In the same season Fayoles, the fourth King of Numidia, sent out of the
country of Africa to Grangousier the most hideously great mare that ever
was seen, and of the strangest form, for you know well enough how it is
said that Africa always is productive of some new thing. She was as big as
six elephants, and had her feet cloven into fingers, like Julius Caesar's
horse, with slouch-hanging ears, like the goats in Languedoc, and a little
horn on her buttock. She was of a burnt sorrel hue, with a little mixture
of dapple-grey spots, but above all she had a horrible tail; for it was
little more or less than every whit as great as the steeple-pillar of St.
Mark beside Langes: and squared as that is, with tuffs and ennicroches or
hair-plaits wrought within one another, no otherwise than as the beards are
upon the ears of corn.

If you wonder at this, wonder rather at the tails of the Scythian rams,
which weighed above thirty pounds each; and of the Surian sheep, who need,
if Tenaud say true, a little cart at their heels to bear up their tail, it
is so long and heavy. You female lechers in the plain countries have no
such tails. And she was brought by sea in three carricks and a brigantine
unto the harbour of Olone in Thalmondois. When Grangousier saw her, Here
is, said he, what is fit to carry my son to Paris. So now, in the name of
God, all will be well. He will in times coming be a great scholar. If it
were not, my masters, for the beasts, we should live like clerks. The next
morning--after they had drunk, you must understand--they took their
journey; Gargantua, his pedagogue Ponocrates, and his train, and with them
Eudemon, the young page. And because the weather was fair and temperate,
his father caused to be made for him a pair of dun boots,--Babin calls them
buskins. Thus did they merrily pass their time in travelling on their high
way, always making good cheer, and were very pleasant till they came a
little above Orleans, in which place there was a forest of five-and-thirty