“I can’t help liking this Trojan girl,” he said to himself; and then, as his gaze returned to Eurybia and Echidna, and from them wandered back to the coast of Wone, and from thence to the moonlight on the ocean, there rushed through his mind like jaggedly forked lightning a startling philosophical speculation.
“Does everything come round in circles and repeat itself? Was there, when people first invented boats and ships, some boy like me ten thousand years ago who lay on a ship’s deck, such as ships were in those days, with only one deck, and only a couple of oarsmen, and a sail made of the skins of seals and wild goats, and said to himself, just as I am saying now: ‘I don’t want to go back to mother and father. I want to serve my King. I want to make love to that girl I saw on that wharf where we moored yesterday!’
“And will there be a boy like me ten thousand years hence who will lie on a much grander deck than this and say to himself: ‘I don’t want to go back to my mother and father! I want to sail round all the known West to the Isles of the Blest!’ That boy who was like me; and this boy who will be like me, shall we three meet in the kingdom of Aidoneus?”
Nisos had only just begun to turn his mind away from thinking about boys like himself ten thousand years before and ten thousand years after, when he saw Arsinöe open her beautiful eyes very wide indeed and give a start that would have waked from sleep anyone in the world save the son of Arcadian Pan who was holding her on his knee.
At the same time Nisos felt himself touched on the shoulder. He twisted his head round, and there before him in the moonlight stood the figure of Odysseus!
“Hush!” whispered the old hero while his bowsprit beard tickled Nisos’ chin: “get up as quietly as you can, my boy, and take a step with me!”
It was a comfort to Nisos to notice when he was on his feet that his friend Arsinöe had been shrewd enough to shut her eyes and pretend to surrender herself to what certainly looked like a sleep as deep as Zeuks’ own.
“I won’t take you with me just now further than the ladder, my boy,” said Odysseus still speaking very quietly. “I came to fetch ‘Expectation’, my most valued weapon, with which, as you know, Herakles killed the Nemean lion. But I also came to tell you what my intention is. I have already told Akron, who is at this moment informing the oarsmen what I have in mind, and I have already told Eumolpos the helmsman. My intention is this. My son Telemachos received, when he visited the yellow-haired Menelaos, as a guest-gift from Helen herself, a little phial of Nepenthe which was given to her by the King of Egypt.
“When even a few drops of this divine Nepenthe, the enemy of all suffering, are dropped into wine, the wine into which the Nepenthe has been poured, takes away all thoughts that bring anxiety or pain or fear or doubt or suspicion or grief or envy or hatred or terror; and in place of these a beatific happiness fills our souls to the brim.
“A little of this precious Nepenthe goes a very long way; and I have brought some of it with me to this ship. Now what I propose to do is to put a few drops of this divine drug into the wine which our four Ladies, together with Nausikaa’s official Herald, will presently be drinking in my cabin. You and I, however — and for heaven’s sake, child, don’t you go and get caught by the fragrance of the wine or lured into letting the least drop of it touch your tongue! — as soon as we see that the four ladies and Nausikaa’s Herald have fallen asleep and are deep sunk in this blessed Elysium of happy visions, having taken good care — and don’t you forget that part of it, my son! — to eat enough to last us, if need be, for a whole night and day, we, I say, will leave that lower deck and come up here, to be ready for, well, for whatever fate may bring!”
They had by this time reached the ladder which descended to the deck of the rowers, and it was not until Odysseus was half-way down that the necessity of asking him a most drastic and necessary question forced Nisos to make the old man turn round and lift up his head towards him. Never did the lad, through all the rest of his mortal days, forget the impression he received at that second as the unearthly luminosity of that night’s omniscient moonlight poured down upon that old upturned face with that crazy “Helmet of Proteus” twisted about it, whereof the absurdly trailing “thusanoi”, or “tassels” looked in that silvery gleaming as if they were the “tassels” of Athene’s “aegis” transformed into long, slenderly-coiling, silvery worms.
“Do you wish me, my king,” Nisos enquired, getting the words out with a gasping rush of breath, “to inform Zeuks of your intention? Is he to share your Nepenthe with the Herald and the four ladies? Or shall I tell him of your intention and recommend him to bring down the Trojan maid Arsinöe to wait on the four ladies and to share their supper and the sleep-giving wine?”
“You have done well in thinking as you have,” answered the voice of the king from the white face above that moonlit beard. “Bring them both down to my cabin. We’ll let them both sleep the sleep of Nepenthe. After all it was the gift of Helen.”
A couple of minutes later, Nisos was standing close to what clearly had become an extremely agitating game of contending figurines above whose “Pessoi”, or “inanimate men-at-arms”, Pontos and Proros were now bending in intense concentration.
But Nisos was too occupied just then in obeying Odysseus to feel the faintest desire to “pessenize”. “Arsinöe!” he called out in a clear though not a loud voice. The girl heard him at once. “What’s the matter?” she asked, disengaging herself from the knees of the son of Pan and rising to her feet.
“You must wake him now,” our friend answered, “for the king wants him at their supper.”
And then he added hurriedly, catching a rather pathetic look of bewilderment on her face, “And you too, Arsinöe my dear, I expect they’ll all be glad to have you down there; for if I’m not mistaken there’ll be more good wine than good manners at this precious supper of theirs!”
The girl bent down over Zeuks and shook him by the right shoulder. His body was squeezed between the metallic base of the famous figure-head which was at that point wrought into a number of shell-curved, beautifully carved dragon-scales, and the narrowing rondure of the rail of the ship’s prow. Zeuks opened his left eye, gave both the girl and Nisos a glance that partook of the nature of a humorous wink and closed it again.
“Do wake him for heaven’s sake, my dear!” repeated Nisos. “I’d do it myself,” he went on, “only if I touched him he might fly into a passion and start hitting me; and that would probably set me off too and there’d be a fine row!”
Nisos felt deep in his soul that he wouldn’t mind at all if there was a murderous row; but as he stared ahead he realized that the “Teras” had actually now reached the point at which not so far inland arose that nameless sharp-pointed rock to which their ship was to be roped. It certainly was a curiously shaped rock, like a tall lean man with a fantastically long neck and an unnaturally large head; and our friend began wondering just from where upon the “Teras” the rope would have to be conveyed to that figure and attached to it.
His speculations about the securing of their vessel were broken up by some change in the wind that brought to his ears — and apparently to Arsinöe’s too, for she let Zeuks’ head sink down again — what was unmistakably the culminating point of the unending dispute between Eurybia and Echidna.
Both Nisos and Arsinöe soon realized from the weird words they heard that Eurybia had finished her murmured contention that the reeling and rocking of the cosmos that was now the chief topic of what might be called the elemental gossip of the universe was due to a revolt of the whole Feminine Half of the world against the eternal Male; and that Echidna was now defending her notion of what was happening, which certainly was a startling and terrifying one, and entirely different from that of her sister phantom of this Arima in the midst of the ocean.