King Rediva had summoned the Rhodian Centaurs to help in the war against the Unicorns' Peace Empire. However, the warriors unexpectedly meet the most beautiful mare of all time and fall head-over in love with the beauty. Now, this mare is, of all things, one of the highest-ranking priestesses of the Black Unicorn, the king's enemy in the flesh, and also enjoys a very high reputation among the unicorns. Nevertheless, the centaurs set off to dare to show up before the Lord of the Order and ask for the mare's hand. This one, instead, sends them on a murderous quest.

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa. Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.