‘Stop a moment; be careful, my lord,’ put in the horse, ‘and be sure you do what I tell you. Dig your spurs in my body up to the rowel, draw your sword, and keep yourself ready, for we shall have to leap over both bridge and dragon. When you see that we are right above the dragon cut off his biggest head, wipe the blood off the sword, and put it back clean in the sheath before we touch earth again.’
So Petru dug in his spurs, drew his sword, cut of the head, wiped the blood, and put the sword back in the sheath before the horse’s hoofs touched the ground again.
And in this fashion they passed the bridge.
‘But we have got to go further still,’ said Petru, after he had taken a farewell glance at his native land.
‘Yes, forwards,’ answered the horse; ‘but you must tell me, my lord, at what speed you wish to go. Like the wind? Like thought? Like desire? or like a curse?’
Petru looked about him, up at the heavens and down again to the earth. A desert lay spread out before him, whose aspect made his hair stand on end.
‘We will ride at different speeds,’ said he, ‘not so fast as to grow tired nor so slow as to waste time.’
And so they rode, one day like the wind, the next like thought, the third and fourth like desire and like a curse, till they reached the borders of the desert.
‘Now walk, so that I may look about, and see what I have never seen before,’ said Petru, rubbing his eyes like one who wakes from sleep, or like him who beholds something so strange that it seems as if... Before Petru lay a wood made of copper, with copper trees and copper leaves, with bushes and flowers of copper also.
Petru stood and stared as a man does when he sees something that he has never seen, and of which he has never heard.