hem, and the
king and his three companions were in the greatest possible danger.

A dense cloud came over the sun, and sank rapidly toward the earth. The
cloud moved all together, and yet the thousands of white flakes of
which it was made up moved each for itself in ceaseless and rapid
motion: those flakes were the wings of pigeons. Down swooped the birds
upon the invaders; right in the face of man and horse they flew with
swift-beating wings, blinding eyes and confounding brain. Horses
reared and plunged and wheeled. All was at once in confusion. The men
made frantic efforts to seize their tormentors, but not one could they
touch; and they outdoubled them in numbers. Between every wild clutch
came a peck of beak and a buffet of pinion in the face. Generally the
bird would, with sharp-clapping wings, dart its whole body, with the
swiftness of an arrow, against its singled mark, yet so as to glance
aloft the same instant, and descend skimming; much as the thin stone,
shot with horizontal cast of arm, having touched and torn the surface
of the lake, ascends to skim, touch, and tear again. So mingled the
feathered multitude in the grim game of war. It was a storm in which
the wind was birds, and the sea men. And ever as each bird arrived at
the rear of the enemy, it turned, ascended, and sped to the front to
charge again.

The moment the battle began, the princess's pony took fright, and
turned and fled. But the maid wheeled her horse across the road and
stopped him; and they waited together the result of the battle.

And as they waited, it seemed to the princess right strange that the
pigeons, every one as it came to the rear, and fetched a compass to
gather force for the reattack, should make the head of her attendant on
the red horse the goal around which it turned; so that about them was
an unintermittent flapping and flashing of wings, and a curving,
sweeping torrent of the side-poised wheeling bodies of birds. Strange
also it seemed that the maid should be constantly waving her arm toward
the battle. And the time of the motion of her arm so fitted with the
rushes of birds, that it looked as if the birds obeyed her gesture, and
she was casting living javelins by the thousand against the enemy. The
moment a pigeon had rounded her head, it went off straight as bolt from
bow, and with trebled velocity.

But of these strange things, others besides the princess had taken
note. From a rising ground whence t