On the other hand, a foreign traveler, particularly one from Asia, is often filled with a sense of awe and perhaps of pity at the savage image of the huge beast’s being slain. “Poor things, hunted and killed everywhere!”

But mostly the former sentiment prevails, as Asians are accustomed to adoring the dragon’s power, admiring his vitality, worshiping his supernatural character, and supplicating him for a piece of his blessing. 

Indeed, instead of even thinking of killing him, we have on the whole aspired to share certain aspects of his wild glory.  For in our tradition, getting a glimpse or even having a dream of the supernatural beast was supposed to bring luck of unthinkable proportion to an ordinary mortal.

Even if there were no means of retrieving her, and even if it meant defying the way of nature as clearly manifested, they could not renounce the beauty as lost.

To be frank, I was profoundly depressed on occasion and even despaired when looking at Western depictions of human figures fighting the animal against obvious odds but in an apparently unshakable conviction of ultimate triumph.  Why hadn’t we Orientals ever thought of really fighting him instead of thinking of him as absolutely above us?  I wondered.  But then one day I found I had missed the point of it all.

Of course, we had confronted the dragon when it came to a matter of our vital concern, in our own peaceful but firm way—not single-handedly but collectively, and not for any earthly glory or welfare but for a beauty: for the sake of a beautiful woman.

Thus, one day in a small town in Europe, as I was looking at a plaque on the top of a gate showing a mounted knight engaged in a fatal combat with the lizard, I remembered a tale of a long-ago era, about the time when we Koreans began to be aware of ourselves as one nation.

An image came vividly to my mind: A multitude of people gathered on the seaside, small and helpless figures chanting, shouting, and gesticulating against a background of overpowering nature, of desolate hills and a rough sea.  Out of this reverie emerged a picture filled with the words that made up a story, an account of how it came to happen.