slope beyond the hills that leads up to the Edge of the World, and
where, as all guidebooks tell, anything may happen. You might at the
foot of this slope see here and there things that could conceivably
occur in the fields we know; but soon these disappeared, and the
traveller saw nothing but fabulous beasts, browsing on flowers as
astounding as themselves, and rocks so distorted that their shapes had
clearly a meaning, being too startling to be accidental. Even the
trees were shockingly unfamiliar, they had so much to say, and they
leant over to one another whenever they spoke and struck grotesque
attitudes and leered. Jones saw two fir-trees fighting. The effect of
these scenes on his nerves was very severe; still he climbed on, and
was much cheered at last by the sight of a primrose, the only familiar
thing he had seen for hours, but it whistled and skipped away. He saw
the unicorns in their secret valley. Then night in a sinister way
slipped over the sky, and there shone not only the stars, but lesser
and greater moons, and he heard dragons rattling in the dark.

With dawn there appeared above him among its amazing crags the town of
Tong Tong Tarrup, with the light on its frozen stairs, a tiny cluster
of houses far up in the sky. He was on the steep mountain now: great
mists were leaving it slowly, and revealing, as they trailed away,
more and more astonishing things. Before the mist had all gone he
heard quite near him, on what he had thought was bare mountain, the
sound of a heavy galloping on turf. He had come to the plateau of the
centaurs. And all at once he saw them in the mist: there they were,
the children of fable, five enormous centaurs. Had he paused on
account of any astonishment he had not come so far: he strode on over
the plateau, and came quite near to the centaurs. It is never the
centaurs' wont to notice men; they pawed the ground and shouted to one
another in Greek, but they said no word to him. Nevertheless they