Rubh by the bridle and seeking for a pathway. Behind him the
voices of crashing trees filled the windless night. He found a ledge
at length, and there the three huddled together--Niotte between
swooning and sleep, Graul seated beside her, and Rubh standing
patient, waiting for the day. When the crashing ceased around them,
the King could hear the soft flakes of sweat dripping from the
stallion's belly, and saw the stars reflected now from the floor where
his forest had stood. Day broke, and the Lyonnesse had vanished.
Forest and pasture, city, mart and haven--away to the horizon a
heaving sea covered all. Of his kingdom there remained only a thin
strip of coast, marching beside the Cornish border, and this sentinel
rock, standing as it stands to-day, then called Cara Clowz, and now
St. Michael's Mount.

If you have visited it, you will know that the mount stands about half
a mile from the mainland; an island except at low water, when you
reach it by a stone causeway. Here, on the summit, Graul and Niotte
built themselves a house, asking no more of life than a roof to
shelter them; for they had no child to build for, and their spirit was
broken. The little remnant of their nation settled in Marazion on the
mainland, or southward along the strip of coast, and set themselves to
learn a new calling. As the sea cast up the bodies of their drowned
cattle and the trunks of uprooted trees, they took hides and timber
and fashioned boats and launched forth to win their food. They lowered
nets and wicker pots through the heaving floor deep into the twilight,
and, groping across their remembered fields, drew pollack and conger,
shellfish and whiting from rocks where shepherds had sat to watch
their sheep, or tinners gathered at noonday for talk and dinner. At
first it was as if a man returning at night to his house and, finding
it unlit, should feel in the familiar cupboard for food and start
back from touch of a monstrous body, cold and unknown. Time and use
deadened the shock. They were not happy, for they remembered days of
old; but they endured, they fought off hunger, they earned sleep; and
their King, as he watched from Cara Clowz their dark sails moving out
against the sunset, could give thanks that the last misery had been
spared his people.

But there were dawns which discovered one or two missing from the tale
of boats, home-comings with heavy news for freight, knots of women and
children with blown wet hair awaiting i