“As for myself,” Nisos thought, “I believe I might just manage to carry things off with a rush and be brave enough to scare my enemy with brandishings of my dagger as I flew at his throat; but what I couldn’t do would be to get rid of my secret dread, my stalking and skulking terror, the horror I’d feel in my jumpy nerves and the heart-beating throbs of my jittering pulses.
“Why, the old man behaves as if this terrifying dead city at the bottom of the sea were the friendly haunts of his family dryad. He seems able to note things and examine things and analyse things with as much calm and as much lively interest as if he were observing the beasts and birds and shrubs and trees and plants and rocks and stones of a new tract of totally unknown country that we had invaded and occupied.”
“I don’t like the idea,” said Odysseus at last, lowering his head after having kept it thrown back and tilted upwards with his bowsprit beard pointing to the world they had left, “of that creature up there dropping his kopros on our heads.”
Nisos in his turn lifted his head; and there did indeed seem to him a very potent probability that from the under-belly of Typhon or, worse still, from beneath his serpentine tail, extremely unpleasant excrement might descend upon them! From that unwieldy body gusts of the foulest-smelling wind, collected for long in those over-replenished bowels, were already beginning to explode in startling and menacing bursts of spluttering thunder; and it certainly wasn’t a pleasant prospect to imagine themselves being chased from one end of the ocean to the other by the droppings of this fire-breathing fugitive from the wrath of Zeus.
“I don’t know, my son,” the old man continued, “whether you can make out the width of that fresh-water aqueduct under his coils as he comes on; but from what I can see of the situation it strikes me that this final rebellious child of our old Earth has got himself on a road that’s too narrow for him to turn till he arrives at the end of it. It’s too high a jump even for him, and I really believe, now he’s once on that aqueduct, that there’s nothing he can do but go on to the end of the thing! We shall, no doubt, my dear boy, have many other vexations before we’ve got to the end of our aqueduct; but I think we’re in no immediate danger from that outrageous Man-Dragon up there.”
Forward therefore with free steps the father and son moved. They had to walk independently of each other because each held his weapon in his right hand, and when by any chance they moved too close, the hilt of the son’s sword-dagger kept grazing the knuckles of the father’s left hand.
What Odysseus was thinking as they went forward in this way Nisos would have given a lot to know; but he had by this time discovered that one of the fundamental characteristics of this greatest of all leaders was his power of keeping his wandering and philosophical thoughts wholly and completely distinct from his practical thoughts, that is to say from his tactics, stratagems, decisions, and plannings for future action.
For himself, as father and son advanced in this manner, both cautiously and impulsively, along the bottom of the deepest of earth’s seas, Nisos was too absorbed and spell-bound by the external overpoweringness of what he saw to have any spirit left for mental reaction to it save awe and wonder. He decided that it must have been on the ground-floor so to say of the ocean-bed that they had found themselves after their dive.
But what a place it was, far more impressive than any city he had ever seen before, or ever was likely to see! The stones it was built of were all the same colour; but whether this was due to the action of the water or to the particular kind of rock or of marble that the builders had used he wasn’t enough of a traveller to know. But all the visible masonry, including the roads and the pavements, was certainly of one and the same tint, and this tint was of a grey shade, but quite unlike any other grey shade he could ever remember having seen.
What struck him most about this whole drowned city as it rose up before him now was, strangely enough, its suitability, its fittingness, its adaptability for being a drowned city. It lent itself to its doom. It was in fact the most perfect realization of a drowned city that could have entered, or the idea of which could have entered, any great poet’s imagination.
What especially struck Nisos about it was its unity with itself, the fact, namely, that it rose in so many levels, with its stair-ways and bridges and squares and platforms and tiers and terraces, as if conceived and created to support the pedestals and pillars of the metropolis of the universe with temples and theatres and dance-halls and council-chambers and academies and ecclesias and arenas and hippodromes and senate-halls, towering up, one above another, towards the surface of the water that covered them, making in their colossal entirety one single isolated palace-house, where reigned and ruled in undisturbed supremacy the mysterious Being who had revolted against Heaven, defied the Human Race, and adapted its own unfathomable consciousness to a secret submarine life, with no companion but the Man-Dragon, Typhon.
It was the extraordinary way in which this city beneath the waters satisfied the whole deep-breathing desire in the ultimate chemical elements of existence that they should have nothing within them to the end of their days save what in silence uttereth speech and whose speech is the speech of air, water, fire, and earth, an elemental language which in its essence is the music of enjoyment, that gave the thing its real secret.
It was queer and quaint to notice, as the two of them progressed onwards in what they both divined would probably turn out to be intricate curves returning by degrees to the region of the city from which they had set forth, how the various fish and sea-creatures they were constantly encountering showed not the faintest alarm at their appearance and even came so close that they sometimes brushed against their necks and arms and faces with their fins and tails. One star-fish for instance struck Nisos so violently in the mouth that it made his lip bleed, and it gave him a very queer shock when this sudden taste of blood mixed with salt-water brought back to his memory an occasion when as a child he had picked up a jelly-fish on the sea-coast, and then, falling on his face as he tried to bite it, had bloodied his mouth.
A much more obscure memory may have been released when he saw the extremely elastic and singularly delicate skin of one queer-looking sea-creature, skin that resembled the caul with which new-born babes are sometimes covered, rent and torn by the stab of a small sword-fish. But it was when he noticed one luckless fish whose eye was gone that he suddenly remembered how when he was questioning Eione as to the way the Helmet of Proteus, the thing that at this moment he and his father were using to such good effect, had come into her hands, she told him that Arcadian Pan had stolen it from the great Hunter Orion, whose consequent lack of it had resulted in his being blinded.
“The blinding of Orion! How very odd that I should never have given that piece of news a second thought!”
By one of those queer coincidences that it is always almost impossible to regard as just coincidences he had no sooner thought of the injury that Tis’s little sister had unwittingly done to the great Hunter Orion than his father suddenly turned to him and said with a smile: “I was just wondering why it is, my son, that only once in my life I’ve composed a line of poetry, while from my memory I can repeat so many lines.”
“What was the line you once composed?” enquired Nisos. “It would interest me so much if you’d repeat it to me now! Do, please, please, my father, let me hear that line of poetry you composed. Had it to do with what at that moment came into my head? I mean the blinding of Orion?”