98 A BOOK OF MORTALS 



It is the King of that strange, imaginary girdle of the 

 Beasts which is set among the Stars of Heaven to keep 

 watch and ward over man's world upon its way ; for the 

 sign of the Lion in the zodiac holds the Sun in the zenith 

 of his power. 



It is a quaint mysterious girdle that of the beasts 

 marshalling, or being marshalled by the Virgin, the Twins, 

 the Archer, and the Water-carrier. If we could truly 

 understand its imagery we should solve many a puzzle of 

 the past and present. 



For how came it there ? — the bestiary, as it was called 

 not so long ago even in this England of ours ? How few 

 of us ever pause to think why the tentative, fear-stricken, 

 yet trustful hands of our far-away forefathers were stretched 

 so far beyond their limited lives in order to set these symbols 

 of something in the sky ? 



Myth-mad antiquaries tell us that these houses of the 

 Sun were his shelter, his cities of refuge in his endless escape 

 from Night, his endless race against Time ; just as in old 

 tales the good fairy escapes from the bad fairy by changing 

 herself into a beast that walks, a bird that flies, an insect 

 that gropes, or a fish that swims. 



Let us say " True, Oh King ! " with heart-whole 

 acquiescence ; but for all that we are no further than we 

 were in comprehension ; for, far below the surface of explana- 

 tion like a dead drowned face in the unfathomed sea, we 

 catch a glimpse of an inexplicable human thought born of a 

 desire which sought, as we seek now, a firmer grip on life, 

 and which found it in the quaint device of safeguarding a 

 soul by putting it in another body than its own. 



" Tell me true, in what thing does your life lie," asks 



