“What does he want?”
“A drink. They will do anything for it.” Geos pressed a button, and in a moment he had another goblet. This he held before the little stallion, who thrust his head in above his nostrils and drank as greedily as a Percheron weighing a ton. Watson stroked his sides; the mane was like spun silk, he felt the legs symmetrical, perfectly shaped, not as large above the fetlocks as an ordinary pencil.
“Are they all of this size?”
“Yes; all of them. Why do you ask?”
“Because”—seeing no harm in telling this—“as I remember them, a horse on the other side would make a thousand of this one. People ride them.”
The Rhamda nodded.
“So it is told in the books of Jarados. We had such beasts, once, ourselves. We would have them still, but for the brutality and stupidity of our ancestors. It is the one great sin of the Thomahlia. Once we had animals, great and small, and all the blessings of Nature; we had horses and, I think, what you call beef; a thousand other creatures that were food and help and companions to man. And for the good they had done our ancestors destroyed them!”
“Why?”
“It was neglect, unthinking and selfish. A time came when our civilisation made it possible to live without other creatures. When machinery came into vogue we put aside the animals as useless; those we had no further use for we denied the right to reproduce. The game of the forest was hunted down with powerful weapons of destruction; all went, in a century or two; everything that could be killed. And with them went the age of our highest art, that age of domesticated animals.
“Our greatest paintings, our noblest sculpture, came from that age; all the priceless relics that we call classic. And in its stead we had the mechanical age. Man likewise became a mechanism, emotionless, with no taste for Nature. Meat was made synthetically, and so was milk.”