleep, and day after day lit his gallop,
till he came to the lands of the Athalonian men who live by the edges
of the mundane plain, and from them he came to the lands of legend
again such as those in which he was cradled on the other side of the
world, and which fringe the marge of the world and mix with the
twilight. And there a mighty thought came into his untired heart, for
he knew that he neared Zretazoola now, the city of Sombelene.
It was late in the day when he neared it, and clouds coloured with
evening rolled low on the plain before him; he galloped on into their
golden mist, and when it hid from his eyes the sight of things, the
dreams in his heart awoke and romantically he pondered all those
rumours that used to come to him from Sombelene, because of the
fellowship of fabulous things. She dwelt (said evening secretly to the
bat) in a little temple by a lone lakeshore. A grove of cypresses
screened her from the city, from Zretazoola of the climbing ways. And
opposite her temple stood her tomb, her sad lake-sepulchre with open
door, lest her amazing beauty and the centuries of her youth should
ever give rise to the heresy among men that lovely Sombelene was
immortal: for only her beauty and her lineage were divine.
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