"And so King Arthur floated away to Avalon. You know that Avalon was Glastonbury, and you do not see, perhaps, how any boat could go from this mountain lake, all shut in by the land, out to the sea and inland again to that island with the marsh around it. You must think of the magic of Queen Morgan-le-Fay. Where she wanted her boat to go I am sure that water-ways would open of themselves to let her pass. A ship with her upon it would go as fast and as far as she would have it go. And then, one of the old stories says, they had a pilot who knew all the seas and all the stars of the heavens.
"Sir Bedivere looked after the boat till it had been gone from his sight for a long time. Then he turned away from the lake, went down the hill, and wandered away through the woods. He did not know where he was going and he did not care. He scarcely saw what places he passed. He was thinking of his King who had been taken away from him. He thought of the bright old days when Arthur won his crown in the battles with the rebel Kings, when his own knights learned to love his strength and his truth and his nobleness. He thought of the happy days when the greatest knights of the world gathered at the Round Table in Camelot. He thought of how they had helped the King to bring peace and plenty and content to the land. He thought of the sad later days and of these last days of all and he wished that he might have died before they came. He could not think at all yet of what he was still to do or how he was to live without his King.
"So, deep in these sad thoughts, he went on and on, stopped now and then, where he could, to eat or drink, because he knew he must, or lay down in the forest to sleep, but never thought and never knew how long he had been on the way or how weary he was. At last he heard a bell and saw an abbey before him. He went into the chapel and saw a man kneeling upon a tomb. The man rose and came to meet him. He was the abbot. 'Sir,' said Bedivere, 'whose tomb is that where I saw you praying?'
"'I do not know,' said the abbot. 'Last night a great company of ladies came here and brought a dead man and begged me to bury him. And I buried him in that tomb there before the altar, but they did not tell me who he was.'
"'Then I will tell you,' said Bedivere. 'If a company of ladies brought him, it was King Arthur.'
"Then Bedivere asked the hermit to let him stay there and live with him. And he stayed for a long time there in the Abbey of Glastonbury, and visited the poor and the sick, and at last he became a priest.
"And that was all that was known of how King Arthur passed away from the battle, of how he came to Avalon, and of how he was buried. The abbot did not know who the man was whom he had buried, till Bedivere told him, and Bedivere thought that he was King Arthur only because a company of ladies had brought him. But Arthur himself had told Bedivere that he was going to Avalon to be cured of his wound, and that some time he might come again. And so, on a stone over the grave at Glastonbury, they put the words:
hic jacet Arthurus,
Rex quondam Rexque futurus.
That is Latin and it means: 'Here lies Arthur, King that was and King that shall be.' And so it was long believed that some time King Arthur would come back to conquer the foes of England and to save the people. Some said that he was taken away in the boat to some happy island, to be cured of his wound and to wait for the time when England should need him most. Some said that he was sleeping down under the ground, with his knights, at Caerleon-upon-Usk, and others that he was in the enchanted castle on the hill at Camelot. Some believed that he was a raven, flying around the Cornish coast, and some that he was dead like other men, and in his grave in the Abbey of Glastonbury."
