He had learned our language fairly easily, but retained a slight Levantine accent. Despite his two hundred and sixty years, his appearance was youthful, both in his human aspects and in those equine. What I will relate here is the fruit of our long conversations.

The centaurs’ origins are legendary; but the legends that they pass down among themselves are very different from those we consider to be classic.

Remarkably, their traditions also begin with a highly intelligent man, a Noah-like inventor and saviour, whom they call Cutnofeset. But there were no centaurs on Cutnofeset’s ark. Nor, by the way, were there ‘seven pairs of every species of clean beast, and a pair of every species of the beasts that are not clean’. The centaurian tradition is more rational than the biblical, recounting that only the archetypal animals, the key species, were saved: man but not the monkey; the horse but not the donkey or the wild ass; the rooster and the crow but not the vulture or the hoopoe or the gyrfalcon.

How, then, did these species come about? Immediately afterward, legend says. When the waters retreated, a deep layer of warm mud covered the earth. Now, this mud, which harboured in its decay all the enzymes from what had perished in the flood, was extraordinarily fertile: as soon as it was touched by the sun, it was immediately covered in shoots from which grasses and plants of every type sprang forth; and even more, within its soft and moist bosom, it was host to the marriages of all the species saved in the ark. It was a time, never again to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity in which the entire universe felt love, so much so that it nearly returned to chaos.

Those were the days in which the earth itself fornicated with the sky, in which everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring, not in a few months, but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the cold and prudish face of the earth, was a single immense nuptial bed, boiling over with desire in all its recesses, and teeming with jubilant germs.

This second creation was the true Creation; because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain analogies, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna fish and a cow. Where do the delicate colours of butterflies and their ability to fly come from? They are the children of a flower and a fly. And tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. And bats of an owl and a mouse. And conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. And hippopotami of a horse and a river. And vultures of a worm and an owl. And the big whales, the leviathans, how else to explain their immense mass? Their wooden bones, their black and oily skin and their fiery breath are living testimony to a venerable union in which this same primordial mud got greedy hold of the ark’s feminine keel, made of gopher wood and covered inside and out with shiny pitch, when the end of all flesh had been decreed.