So they made them ready for their journey, and Boy Beautiful embraced his bride and departed, but the ladies stood there looking after him, and their eyes were filled with tears.
And now Boy Beautiful and his faithful steed came to the place where the domains of Scorpia had been, but the forests had become fields of corn, and cities stood thickly on what had once been desolate places. Boy Beautiful asked all whom he met concerning Scorpia and her habitations, but they only answered that these were but idle fables which their grandfathers had heard from their great-grandfathers.
“But how is that possible?” replied Boy Beautiful; “’twas but the other day that I passed by——” and he told them all he knew. Then they laughed at him as at one who raves or talks in his sleep; but he rode away wrathfully without noticing that his beard and the hair of his head had grown white.
When he came to the domain of Gheonoea he put the same questions and received the same answers. He could not understand how the whole region could have utterly changed in a few days, and again he rode away, full of anger, with a white beard that now reached down to his girdle and with legs that began to tremble beneath him.
At length he came to the empire of his father. Here there were new men and new dwellings, and the old ones had so altered that he scarce knew them.
So he came to the palace where he had first seen the light of day. As he dismounted the horse kissed his hand and said: “Fare thee well, my master! I return from whence I came. But if thou also wouldst return, mount again and we’ll be off instantly.”
“Nay,” he replied, “fare thee well, I also will return soon.”
Then the horse flew away like a dart.
But when Boy Beautiful beheld the palace all in ruins and overgrown with evil weeds, he sighed deeply, and with tears in his eyes he sought to recall the glories of that fallen palace. Round about the place he went, not once nor twice: he searched in every room, in every corner for some vestige of the past; he searched the stable in which he had found his steed, and then he went down into the cellar, the entrance to which was choked up by fallen rubbish.
Here and there and everywhere he searched about, and now his long white beard reached below his knee, and his eyelids were so heavy that he had to raise them on high with his hands, and he found he could scarce totter along. All he found there was a huge old coffer which he opened, but inside it there was nothing. Yet he lifted up the cover, and then a voice spoke to him out of the depths of the coffer and said: “Welcome, for hadst thou kept me waiting much longer, I also would have perished.”