Questing Beast Quotes

“His face was aglow with wonder and disbelief. “Bloody hell.”
The questing beast floundered in the shallow rock pool, bewildered and panicked, ridiculous and beautiful. Its lithe, spotted body was soaked through; it scrabbled at the rim with cloven-hoofed feet. Its head— scaled, delicate, with enormous dark eyes— thrashed at the end of a long neck. Now that she was looking at it again, there was no doubt what it was. It didn’t matter what made sense, what was possible, what she believed the world to be. It couldn’t be anything else.
“Excuse my language,” Tom added, as an afterthought.
“No, no,” Ellie assured him. “I thought it was quite right.”
The head of a snake, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the feet of a deer. Her lecturer at university had said it was probably a medieval description of a giraffe. She had been wrong.
The howling noise rattled through the air— a quiet muttering this time, building to a mournful whine.
“That’s what we heard last night,” Ellie whispered. “When it isn’t drinking, its belly makes a noise ‘like unto the questing of thirty couple hounds.’”
“Where’s that from?”
“Malory. Le Morte d’Arthur.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood