Then I said to him, “O Eean, I had no playmate nor companion until I met you in the King’s gardens. Now I could not bear to see you go from me, and where you go I shall go too.” Afterward I asked him if there were in the world any Enchanters who were as powerful as Zabulun. He told me of Chiron the Centaur, and of Hermes Trismegistus, the wise Egyptian, and of Merlin whose home is on an island that is west of your Western Island. I thought that only from one of these Enchanters might we get aid against Zabulun. The red grew over the sea green of the ring, and we knew that the farther the red grew the nearer did Zabulun approach us. I wondered how we might get to one of the great Enchanters. Hermes Trismegistus, being in Egypt, was far, and Merlin, on the island beyond the Western Island, was farther still. I thought of Chiron the Centaur, and it seemed to me that him we might be able to find. Now my father had lived a long time in the world, and he had heard many things, and he had thought over the things he had heard in the years when he had gathered brambles and thorns in the wilderness. I went to my father for word of Chiron the Centaur. “Chiron the Centaur dwells all alone in a cave that is in the side of a mountain. The mountain is covered all over with a deep and an ancient forest,” my father told me. And again he said, “Once I knew the direction in which that mountain is, and to-morrow I shall go into the wilderness, and as I walk about it may be that the memory of it will come back to me.” He came back from the wilderness in the evening and he said, “Away toward where the morning star shines there is a great waste. If one skirts this waste one comes to a river the waters of which are as cold as snow. The river flows down from the mountain on the side of which is the cave of Chiron the Centaur. All this I heard in the days of my youth.” Over more and more of the sea green of the ring the red had grown. By this sign we knew that Zabulun was coming close to us. I spoke to Eean and I said that we both should make ready to go to the cave of Chiron the Centaur. Then when the morning star shone very brightly we took leave of my father and we went toward where it shone. We came to the great waste, and we skirted it as we had been told. On we went, and we came to the river, the waters of which were cold as snow. We turned our faces toward the place from which the river flowed until we saw a mountain that was all covered with forest. Deep and ancient and silent was that upward-growing forest. So frightened of its silence were we that we never let go of each other’s hands. For days we went seeking the cave, and at last we heard cries--they might have been from birds, they might have been from the winds--that said, “Who comes to trouble the rest of Chiron the ancient Centaur?” We went toward where the cries came from and we saw the mouth of the cave. We mounted the track that led to it, and in fear we went within.