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On that broad road, travelling toward the awful, dragon-guarded arch, beyond which lay I knew not what, it seemed to me that I was the only man left in the world, I, whose hour had come to enter the portals of destruction.
A postern door in the walls opened on an ornamental wooden bridge across the weir-head a favourite haunt of all fishers and sketchers who were admitted to the dragon-guarded Elysium of Whitford Priors. Thither Lancelot went, congratulating himself, strange to say, in having escaped the only human being whom he loved on earth. He found on the weir-bridge two of the keepers.
"He who sat beside the pool behind the dragon-guarded doors and was named Gateway of the Gods. He who showed to me that we should meet again in such a place and hour as this." "Whence come you now, priest and woman, and why?" "We come from Avignon. We fled thence from one who would have done this maiden grievous wrong. He followed us. Not an hour gone he overtook us with his knaves.
"I'm sure you'll pardon my insistence on this little technicality," he said smoothly; "but you business men, you professional men, are so shrewd, so very alert and quick of mind, that a comparative novice like myself is mere wax in your strong, deft fingers. . . . And now to cipher out some way to secure the golden apple which hangs so close to hand, yet so very dragon-guarded."
Your dreams, even your day-dreams, have hurried you ever far off and away from the beaten turnpike-road of life, through forests of enchantment, to rescue beauty which you never saw, from knight-begirt and dragon-guarded castles; and little thankful have you been when you have opened your eyes awake in peace to the cold light of our misnamed utilitarian day, and found all your enchantment broken, the knights discomfited, the dragon killed, the drawbridge broken down, and the ladies free all without your help; and then, when you have gone forth, and in lieu of some rescued paragon of her sex, you have met but the squire's daughter, in her trim bonnet, tripping with her trumpery to set up her fancy-shop in Vanity-Fair, for fops to stare at through their glasses, your imagination has felt the shock, and incredulous of the improvement in manners and morals, and overlooking all advancement of knowledge, all the advantages of their real liberty, momentarily have you wished them all shut up in castles, or in nunneries, to be the more adored till they may chance to be rescued.
I saved her from a hundred dangers; I followed her through dragon-guarded caverns and the corridors of magic castles; I walked by her side through the forests of the Amazon.... And now I began to crave for some means of expressing these fancies to myself. While they were mere thoughts, parts of me, they were unsatisfactory, however delicious.
For found is now the golden tree, Solv'd th' Atlantic mystery, Pluck'd the dragon-guarded fruit; While around the charmed root, Wailing loud, the Hesperids Watch their warder's drooping lids. Low he lies with grisly wound, While the sorceress triple-crown'd In her scarlet robe doth shield him, Till her cunning spells have heal'd him. Ye, meanwhile, around the earth Bear the prize of manful worth.
Like that immemorial and dragon-guarded jewel of the East the sun, cradled in flaky gold, hung a hand's breadth above the horizon, and all the world had turned to a hazy plum-bloom tint threaded with pale fire.
The goal lay awaiting the final desperate assault, with all its traps and hidden dangers. What a goal to have sought. It was like the dragon-guarded storehouse of the crudest folk-lore. The white men stood apart from their Indian supporters. Kars knew the scene. He was observing the faces of the men who were gazing upon the gorge for the first time. They were full of interest.
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