The pebbles and streams became a river over the bank of a rise. We rose too; we had come out of a dip in the plain, and the sky and river were turbulent with dark grey and dark white, and the wind meets us like a curling, turning, curling, spurling sea-edge all waves and patterns and he breasts it and its blast strikes us and does not slay and the wind parts and runs past us like a river.

My hair and clothes follow the backwards rider’s-lean of my body. My Cousin! What it is to ride one with a creature whose each savage stride is part of a rhythm like the swiftened, terrible rhythm of the mountains growing.

The wind’s force against my breast, against us, is so great that at first I am lost in wind, my six senses aware only of wind, then the force of our motion into it is more highly active.

And the rhythm continues with each savage stride.

Later the wilderness became less sullen. Armadillos scurried in the scrubby undergrowth. Over there long ripple after long ripple makes it seem as if the tall, saffron grasslands are gliding towards us, but it is only wind scudding the thousands of feathery grass-heads against the flanks of the herds grazing in it. There are boar, grunting, hacking, turning bloodshot practically useless eyes here and there; the wind is ours inasmuch as it does not tell their disgusting nostrils of us. There, majestic as unhurried swimmers, dark and shambling on the horizon, mammoth: the leader’s tusks are growing at such a back-curve that in a few more years they will have got to his own eyes—perhaps he will have been able to keep their points at bay by filing them on bark. There are lumbering, trundling, giant ground sloth, desiccating foliage.

These great bulks, in their own element, would have crushed me with terror before even noticing me, had I been alone. Now I was a lord of the wilderness, for I rode one of their lords, one of the swiftest, fiercest and strongest, and he was my loyal companion, he would let nothing happen to me.

Several times we saved time by crossing loops of the river, now broad and swift and shining, blue enclosed between its high, rocky, flowering banks. Urns trod daintily down these, in places nearly perpendicular, then stepped without stride-change into the swift blue where it gurgled at the bank-foot. Often,

43 8^