And yet before we had driven into Wantage and seen King Alfred's
quaint grey statue in the sun, we had seen yet a third white horse.
And the third white horse was so hopelessly unlike a horse that we were
sure that it was genuine. The final and original white horse, the white
horse of the White Horse Vale, has that big, babyish quality that truly
belongs to our remotest ancestors. It really has the prehistoric,
preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand native drawings.
This at least was surely made by our fathers when they were barely men;
long before they were civilized men.
But why was it made? Why did barbarians take so much trouble
to make a horse nearly as big as a hamlet; a horse who could
bear no hunter, who could drag no load? What was this titanic,
sub-conscious instinct for spoiling a beautiful green slope
with a very ugly white quadruped? What (for the matter of that)
is this whole hazardous fancy of humanity ruling the earth,
which may have begun with white horses, which may by no means end
with twenty horse-power cars? As I rolled away out of that country,
I was still cloudily considering how ordinary men ever came
to want to make such strange chalk horses, when my chauffeur
startled me by speaking for the first time for nearly two hours.
He suddenly let go one of the handles and pointed at a gross
green bulk of down that happened to swell above us.
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