This study has examined the construction of culture and history through the careful management of difference. We have seen complementary, or at times contradictory, impulses: strategies of hybridisation, assimilation, and fusion on the one hand, and of separation, isolationism, and purification on the other. In closing I wish to examine a pair of images through which this insoluble problem of difference is emblematically expressed: the two dragons unleashed at the Perron Merveilleux to be interred in a subterranean pool, and their comical double, a pair of serpents in a fountain. The two dragons, red and white, are identified as the very ones later figuring in the prophecies of Merlin. Whether they are understood in their original sense of representing the Britons and the Saxons, or whether they are additionally seen as representing Trojans and Greeks, one thing at least is clear: any dream of ethnic purity, of a British identity existing in isolation from ethnic and cultural difference, is impossible. The dragons, hidden in a pool beneath Mount Snowdon like a time bomb waiting to go off, figure inter-ethnic strife as the fundamental violence of history, the crucible in which ‘Britishness’ is forged. And in the context of Perceforest itself, the furtive burial of these highly charged symbolic beasts can be seen, along with the concealment of the ‘ancient chronicle’ narrating the secret of Britain's Greek heritage, as a virtual staging, mutatis mutandis, of Said's comment that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and underground self’.