Noting his son’s action and divining that it had something to do with the curious “life-crack” or naturally-engendered slit in the bosom of “Dokeesis” alias “Expectation”, the old hero raised the weapon into a more perpendicular position and gave it the sort of brandishing shake that Herakles himself must have given it before between them they killed the Nemean lion.
Held quietly and firmly now at a slanting angle to the bottom of the ocean, and tangled in a twist of one of the two parallel life-lines that reached from the Helmet of Proteus to the surface of the sea, it was possible for our two world-voyaging insects to appear at the mouth of their unusually-shaped caravan and even plunge into verbal relations with their almost equally bewildered fellow-travellers.
“My friend the Moth keeps imploring me to tell her,” murmured the Fly, “just where in the circumambient trail of our cosmogonic excursion she may know she has arrived. I tell her that this is the only ship upon the sea that fulfils the longing of real adventures all over the world who long to exchange earth for air, air for fire, fire for water, in their natural, heaven-blest longing for new life.
“My friend the moth suffers unfortunately from one of those troublesome manias that so often afflict lovely and sensitive females. She maintains that the Orphic Priest, who confessed just now, when he saw Eurybia and Echidna on the island of Wone, that the gods he really worshipped were not Eros and Dionysos but Death and Nothingness, had been driven mad by the way we all treated him and by the hatred we all felt for him.
“She actually went so far as to say that if she could have spent a whole night when he was asleep caressing with her silky wings the frontal bone of his skull she could have restored him to sanity! I think myself that it is the pressure of all this dreadful volume of water upon a creature as delicate as she is that has disturbed her own brain.”
At this point Odysseus intervened, but quite carelessly and lightly. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “for this confounded weight of waters, in spite of our Helmet, makes me feel a trifle dizzy, I’ll rest here for a moment.” Saying this he seated himself upon a stone bench on a long, low wall; but he continued to keep the club in the same position and took care to hold it so that its “life-crack”, out of which the two insects were peering, might point towards Nisos.
“Please, O please, thou son of Odysseus,” cried the agitated moth, quickly recovering, under the powerful protection of the Helmet of Proteus, the spontaneous passion of her feelings, “don’t let him traduce by his terrible cleverness a person as holy, a person as chaste, a person as devoted, a person as spiritual as this great Priest of Orpheus! Where is he now, I ask you? Carried away by brute force on the back of a titanic animal who hates him even more than any of you do! Is that the way to treat the greatest Priest of the Highest Mysteries that the history of our world has known?
“If he were here now, instead of having to crouch as we are doing on the lowest bench in the lowest bottom of the world, we would be marching proudly across these bridges and in and out of these vast temples and forth and back down these sumptuous terraces and across these colossal squares and up and down these palatial flights of gently curving and softly undulating stairways, or we might even have found a chariot to ride in, for that would be the proper fashion for a man as old and famous as our sovereign the King of Ithaca!
“Please, O please, thou Son of Odysseus, call on your father to use his power to lift us out of this humiliation!”
“Is it not clear,” protested the fly, while the moth at his side quickly recovered her equanimity, “that the poor darling has suffered a serious shock? Think of her assuming that an aged hero who has lived, loved, and fought with the gods and whose capture of Troy, as the Pillar in the Corridor has been telling me, is included in the poetical recitations of all the master-reciters in Hellas, is less poetical when resting by the wayside as an ordinary tired old man, than if under a gorgeous canopy he were riding on the back of an elephant followed by a procession of camels as the emperor of a host of jewelled Barbarians!
“It can only be, as you can see at once, my noble Lord Nisos, that our beautiful friend is suffering from a shock caused by the pressure of this appalling mass of water; and it would be very kind, as well as most appropriate, if, in order to turn her attention to other things, you would tell your King that the Sixth Pillar has just informed me that the fire-breathing Monster, Typhon, half-Dragon and half-Giant, and the arch-enemy of the Olympians, whom Zeus buried under a mountain in Italy, but who had been loose for several months, has now been decoyed by the Being who lives down here, and whose image is the Teras’ figure-head, into serving Him or Her or It, after the manner in which an obedient Beast serves its master. In fact, O most noble, O most loyal, O most sagacious grandson of Laertes, if you will forgive my turning for a moment from the philosophical aspects of life to those of more immediate concern”—and Nisos noticed that the head of the fly grew suddenly larger and blacker than usual and that both its orbicular eyes were gazing into the distance—“I believe the Monster I have just referred to, not the figure-head Being, if you understand, but the half-ophidian and half-human fire-breather, has smelt human blood down here and is hastening in our direction.”
The hand with which Nisos had hurriedly touched his master’s elbow, pointed now at a convulsive cloud of smoke and fire that he could see bending its course towards them over a sort of under-water aqueduct, and then, drawing from a slit in his own shirt, in a manner worthy of Zeuks himself, that dagger-sword with two edges that had been pressed into his hand as he went over the side, he gave a little straightening jerk to the club in the old man’s hand as if indicating to it that battling with a Monster rather than philosophizing with a Fly must now be the order of the day.
It now became obvious once more to our friend what a perfect fellow-voyager and fellow-adventurer his new father was. Apparently Odysseus had so shrewdly and so quickly taken in the immediate topography of their position and the general nature of this astonishing metropolis of a drowned continent that he had no sooner caught sight of the Fire-breathing Typhon advancing towards them, swaying and heaving and writhing like a serpent with the lower half of its body, but steering itself with human arms and keeping a straight course along a sort of aqueduct, which perhaps still, though it only had the thirst of titans and monsters to quench, carried fresh streams in spite of all this intolerable weight of salt water: then with “Dokeesis” otherwise “Expectation” or the Nemean club in his right hand, and his son’s arm gripped tight above the elbow in his left, he hurried off in a straight line towards the advancing monster but upon such a different level of ground that to reach them Typhon would have had to risk a plunge of about a thousand feet, a leap which for all his dragon scales and serpent tail and the fearful strength of his gigantic arms was evidently beyond his power.
What struck Nisos most about Odysseus as they advanced side by side towards this writhing and twisting cloud of fire and smoke, till it was almost exactly above their heads, was the man’s absolutely amazing gift for adapting himself to a staggering and overwhelming situation with complete calm and balance of mind.