The Gabriel Hounds

So here, treading on the ghostly heels of Isis and Ishtar and Astarte and the Great Mother herself who was Demeter and Dia and Cybele of the Towers, came Aphrodite to fall in love with the Syrian shepherd Adonis, and lie with him among the flowers. And here the wild boar killed him, and where his blood splashed, anemones grew, and to this day every spring the waters of the Adonis run red right down to the sea. Now the corrie is empty except for the black goats sleeping in the sun on the ruined floor of Aphrodite's temple, and against the roar of the torrent the drowsy stirrings of the goat bells come sharp and clear. The rags that flutter from the sacred tree are tied there as petitions to the last and latest Lady of the place, Mary.
Even without the legends, it would have been breathtaking. With them, the scene of white water and blazing rock, massive ruins, and bright flowers blowing in the wind from the fall, was something out of this world. And as we turned eventually out of the corrie onto the track-- it could hardly have been called a road-- that would take us home by a different route, the scene had its final touch of Eastern fantasy.
A little way beyond and out of sight of the Adonis corrie, a few Arab houses straggled along the water-side. A path, a white scratch on the rock, climbed out of this at an angle to the road. And up this path, going easily, went a chestnut Arab horse, the white burnous of its rider filled out by the motion like a sail, the scarlet and silver of the bridle winking in the sun. At the horse's heels cantered two beautiful dogs, fawn-colored greyhounds with long silky hair, the saluki hounds which were used by the princes of the East for hunting gazelle.
A curve of the road hid them, and all at once it was time for lunch.
We saw the rider again, on our way down the other side of the valley. We had spent more than an hour over lunch, and the horseman must have used paths which cut off a thousand difficult corners that a car had to take. As we picked our way between the potholes into some tiny settlement in a lost high valley where the snow lay not very far above us, I saw the rider below, walking his horse down a barely visible path that took him thigh-deep through a field of sunflowers. The dogs were invisible below the thick, heart-shaped leaves. Then they raced ahead of him out onto a lower curve of the road, the horse breaking into a canter behind them. So clear was the air that I could hear the jingling of bridle bells above the thud of hoofs in the dust.
The squat peeling houses of the village crowded in on the car and hid him from view.


FROM
The Gabriel Hounds
by Mary Stewart