and more as you go up the hills.  For instance, descending once into Poy Plains, the first thing that I saw was an ordinary shepherd watching a flock of ordinary sheep.  I looked at them for some time and nothing happened, when, without a word, one of the sheep walked up to the shepherd and borrowed his pipe and smoked it—­an incident that struck me as unlikely; but in the Hills of Sneg I met an honest politician.  Over these plains went Jones and over the Hills of Sneg, meeting at first unlikely things, and then incredible things, till he came to the long slope beyond the hills that leads up to the Edge of the World, and where, as all guidebooks tell, anything may happen.  You might at the foot of this slope see here and there things that could conceivably occur in the fields we know; but soon these disappeared, and the traveller saw nothing but fabulous beasts, browsing on flowers as astounding as themselves, and rocks so distorted that their shapes had clearly a meaning, being too startling to be accidental.  Even the trees were shockingly unfamiliar, they had so much to say, and they leant over to one another whenever they spoke and struck grotesque attitudes and leered.  Jones saw two fir-trees fighting.  The effect of these scenes on his nerves was very severe; still he climbed on, and was much cheered at last by the sight of a primrose, the only familiar thing he had seen for hours, but it whistled and skipped away.  He saw the unicorns in their secret valley.  Then night in a sinister way slipped over the sky, and there shone not only the stars, but lesser and greater moons, and he heard dragons rattling in the dark.

With dawn there appeared above him among its amazing crags the town of Tong Tong Tarrup, with the light on its frozen stairs, a tiny cluster of houses far up in the sky.  He was on the steep mountain now:  great mists were leaving it slowly, and revealing, as they trailed away, more and more astonishing things.  Before the mist had all gone he heard quite near him, on what he had thought was bare mountain, the sound of a heavy galloping on turf.  He had come to the plateau of the centaurs.  And all at once he saw them in the mist:  there they were, the children of fable, five enormous centaurs.  Had he paused on account of any astonishment he had not come so far:  he strode on over the plateau, and came quite near to the centaurs.  It is never the centaurs’ wont to notice men; they pawed the ground and shouted to one another in Greek, but they said no word to him.  Nevertheless they turned and stared at him when he left them, and when he had crossed the plateau and still went on, all five of them cantered after to the edge of their green land; for above the high green plateau of the centaurs is nothing but naked mountains, and the last green thing that is seen by the mountaineer as he travels to Tong Tong Tarrup is the grass that the centaurs trample.  He came into the snow fields that the mountain wears like a cape, its head being bare above it, and still climbed on.  The centaurs watched him with increasing wonder.