My reaction to Louise's preparations for what I considered to be a
reckless and possibly fatal move were contradictory in themselves. I
could not suppress an emotion that must have been akin to one
attempting escape from a conflagrated Troy - it must be recalled that
we were entering not leaving a walled or fenced place, but Louise
was juggling with possible immolation, in this I felt we could claim
common ground with those ancient Trojans seeking exile in a hostile
world, and our choice differed only in that we sought to enter a world
of potential troubles that was enclosed rather than a system that was,
considering the technologies of the Iron Age, all but open ended.
Louise had remained for some time assessing the situation which I,
though I had to admit later that I was not in full possession of the data
at the time and thus unable to come to a fully balanced decision, in
that intuitive flash so characteristic of humans had judged to be of
insuperable difficulty. Thus I could not restrain a cry of caution, which
for some reason came from my lips in Italian - va' prudentemente,
Ludovica! - when her posture, haunches settled close to the forest
floor accompanied by the strange, but I presume necessary, shuffling
of hooves so similar to the nervous preparation of a human athlete,
indicated that she was about to attempt to clear this towering and
potentially lethal hurdle. Though I was to participate in an
extraordinarily intimate manner in this cervicidal, not to mention
homicidal, assay my views were of no account and Louise with a
great cry of nemo me impune lacessit! (with what I could only assume
was some sort of Etruscanised intonation and vowel value, perhaps
she was picking up my Trojan sentiments or maybe I derived them
from her - at any rate her pronunciation differed so markedly from the
church Latin with which I was familiar and her delivery was so
confident and of such a well-defined character that she gave it a ring
of authenticity that, for me, echoed back to those mysterious roots.)
and launched herself at the crest of the eight-ell barrier. With no
approach run at all her technique would seem to be as unreasonable
as that of an athlete who attempts the high bar from a crouch directly
in front of the posts, but for Louise this handicap was eliminated by
the extraordinary power of her haunches. We rose precipitately into
the air and my concern as we almost instantly gained sufficient height
to clear the barrier transferred itself to our trajectory. We were
describing an exceptionally narrow parabola that would allow us to
