We cannot end this section without repeating
that, from all the gifts man has inherited from Atlantis, the domesticated
horse was certainly one of the noblest of all. Though classically used
in combats and disputes of all sorts, the horse also served as a means
of transportation, of drafting loads and implements and, above all, for
riding, along all the millennia that preceded the epoch-making invention
of the automobile.
When one admires horses on the loose,
one is usually impressed with the great speed and the gracefulness of the superb animal. But one is also struck with
the wide extensions that these magnificent creatures require both for roaming
and for feeding. One is also led to dream of paradisial grassy plains of enormous extension, abounding in fat grass and in water sources flashing under the warm sunlight of the tropical regions.
What other plains are as fit as the Elysian
Plains for the birthplace of the horse and for that of the wise ancestors
who first dreamed of turning the horse in an everyday companion and friend?
The very fact that the ancestor of the domesticated horse cannot be traced
with security suggests a lost site of origin like the one of Atlantis. Atlantis, we recall, was the very site of the Elysian Plains, the immense grassy pampas where the horse is most likely to have originated.
