The Sword in the Stone. T. H. White

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      The sun finished the last rays of its lingering goodbye, and the moon rose in awful majesty over the silver treetops, before he dared to rise. Then he got up, and dusted the twigs out of his jerkin, and wandered off forlornly, taking the easiest way always and trusting himself to God. He had been walking like this for about half an hour, and sometimes sighing to himself and sometimes feeling more cheerful – because it really was very cool and lovely in the summer forest by moonlight – when he came upon the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen in his short life.

      There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass, and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the opposite side. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always most beautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was the smallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink there were just beeches, but immediately afterwards there was a Knight in full armour, standing still, and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormous white horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in his right hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smooth jousting lance, which stood up among the tree stumps, higher and higher, till it was outlined against the velvet sky. All was moonlit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.

      The Wart did not know what to do. He did not know whether it would be safe to go up to this Knight, for there were so many terrible things in the forest that even the Knight might be a ghost. Most ghostly he looked, too, as he hoved meditating on the confines of the gloom. Eventually the Wart made up his mind that even if it was a ghost, it would be the ghost of a Knight, and Knights were bound by their vows to help people in distress.

      “Excuse me,” said the Wart, when he was right under the mysterious figure, “but can you tell me the way back to Sir Ector’s castle?”

      At this the ghost jumped violently, so that it nearly fell off its horse, and gave out a muffled baaaing noise through its visor, like a flock of sheep.

      “Excuse me,” began the Wart again, and stopped, terrified, in the middle of his speech.

      For the ghost lifted up its visor, revealing two enormous eyes frosted like ice; exclaimed in an anxious voice, “What, what?”; took off its eyes – which turned out to be horn-rimmed spectacles, completely fogged by being inside the helmet; tried to wipe them on the horse’s mane – which only made them worse; lifted both hands above its head and tried to wipe them on its plume; dropped its lance; dropped the spectacles, got off the horse to search for them – the visor shutting in the process; lifted its visor; bent down for the spectacles; stood up again as the visor shut once more, and exclaimed in a plaintive voice, “Deah, deah!”

      The Wart found the spectacles, wiped them, and gave them to the ghost, who immediately put them on (the visor shut again at once) and began scrambling back on the horse for dear life. When it was there it held out its hand for the lance, which the Wart handed up, and, feeling all secure, opened its visor with its left hand and held it open. It peered at the Wart with one hand up, like a lost mariner searching for land, and exclaimed, “Ah – hah; whom have we heah, what what?”

      “Please,” said the Wart, “I am a boy whose guardian is Sir Ector.”

      “Charming fellah,” said the Knight. “Charming fellah. Never met him in my life.”

      “Can you tell me the way back to his castle?”

      “Faintest ideah,” said the Knight. “Faintest ideah. Stranger in these parts meself.”

      “I have got lost,” said the Wart.

      “Funny thing that. Funny thing that, what? Now Ay have been lost for seventeen years.

      “Name of King Pellinore,” continued the Knight. “May have heard of me, what?” Here the visor shut with a pop, like an echo to the What, but was opened again immediately. “Seventeen years ago, come Michaelmas, and been after the Questing Beast ever since. Boring, very.”

      “I should think it would be,” said the Wart, who had never heard of King Pellinore, or the Questing Beast, but felt that this was the safest thing to say in the circumstances.

      “It is the burden of the Pellinores,” said the Knight proudly. “Only a Pellinore can catch it; that is, of course, or his next of kin. Train all the Pellinores with that ideah in mind. Limited eddication, rather. Fewmets, and all that.”

      “I know what fewmets are,” said the Wart with interest. “They are the droppings of the beast pursued. The harbourer keeps them in his horn, to show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable beast or otherwise, and what state it is in.”

      “Intelligent child,” remarked King Pellinore. “Very. Now Ay carry fewmets about with me practically all the time.

      “Insanitary habit,” added the King, beginning to look rather dejected, “and quite pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, what, so there can’t be any question whether it is warrantable or not.”

      Here his visor began to droop so much that the Wart decided he had better forget his own troubles and try to cheer his companion up, by asking questions on the one subject about which King Pellinore seemed qualified to speak. Even talking to a lost royalty was better than being alone in the wood.

      “What does the Questing Beast look like?”

      “Ah, we call it the Beast Glatisant, you know,” replied the monarch, assuming a learned air and beginning to speak quite volubly. “Now the Beast Glatisant, or, as we say in English, the Questing Beast – you may call it either,” he added graciously, – “this Beast has the head of a serpent, ah, and the body of a libbard, the haunches of a lion, and he is footed like a hart. Wherever this beast goes he makes a noise in his belly as it had been the noise of thirty couples of hounds questing.

      “Except when he is drinking, of course,” added the King severely, as if he had rather shocked himself by leaving this out.

      “It must be a dreadful kind of monster,” said the Wart, looking at him anxiously.

      “A dreadful monster,” repeated the other complacently. “It is the Beast Glatisant, you know.”

      “And how do you follow it?”

      This seemed to be the wrong kind of question, for King Pellinore immediately began to look much more depressed than ever, and glanced over his shoulder so hurriedly that his visor shut down altogether.

      “Ay have a brachet,” said King Pellinore sadly, as soon as he had restored himself. “There she is, over theah.”

      The Wart looked in the direction which had been indicated with a despondent thumb, and saw a lot of rope wound round a tree. The other end of the rope was tied to King Pellinore’s saddle.

      “I don’t see her very well.”

      “Wound herself round the other side of the tree, Ay dare say,” said the King, without looking round. “She always goes the opposite way to me.”

      The Wart went over to the tree and found a large white dog scratching herself for fleas. As soon as she saw the Wart, she began wagging her whole body, grinning vacuously, and panting in her efforts to lick his face in spite of the cord. She was too tangled up to move.

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