One half a continental span, The Aralasian mountains lay Like a Valkyrian caravan At rest along the Aryan Way. And central to the barrier, Rising in mottled columns, were The limestone ramparts of the heights— The Carolonian Dolomites. Over those scaffolds nothing passed But navigators of the sky: Those crags were taken only by The sun and moon and the wind's blast, By clouds and by the eagles' wings Out on their furthest venturings. So rooted in geography The natural frontier, it could be A theme for neither god nor beast To argue that one side was east And that the other side was west. Yet with this knowledge manifest, We must record a truth as strange As any fact or myth that can Inflict mortality on man.

The middle section of this range For endless centuries had been Earth's most dramatic mise en scène For lawless indeterminate fights. Both avalanche and cataract With Time compounding had attacked The lowest of the Dolomites With spring's recurrent cannonade; Had deepened crater and crevasse, Torn down the gorges and had laid The canyon of Saint Barnabas. Along this canyon's northern edge, One hundred feet in length, a ledge Of schist, known as the Capra Pass, Projected from the mountain wall. This slippery stretch might well appal The tread of cloven-footed things In their most cautious pedallings, But as a ground on which to stage The fortunes of a battle rage, That ledge of Capra might reveal A tale which, for perversity, Could tame the Kyber Route or steal The title from Thermopylae.

The country which those peaks divide Was noted for its rich terrains, Its sweeping uplands and its wide Deltas and undulating plains. Millions of hornèd ruminants Roebucks and elks and argalis Upon this vast inheritance Had founded aristocracies, Which ruled the commons till, between Their slaughterous feuds internecine And foreign raids, they lost their lead To a lusty more endurant breed— A new totalitarian horn Known as the genus Capricorn.

The Aralasian country west, Described as Carob, was possessed By a remarkable race of goats With lyrate horns and shaggy coats. Unyielding individualists At first by nature they had learned The folly of obstructionists Within their tribal ranks and turned To federal virtues for the wise Conduct of a state enterprise. And of this wide domain the head Was Cyrus. It was he who led The bucks against the bulls in that Perfidious effort to profane The purity of the racial strain: 'Twas he, the high-born aristocrat, Who rounded up intransigeants, Drove out all civil disputants, And bent the proletariat Under a regimen of drill To his authoritarian will.

And on the east there was a spot As fertile as the Carob land, Where goats likewise had won command— The ancient dynasty of Gott. Straight-horned those tribes, of wiry coat, They had outmatched their canine foes, Then turned upon the yaks and smote The harts and put to shame the does. Inebriated by success, With numbers vastly multiplied, They built a citadel of pride About a national consciousness, Outran their borders to possess Those lush exotic harvest yields Of hitherto unvanquished fields, Until they had from that wild shore Of the Fallopian corridor Down to the grey Ovidian Sea Established their hegemony.

Now when the veterans returned Flushed with their foreign victories, The hearts of all the generals burned With personal antipathies. All scrambled for the seats of power, Some wanted this, some wanted that, And some they knew not what—whereat Uprose the leader of the hour, A buck who by right of descent, As by his natural temperament, Had never recognized retreat. A scion of a Caliphate, He knew the strategy to beat The factions by a stroke of state And quell diversity of bleat, For of all lands, the realm of Gott Indubitably was polyglot. This stroke of state, this coup d'état Was nature's oldest formula. It was the leader's bright idea To send them forth to find their grub On fetid moors and desert scrub Where tuber roots of Ipomoea Purga—the standard panacea For disaffections of the mind— Became their diet, which, combined With seeds of Croton Tiglium, Restored their equilibrium. The mightiest hybrid of his race Was this ballista of the herd; The orient framework of his face Had been through generations blurred By a gigantic Ural trek— For unlike Cyrus, Prince of Carob, The Gottite leader's stream was stirred By elements from Turk and Arab: Tincture of Tartar, touch of Czech Lay in the great Abimelech.

So with the martial banners furled At all the frontiers in debate, It seemed as if the caprine world Might learn so to domesticate The gains imperial to release Their bucking energies for peace Under a wise duumvirate— Two cousins far removed but loined From the same root, the god-like Pan, Abimelech and Cyrus joined In a world reconstruction plan! But goats like men have never found Much standing room on neutral ground, Once let a point of honour rise And death stalks in on compromise. Those Gottites and the Carobites Stood pat upon their natural rights, And here we must at once admit Three rocks on which a League might split.

It seemed that Nature had designed, When first she fixed a Gottite mind, Or pitched the Carob brain, and bent The bony bulwarks round about, Into a three-inch armament, That compromise should never find An alley either in or out. For when in any age was born A freak without a cloven hoof, Or with palmated frontal roof That blossomed points along the horn— Some civilized concessive goat Who carried democratic stripes Upon his softly textured coat— The uniformitarian types, Who strove to dominate the breed, Exiled him from the herds. Indeed, Had not one just appeared to show Progressive softening of the brain By urging tolerance towards the foe At the finish of a great campaign? Now, inasmuch as he was not Pure Carob or acknowledged Gott, But some form of a large jerboa Derived from stray spermatozoa, They tore his carcase joint from joint And sheared him to the fourteenth point. That goats were laid down for dissent Was clearly, whether right or wrong, An architectural intent. Those picket horns were three feet long— What was their purpose but reproof? And what the skull's, if not for shock? As axiomatic as the hoof For stance upon the mountain rock!

Moreover, had this quirky dame Implanted in their disposition A sacred but a smoky flame Of uncontrollable ambition. Nomads from zoologic time, The race grew conscious that they must Give to an aimless wanderlust The sublimation of a climb. Valleys and plains were nurseries Which full-grown goats might leave behind For the wild gully routes that wind Up to the mountain crags and screes— Places of habitation where Ancestral bands of satyrs shook Lascivious lightnings from their hair. They marvelled with exalted look At things that voyaged through the air; They worshipped clouds and glorified The golden eagles as they took The solar orbit in their stride.

Joined with this instinct of ambition There was a problem called nutrition, A knotty, vexed consideration Not yet resolved by sublimation. Of all the animals that faced The question of a food supply, The goat had the most catholic taste That crops could ever satisfy. It could be proved by any test He had no rival at a feast. He craved the foliage of the west To vary pastures of the east, New barks and fresher rinds: the sight Of grasses inaccessible Was whetstone to the appetite. The more he had, the more he wanted; A taste unrecognized, a smell Still unappropriated, haunted The rumen like a ghostly spell. The eastern tribes had often stared Up at the peaks and wondered what Those vapours were their nostrils flared, What herbs and blossoms there might be— Was it goatleaf or bergamot, Red clover or sweet cicely? And likewise when the east wind blew Over the Carolonian summit, The herds from western uplands drew Intoxicating essence from it. Was that bay laurel, was it thyme That floated from the mountain span? Their eyes were fastened on the climb, Their noses quivered with the sniff, Yes, by the beard of the first Khan, There was no error in that whiff, They knew it, every buck and dam, 'Twas lavender and marjoram.

On one crisp morning when the heights Were diamond brilliant with their snows, When Dawn had flushed with a deep rose The panels of the Dolomites, And atmospheric odours tart Made tonic impact on the heart, A common inspiration struck Concurrently each monarch buck: It was the Ledge, the unconquered Ledge, The sanguinary Capra Pass, That sent its challenge from the edge Of the canyon of Saint Barnabas.

Abimelech and Cyrus led Their troops up the opposing sides, Past fell and scaur and watershed, Over the small and great Divides. The marching bleat from every corps Combined into their battle roar, Excelsior! Excelsior! Such stout morale, such fine élan Was never seen since time began. By noon both tribes became aware Through subtle changes in the air Caused by the sharp reverberant sound Of hoofs upon untimbered ground, And by the Carob-Gottite smell, A mixture indescribable, That they might any moment close With their hereditary foes. They reached the hollow where the green Ledge like a boa lay between The twin peaks of the Dolomites. Massed by prophetic signals, kites And buzzards in a storm of wings Swept up and down the great ravine, Impatient for their scavengings. Upon that very ledge were fought Thousands of battles that had wrought The drama of a racial glory, With nothing in the strife more certain Than that each act of the long story Should close upon a carrion curtain. And yet—was there a goat dismayed In all that spiral cavalcade? No—not a buck, nor could there be From stock designed for battery And built like Carthaginian rams, Although that thousand feet of drop Sheer from the Carolonian top Put curds within the milcher dams. With pawing hoofs and sweating flanks, Each chieftain as the duellist Of his own herd stepped from the ranks To try the quarrel on the schist. Abimelech himself had seen His sires, grandsires, and great-grands fall, Locked with the lyrates, down the wall, Plumb to the crypts in the ravine, Dropping like frenzied bacchanals, Hitting their corrugated globes So bloodily, the frontal lobes Came out through their occipitals. But so intense the patriot fire, And so magnificent the roll, The youth had felt the same desire Kindle the torches of his soul. And had not Cyrus felt as well The potent ritual of the spell, The phobias of his spirit burn In the white heat of discipline, As he had watched his kith and kin In their inexorable turn Perish? How splendidly they fell! And how the witenagemot Would hallow this immortal spot! And had he not gone back to tell The nursing dams who would convey To generations then unborn The story? How they would portray That plunge! And had not Cyrus sworn Upon the blood script of the laws, That on some sacrificial day He would go forth his father's way, Crusading downward to be torn By canyon jags and vulture claws, Maintening to the end The Cause, The exaltation of The Horn? And now the fatal hour had struck. Abimelech, that eastern buck With all the pride of a Mogul, His anger rising in a storm Of snorts, superbly true to form, Moved to the centre, lowered his skull— The famous Gottite cranium— To meet the Carobite Defender, The noble Cyrus who had come To die but never to surrender.

Come all ye hair-dividers, wise To ways of nature and of art, Who know how to anatomize The fine vagaries of the heart, Come bring your lore and make it plain— This riddle in the Carob brain. In that weird passage from the dark Matrix that shaped the Carobite And stratified his skull for fight, Up to this present hour, the spark Had never failed the dynamite. Ye cannot say that Cyrus knew Just what he was about to do. For nowhere in his long descent Was there a trace of one rehearsal Which might account for this reversal Of military precedent. Folly it is to speculate Upon the food that Cyrus ate, That inland buds of evergreen With valley shoots could mitigate A million years of feudal hate From Irish Moss and carrageen; Or that the Adriatic weed By working on the thyroid freed The activators in his blood; That something in the morning cud Gentled his lymph towards his foes,— That steadying digitalis flip To the heart when he paused to nip The foxglove. Tell us he that knows. Or failing every shibboleth Of blood or ductless glands or such, Did reason enter in to touch The senses with the thought of death, And flash across goat-leaden eyes Glimpse of futilitarian skies? The vultures with their ten-foot spread, Their hairless necks and crimson lids, Were at their business half-a-mile Below among the ancient dead Or roosting on the pyramids. And some were mounting the defile To flank the Pass of Capra where They lounged like lizards on the air;

And one black wing had come so near The Rock, its tip had brushed the coat Of the Carob leader as it passed. And had that brush, so leisured, cast The only one acknowledged fear Within the history of the goat? Or was it fear? Did Cyrus know That neither courage, strength nor will Behind the battle urge to kill Was proof against a flying foe? That every time when honour wronged Secured revenge upon the peaks, Inevitably the spoils belonged To the swiftest wings and sharpest beaks— The harpies and the cormorants Who, compensating for their theft Of blood and flesh and fat, had left The glory to the ruminants? But do not reason why the mind Should save the soul or seek to find Within the evolutionary dream An optimistic phagocyte That cleaning up the corporate stream, Had scrubbed a conscience into light, The conscience of a Carobite— An Aryan working overtime Beating the Tartar to the climb! Ye cannot know what Cyrus felt; Ye only know that Cyrus knelt. Knelt! Hocks and knees! The body lay Prone—lengthwise—on the Capra Pass, As if beside his dam—the way He went to sleep in summer grass.

Now let pathologists explain What happened to the other brain. After a close look at the head, A momentary sniff at hoof And beard which gave Abimelech proof That Cyrus was by no means dead, A flash of understanding thrown Like a dagger of apocalypse, Had pierced the Gottite cranial bone And crashed his spiritual eclipse. Was it a glint of chivalry Nurtured under the eastern climes, A throw-back to the Gobi times, When someone in his ancestry Had set a fashion for the race, Made it a stigma of disgrace To foul a fallen enemy? Let him declare it who can tell Whether in Palestinian lands Some new conciliatory cell Had been evolved while roving bands Converged upon the desert sands To share the water from a well.

The chieftain saw the road was thrown Wide open: it was his alone To take possession in his stride— 'Twas his alone, this flush of pride In a great conquest which would place Him as the hero of his race. But all the arrogance and scorn On which his tribal soul was bred, Spurn of the hoof, flaunt of the horn, That was Abimelech's had fled. And in its place a strangely warm Infusion—a considerate care That would not harm a single hair. He sniffed once more the prostrate form Of Cyrus. Then as if he feared He might do violence to the head Or bring pollution to the beard, He stepped so lightly over, cleared Knees, hoofs and rump with that sure tread Which never yet had made him miss His foothold on a precipice. Clean over? Yes, beyond his foe! None could deny the deed was done, The Carolonian summit won, The Capra Pass without a blow!

Cyrus looked up and in his eyes Was an incredulous surprise. He could not find his enemy. He shook himself and blinked awhile, Then straightened up and gingerly He made the perilous defile. Reaching the safety of the bend, He stopped and, curious, craned his neck, Only to see Abimelech Watching him at the other end. The eyes of those two hierarchs Were four interrogation marks. No record in the family tree Illumined this epiphany. Five minutes motionless and mute They stood with that hypnotic stare That only puzzled goats could wear; And then in reverent salute As though their eyes had shed their scales, And each had recognized a brother Bidding Good Morning to the other, They waved their beards and stubby tails, And turning took their downward trails, Accompanied by their retinue, Alive to the redemptive clue— Cyrus to where the wild thyme grew, And where he could at his sweet beck Tread acres of the cistus-tree And lavender; Abimelech To bergamot and barberry, And where he could, up to his neck, Crop billowing leagues of cicely.