“There be three broad rivers of the plain, born before memory or fable, whose mothers are three grey peaks and whose father was the storm. There names be Eimës, Zänës, and Segástrion. And Eimës is the joy of lowing herds; and Zänës hath bowed his neck to the yoke of man, and carries the timber from the forest far up below the mountain; and Segástrion sings old songs to shepherd boys, singing of his childhood in a lone ravine and of how he once sprang down the mountain sides and far away into the plain to see the world, and of how one day at last he will find the sea. These be the rivers of the plain, wherein the plain rejoices. But old men tell, whose fathers heard it from the ancients, how once the lords of the three rivers of the plain rebelled against the law of the Worlds, and passed beyond their boundaries, and joined together and whelmed cities and slew men, saying: “We now play the game of the gods and slay men for our pleasure, and we be greater than the gods of Pegana.”” ~ Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegana
First Publisher Elkin Mathews, 1905; Pegana Press, 1937
Appearance List Later editions: The Gods of Pegana with S. H. Sime’s photogravure plates (Pegana Press, 1911), The Gods of Pegana with Sime illustrations (1916), The Gods of Pegana (3rd ed., 1919), Beyond the Fields We Know (Ballantine, 1972) ed. Lin Carter.
Description “There be three broad rivers of the plain, born before memory or fable, whose mothers are three grey peaks and whose father was the storm. There names be Eimës, Zänës, and Segástrion. And Eimës is the joy of lowing herds; and Zänës hath bowed his neck to the yoke of man, and carries the timber from the forest far up below the mountain; and Segástrion sings old songs to shepherd boys, singing of his childhood in a lone ravine and of how he once sprang down the mountain sides and far away into the plain to see the world, and of how one day at last he will find the sea. These be the rivers of the plain, wherein the plain rejoices. But old men tell, whose fathers heard it from the ancients, how once the lords of the three rivers of the plain rebelled against the law of the Worlds, and passed beyond their boundaries, and joined together and whelmed cities and slew men, saying: “We now play the game of the gods and slay men for our pleasure, and we be greater than the gods of Pegana.”” ~ Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegana
