Chapter 19 Chapter Nineteen

The sight Arthur never really took for granted, or bored.He and Ford walked along the creek at the bottom of the valley, came to the edge of the plain, and climbed to the branches of a big tree to get a clear view of the strangest and most wonderful sights in the Milky Way. Countless absolutely normal beasts formed a majestic formation, rumbling across the Anhongduo Plain.In the pale morning sun, these big men rushed forward, the sweat evaporated and mixed with the mud fog stirred up by their hooves.They do look eerie and unreal, but what really makes your heart stop is the mystery of where they come from and where they go—and the answer, in general, seems to be air.

They formed a dense phalanx, about a hundred yards wide and half a mile long, which never seemed to change much during the eight or nine days of their regular appearance, except for a little drifting to the side and rear.But while the formation remained largely constant, the phalanx's behemoths continued to charge upward at twenty miles an hour, suddenly appearing out of thin air at one end of the plain, and then disappearing just as abruptly at the other. . No one knows where they come from, and no one knows where they go.They are too important to the lives of the people of Ramla that no one wants to ask.Once an old brush Shiba said that sometimes if you get an answer, the question is taken away.Some of the villagers privately said that this was the only really wise thing that Old Shashiba ever said.Then, after a brief argument, it was decided that he was just a blind cat and a dead mouse.

The hooves hit so loudly that you could hardly hear anything else. "What did you say?" cried Arthur. "I say," exclaimed Ford, "it looks like some kind of evidence of space drift!" "What evidence?" Arthur called back. "Well, a lot of people are worrying that space/time has suffered so much and it's starting to show signs of breaking down. Look at migratory animals. On many worlds, their journeys are long and winding. Weird and scary. In fact, it’s all because of the large chunks of land cracking and moving, which may be the case here, we really live in a distorted era, aren’t we? However, since there is a lack of a good airport..."

Arthur looked at him with a dazed look. "What do you mean?" he asked. "What do you mean when you ask me?" cried Ford. "You know exactly what I mean. We're going to ride out of here." "You really suggest we ride absolutely normal beasts?" "That's right, look where they are going." "We shall die! No," said Arthur abruptly. "We shall not die, at least I shall not, Ford. Have you ever heard of a place called Stavro Murabetta?" Ford frowned. "I don't remember." He took out his battered old copy and opened it. "Any special spelling?" he asked.

"I don't know, I only heard it once, and that guy is full of other people's teeth. I remember I mentioned Agrajag to you." Ford thought for a moment, "You mean the guy who made you kill him again and again?" "Yes, according to him, one of the places where I killed him was Stavro Murabetta. Somebody tried to shoot me, I guess. I got out of the way, and it turned out that Agragag--or at least he One of the births - got shot for me. It does seem to have happened at some point, so at least I don't die before I dodge Stavro Murabetta's shot Well, I guess. But nobody's ever heard of that place."

"Uh." Ford tried a few more times on the Internet, but found nothing. "Nothing," he said. "I don't think I've ever heard of it," said Ford at last.In fact, he was secretly wondering why he had such a faint impression of this name. "Well," Arthur said, "I've seen how the hunters in Ramla set up absolutely normal beasts. If you just stab one with a spear, its body will just be trampled to pieces, so you have to You lure one at a time and you do it. Kind of like a matador, you know, with a brightly colored cape. You lure one at you, and you walk away and dance the way over with the cape pretty gracefully. What do you have on you? Something like a brightly colored cloak?"

"How about this?" Ford handed him the towel.