“Life and summer are fleeting,’ sang the bird. ‘Snow and dark, and the winter comes. Nothing remains the same.”

“Life and summer are fleeting,’ sang the bird. ‘Snow and dark, and the winter comes. Nothing remains the same.”

“Legends of the Silver Stallion had been told for years now, whenever mountain stockmen met round the campfires or on the winding hill tracks. Songs were sung about him to the cattle and both songs and tales had become even stranger since his supposed death when he vanished through the wind and the night over a great cliff. Tales kept cropping up of a ghost horse seen, or imagined, roaming over the mountains at night, of stockmen waking in a hut at midnight, hearing the tremendous stallion’s cry which could only be Thowra’s”

“A long shaft of light came down from the sun behind the clouds and fell on the rearing, striking horses so that Thowra was the glittering foam on a waterfall, was quicksilver held for a dazzling moment in the shape of a horse, but a horse that was never still”

“the oncoming night was filled with the mystery of unknown places and of distance, of things that happened long ago and happenings yet to com”

“Here, also, the future was cried aloud by the wind through the rocks, so that all those who heard would shiver, and then the liquid spring song of the thrush would make all the beauty of moonlight and sunlight blend together, making it true, so true, that happiness must come again”

“Just then, down through the last glimmer of twilight, stepping high and free, like a cloud, a moth, a ghost in the shape of a horse — came the Silver Stallion. Wild, beautiful, and free as the wind he came, from one kingdom to another, Thowra”

“There was some rhythm, some ecstasy in this dance of flight that expressed the fact that happiness which touches depths and rises beyond physical confines is as old as consciousness, yet ever renewed, and is like the glorying flight of the birds”

“beauty such as theirs was something with which one lived joyously — racing with the wind, with storm and snow, dancing in the frost or among the golden wattles, galloping, galloping in the spring sun. Life might be dangerous, with beauty that was so difficult to hide, but life was always and ever had been very, very good”

“Long miles of snow and mountains spun out behind him, and his hooves scattered stardust or snow crystals. He went bounding on and on, right on the spine of the world, thrust out against the night sky”

“Life and summer are fleeting,’ sang the bird. ‘Snow and dark, and the winter comes. Nothing remains the same.”

“I? I am the wind,’ said Thowra. ‘I come, I pass, and I am gone.’ The strange feathers moved up and down, the strange voice said tartly: ‘And are your sons the same?’ ‘My son is the lightning that strikes through the black night. My grandson is light that pierces the dark sky at dawning.’ ‘Ah,’ said the first emu, ‘and we know your daughter is the snow that falls softly from above and clothes the world in white. You want but the rainbow — that is and was and never will be, and is yet the promise of life — and the glittering ice which is there and is gone: then you and your family will possess all magic.”