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Selim the Algerine Katie Letcher LyIe A long-term project of mine is the search for an elusive and fascinating character, a foreign visitor to Appalachian Virginia a great many years ago. My father, a retired Marine general and small-time land speculator, often pointed out a cliff on our Sunday jaunts around the western Virginia countryside where, he said, two horses had been carved by a fellow named Selim. Then he'd tell again the rather garbled tale of the poor Algerian who couldn't speak English who just wandered here into the Shenandoah Valley sometime. A long time ago. Naked. While here, my father said, Selim had carved those left-facing horses—and my father would point, explaining that the bluff had been turned 6 into a quarry about the time I was born, and the horses blasted away with the rest of the cliff. My father remembers from his childhood that they were probably three feet high, on this cliff, maybe seventy -five feet up, about ten or twenty feet down from the top of the cliff. Nobody knew why Sehm had carved them. I absorbed this story as children do, along with many others—the story of the Indian lovers who committed suicide off Lovers' Leap, and the story of how as a young man George Washington came and surveyed Natural Bridge, and carved his initials at what looks like an impossible twenty feet or so above the water line on a perfectly sheer in-curving cliff face (though the locals joked that it was really a drunken Washington and Lee student named Gilbert Wetzstein), and the story of the two horses' skeletons in Lee Chapel—how the smaller one was Robert E. Lee's Traveler as a colt, and the bigger one was Traveler when he was grown up. I found their boniness scary and offensive, and was fiad when both skeletons were discreetly uried. (The small one was a discarded vertebrate skeleton, perhaps a goat's, from the zoology lab at Washington and Lee.) Rockbridge County, named for the famous Natural Bridge within its borders, was and is a colorful place, and my grandfather, a Depression lawyer in Lexington and son of Virginia's Civil War governor, had entertained at his house both William Jennings Bryan and a member of Napoleon's family, and been elected to the state legislature at the age of twenty-two. William Jennings Bryan incurred the eternal enmity of my grandmother by scorning her broiled grapefruit with brown sugar and sherry; he was against liquor in any form, any amount. While my father fought in the Pacific during World War II, we came to live at his parents' house in Lexington, next to the Virginia Military Institute. I took to both my grandparents, finding life in their footsteps fascinating. My grandfather , for instance, did not seem to care if his clients paid him. In fact, he loved nothing better than bartering, and often we would spend a day in some town out west of Lexington, a long day in which he'd work in a country store or county courthouse, while I dabbled around out back trying to catch crawfish in some tiny creek meandering through the village , or made friends with cats lazing on the counters or porches. In the stores I was shameless as a beggar of sweets. As payment for the case he'd been working on, we'd sometimes return to Lexington with a barrel of dried beans, or a wooden Windsor chair, or a couple of live chickens in a crate. One time we brought home a piano, upside down, in his Model T. His son, my father, had made gin and peach brandy in the attic of the big house on Letcher Avenue throughout Prohibition, before he fought Nicaraguas and then Japs, and had his own store of tales to tell when he got back from the wars. It's odd how, driving along a country road, you can pass a tree or a house, and instantly, a memory is triggered. It happened with my grandfather, then my rather, and now I do it to my children. Some years ago, I decided to...

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