Certainly if their luck-blest sailing from East to West was a specially dedicated time for Nisos, it was an even rarer period of exquisite human happiness for Arsinöe. She had by this time come to profoundly understand, not in a scientific manner, but in a much subtler, wiser, and entirely feminine manner, all four of the chieftains on board, for no sea-faring chronicler ought to omit Akron; while our friend Zeuks, like his father, Arcadian Pan, had the power of enjoying a young woman without spoiling her chances with other men: and finally, since she was the only girl on the “Teras”, the ship itself, devoid of a figure-head, was her only rival.
As for Zeuks, he had for the whole of this happy voyage from East to West exactly what his peculiar turn of mind liked best in the world, that is to say, for Arsinöe would never express herself with him, an old man, a middle-aged man, and a very young man, all well-educated, with whom he could discuss his favourite problems forever, problems that were at once erotic and metaphysical and that lent themselves to a humorous elaboration which any woman’s mind spoilt. For the feminine intelligence, brought on the scene, swept in its direct realism so fast over both his logical hieroglyphs on the sands of time and the pantomime-stage overlooking them, that it spoilt the whole humour of his game.
And so when Arsinöe was helping Odysseus take his bath, or was learning something about navigation from Akron, Zeuks would argue with Nisos about that life-logos idea which was summed up in those two significant words “spoudazo terpsis”, which Nisos loved to translate, in the adverbial language of the fly, “I powerfully throw my whole will into enjoying myself under all conditions,” while in his own secret mind Zeuks would struggle to find, though he never could find it, some pregnant aphorism that would say to the whole regiment of all the thinkers and all the prophets that have ever been: “to laugh at everything is the prerogative of man, and we must acquire the art of doing it quickly before everything laughs at us.”
By good luck, or rather by the profoundly wise premonition of Nausikaa, the “Teras” had sailed with provisions enough to last the whole crew for half a year, so that even Akron, cautious as he was, felt no fear that they would reach the end of their resources before they reached the coast of some island or country or continent. And even supposing the ocean stretched on and on as far as the Isles of the Blest where those favoured by the gods lived forever in perpetual happiness, what could happen to the “Teras” before she reached those isles need not trouble them now. Akron indeed went so far as to confess to Eumolpos the helmsman that when he experienced a certain shudder of apprehension at the idea of having to encounter such world-famous favourites of the immortals, he overcame the uneasiness of his respectful awe by the idea that these Blessed Ones might get some kind of a human thrill at being greeted with news from home.
But months passed by and the “Teras” reached no Isles of the Blest or any other Isles. Days followed days, weeks followed weeks, and they met nothing but the same monotony of unending waters. At last there came a day when there arose such an angry controversy among the crew, who had never bargained for a voyage as long as this, that Odysseus himself had to help Akron in restoring order. It was a quite natural nautical dispute about this everlasting fair wind. There certainly was something queer in a wind that never stopped filling their one great sail. Too well they all got to know that old familiar expanse of sail-cloth as it bulged out, so full of that never ceasing wind! There was even a dark stain upon it, in the shape of a man’s hand, made by the blood of a seagull.
But it really was wonderful how quickly the aged adventurer restored order. And he didn’t do it just by his bawdy jests; though there were plenty of those. He did it by holding their fascinated attention while he regaled them with one enthralling episode after another drawn from the actual stream of memorable things. It had been about this wind that their dispute had arisen; and, as so often happens in these contests, in each of the opposing arsenals of argumentative weapons, more were drawn from temperament than from experience.
In the matter of his own adventures Odysseus had come to realize as he grew older, and in doing so he had been greatly assisted by his old Dryad’s intimacy with the Naiads of the Cave, that there were already a number of tavern-and-harbour ditties, school-boy catches, ballad-minstrel songs, and even longer and more scrupulously measured verses, that made very free use of him and of his adventures, just as they did of those of Agamemnon and Achilles and Hector and Ajax; and he now quickly understood, as he caught the drift of this present dispute, that it had to do with an entirely false and rather ridiculous tale that had been rumoured abroad about an ox-hide bag, in which Aiolos, the King of the floating island of Aeolia, bound up the four winds of heaven; and about this bag being given to Odysseus to carry with him on his ship, and about Odysseus’s ship-mates, imagining it contained gold and silver, untying the knot and letting the winds go free, and finally about the frantic fury into which the foolish Aiolos flew when their ship was blown back to his fantastic brass-bound floating island!
Odysseus explained to both sides in this airy dispute that the winds had nothing to do with any such preposterous potentate as King Aiolos of Aeolia, this portly despot with his over-fed six sons married to his pampered six daughters, none of whom did anything but eat and drink all day long.
He explained to them that the mother of the winds was Eos the Goddess of the Dawn, who had married Astraios the son of that very Eurybia they had left on the island of Wone disputing with Echidna; and he warned them that unless they wanted the Hunter Orion on their track they had better cut out this silliness about ox-hide bags.
“I can’t interfere,” he told them, “with what the minstrels and tavern-singers make up about me. But inspired poetry is one thing and a versified fairy-tale, however entertainingly told, is another thing.”
“Land! Land! Land! Land!”
By divine good luck — though Nisos had his own secret thought that his old helper Atropos had something to do with it — it happened to be at the exact hour of Noon with the Sun high above them and the water calm when the whole lot of them crowded on deck to welcome this most heavenly of all sights to those in the air or on the water, the simple sight of the solid earth. It was not a mountainous coast they beheld nor a particularly rocky one. It was just a coast, just a shore, just land at last.
Akron wisely decided not to let his helmsman steer them straight in at the first approach. “I prefer to wait,” he told them — and Odysseus bowed to his opinion—“till we find a really good landing.”
It is a curious thing but “what happens” as we say, often takes the course of events out of the hands of any particular power, even out of the hands of Tyche the Goddess of Chance herself, and yet doesn’t yield it up to Fate or Destiny or the Will of Heaven. The event is not so much stranger than fiction as more appallingly natural than the natural, and to our amazement redeems all sorrows in the sweetness of its silent finality.
Probably no one will ever be really able to explain what there was in common between three extremely vital Entities on board the “Teras” that caused them all three to die of pure delight at their approach to land.
None of the three was entirely human, and it is possible that this was the reason; for it often happens that when plants and insects and half-gods die, ordinary human beings go on living. Ordinary human beings must have a certain mixture of fat and gristle in them that has the power, just because it is — well! what it is, of completely absorbing certain deadly vibrations.
“It’s the end of me!” Zeuks murmured, as Nisos, fancying that the son of the great god Pan was merely drunk, bent rather irritably over him. He wanted to go to Arsinöe who was standing where the Figure-Head had once been, and was talking to Akron and Odysseus; but his conscience had compelled him not to desert his friend the Fly, who was stretched out on its back upon one of the wings of the Moth, who had beaten herself to death in an ecstasy of happiness against the wooden edge of the “life-crack” in the bosom of the club of Herakles.