ut and roofed it over with the huge abundant
leaves of a marvellous weed and ate the meat that grows on the
targar-tree and waited there three days. And all day long the river
tumbled by and all night long the tolulu-bird sang on and the huge
fireflies had no other care than to pour past in torrents of dancing
sparks, and nothing rippled the surface of the Yann by day and nothing
disturbed the tolulu-bird by night. I know not what I feared for the
ship I sought and its friendly captain who came from fair Belzoond and
its cheery sailors out of Durl and Duz; all day long I looked for it
on the river and listened for it by night until the dancing fireflies
danced me to sleep. Three times only in those three nights the
tolulu-bird was scared and stopped his song, and each time I awoke
with a start and found no ship and saw that he was only scared by the
dawn. Those indescribable dawns upon the Yann came up like flames in
some land over the hills where a magician burns by secret means
enormous amethysts in a copper pot. I used to watch them in wonder
while no bird sang--till all of a sudden the sun came over a hill and
every bird but one began to sing, and the tolulu-bird slept fast, till
out of an opening eye he saw the stars.

I would have waited three more days, but on the third day I had gone
in my loneliness to see the very spot where first I met _Bird of the
River_ at her anchorage with her bearded captain sitting on the deck.
And as I looked at the black mud of the harbour and pictured in my
mind that band of sailors whom I had not seen for two years, I saw an
old hulk peeping from the mud. The lapse of centuries seemed partly
to have rotted and partly to have buried in the mud all but the prow
of the boat and on the prow I faintly saw a name. I read it slowly--
it was _Bird of the River._ And then I knew that, while in Ireland and
London two years had barely passed over my head, ages had gone over
the region of Yann and wrecked and rotted that once familiar ship, and
buried years ago the bones of the youngest of my friends, who so often
sang to me of Durl and Duz or told the dragon-legends of Belzoond.
For beyond the world we know there roars a hurricane of centuries
whose echo only troubles--though sorely--our fields; while elsewhere
there is calm. I stayed a moment by that battered hulk and said a
prayer for whatever may be immortal of those who were wont to sail it
down the Yann, and I prayed for them to th