“You were indeed brave to come all this way from your club-tent, Master Myos,” murmured our young friend; “though I hope your dear companion, the Brown Moth, won’t be too miserable in your absence.”
“Look at Enorches!” was the Fly’s reply to this; and the moment our friend obeyed him he knew perfectly well that the Moth was anything but miserable; for it was indeed obvious from the beatific smile of paradisal bliss that now radiated from the Priest’s curiously emphatic nose, mouth, eye-sockets, eyebrows, and ears, that the lovely little winged shadow that now kept hovering under and above and round and beneath the oddly-shaped chin of the oracle of Nothingness was nothing less than the Brown Moth herself playing at burning to death on the altar of truth.
That neither the worship of Eros nor of Dionysos nor even of Silence herself, oldest of all divinities in the world and the one most likely to outlive them all, could wholly satisfy the Priest’s voracious mystery-maw, Nisos at that moment felt certain. The Orphic Priest could praise Nothingness; but the ecstasy he worshipped was a real, actual, concrete experience, which, if not given him by drink or by lechery, could be given him by the devotion of a disciple.
“She knows you are here, does she?”
“Of course. And when she’s finished playing at ‘wings in the candle’ to pluck that poor devil out of his black blot of clotted ink, she’ll come fluttering round us; and then together—‘off we’ll fly to drink with Helen before we die!’”
“With Helen?”
“I mean in a metaphysical sense, by sipping her Nepenthe.”
“It’s wonderful, Master Myos, isn’t it, that I haven’t forgotten your language?”
“Ah, my friend! Don’t you know why that is?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“That’s because”—and the Fly began to grow as academic as he always did with the Moth—“that’s because it was Athene herself who taught you the syntax of it.”
“You mean the peculiar way you always begin and always end with the adverb?”
“I mean the way we say: ‘Beautifully fluttered round him the moth symbolically-speaking.’”
“But do go on, Master Fly, with what you were telling me you had just over-heard from the talk of the Sixth Pillar with the Club of Herakles.”
“The Sixth Pillar told the Club that Princess Nausikaa had been chosen Queen of her Native Land and that those two Immortal Horses, that the Priest over there tried to maim, are even now on their way through the air to take her back to that country where her palace still possesses that famous garden which is the most beautiful garden that has ever been seen in the whole history of the world.”
“Those two Horses coming here, do you say?”
At this startling piece of news Nisos jumped to his feet, removed his hand from his ear, opened his fingers, and let the Fly go free with a flourish of his wrist. The Fly was no sooner free than it was instantly joined by the Moth, and the speed with which the two of them flew off the top deck, down the ladder to the oarsmen’s deck, down the next ladder to the cabin-deck, and thence straight into the interior of the great weapon that was their nomadic home, was incredible.
We human beings in our crowded life are more aware of the starting-points and arriving-points of insects than of the rapidity of their movements from point to point.
“Come along, Zeuks, for heaven’s sake come along! And you too my lord Enorches! Fate will find a Community for you — don’t you doubt it — where you can preach, if not practise, your nihilistic ideas, whether under the love-charms of Eros or under the Thyrsi of Dionysos!”
Our friend’s voice was pitched so high, and he flung into it such a resounding intonation, that not only did Akron cast a sweeping glance from one end to the other of all the Horizon that was visible from their present position, but, to the evident surprise of Zeuks, Enorches actually did scramble clumsily to his feet, and even began automatically kicking at the skirt of his longest blanket as if to make sure that his sandals were firmly fastened.
Nisos then snatched instinctively at Arsinöe’s arm; and followed closely by Zeuks, with Enorches lurching and shuffling after them, he turned his back upon the dragon-neck of the ship’s figure-head and, avoiding the eyes of Pontos and Proros, for with a certain part of his mind he felt as if he were running away, he headed for that already familiar ladder leading down to the oarsmen’s deck.
At the foot of this first ladder he paused for no more time than was just needed to get a glimpse of the face of Euros, a face that at that second looked vexed, irritated, touchy, anxious, full of the most sensitive perturbations, as he bent above his. motionless oar, ready to give it the pull of a master oarsman at the faintest hint from the upper deck.
Arrived at that crowded, ticklish, furtively confused and terribly littered centre of all the gossip and eavesdropping that went on in the passenger’s quarter, Nisos, who was followed closely by Zeuks and by Arsinöe, who once again had a tight hold of each other’s hands, but who himself, since he had no. hand to share with anyone, nor much thought for anything either, save to steer the wavering steps of the Priest of the Mysteries, had a moment’s breathing-space. Now that this weird and disturbing individual was safely under at least temporary control Nisos couldn’t help noticing the insatiable and unpleasantly greedy manner in which the man snuffed up and inhaled with, undisguised relish all the odours and all the smells and all the fragrances and all the airy essences and all the fetid stinks that challenged both the nostrils and the stomachs of any newcomers who dared to plunge from the upper deck into the stygian reek of these bowels of the “Teras”.
And Nisos couldn’t resist saying to himself: “Would this extraordinary creature advise us to lose ourselves in the madness of love or the madness of drink, and thus get to the Original nothingness, before the earth, before the sky, before the sea, before the sun, before the gods created man, before man created the Gods, if he hadn’t forgotten the oracle that my mother used to tell me was what, by his obedience to it, made Odysseus the wisest of all men—Meeden Agan, ‘nothing in excess’?”
“Why in the name of Aidoneus,” the lad’s thoughts ran on, as he watched his blanketed priest snuffing up with such a frenzy of maniacal sensuality the whirligig-reek of kitchen-fumes mixed with the contaminated sweat of the youthful disposers of excrement, “why in the name of Aidoneus was mother always quoting that Meeden Agan, ‘Nothing in Excess’, motto? It had nothing to do with the House of Naubolides, and was always on the lips of Odysseus. I can’t understand it! Well, well! ‘Nothing in Excess’ will have now to be my motto, even when it comes to plunging into the revelry of this weird feast.”
But it is easier to formulate a philosophy, even if we are destined to be a prophet in later life, than to apply it to a definite and particular occasion; and Nisos was puzzled by the sharpness of the pang of jealousy of which he became aware when Zeuks put his arm round the waist of Arsinöe.
The daughter of Hector and the son of Arcadian Pan, however, seemed wholly and entirely oblivious of the feelings they were exciting in their guide as they pushed on in front of him.
Nisos, indeed, had all he could do, apart entirely from his feelings, in steering the blanketed Priest of Orpheus through this packed and perspiring crowd. The most difficult place to pass, with Enorches as your self-absorbed ghost-walker, was the spot where a couple of elongated planks had been laid down to cover a slippery slope that led to the kitchens and pantries and sculleries as well as to the sleeping-quarters of the Lybian and Syrian ship-boys.