Grief sets this chariot moving. Demeter, searching the earth with "torches by night and day" for the daughter Pluto had carried off, comes at last to Eleusis and is taken in there; and when she leaves, she leaves a gift behind. For Triptolemus, "the elder of Metanira's children", she makes "a chariot of winged dragons", and gives him wheat with which, "wafted through the sky", "he sowed the whole inhabited earth." The conveyance is the whole point of the gift — a car that lifts a mortal above every field there is and lets him seed them all.

The witness is Apollodorus's The Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), read here in the translation of Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist whose notes accompany it. Those notes recall that "The dragon-car of Triptolemus" was once staged by Sophocles in a lost tragedy, and that on painted vases the sower is "often represented in his dragon-car" — so the image outlived the telling, carried on pottery long after the poem was gone.

There is a darker gift just before it in the same passage: Demeter had tried to make the infant Demophon immortal by laying him "of nights on the fire", and failed when his mother cried out at the sight. The dragon-chariot is the gift that took — not a secret burning that goes wrong, but a machine of the air that succeeds, scattering grain over the whole world. Only the Greek witness is served here; the Hindu and Irish chariots filed beside it wait unread, though this one alone tells the shape. Why should the gift that founds farming, the most earthbound of the arts, arrive as a thing of the air, drawn by dragons and never touching the ground?