“You will see me again!” it seemed to say to the old king, to the young farm-girl, to the club that slew the Nemean Lion. And the club was fully aware of the fact that there was a special reason for its sharing the horror that now menaced the other two, the fact namely that the Nemean Lion whose brains it dashed out on the “epeiros” was actually, though belonging to the earth, an offspring of this monster of the deep.
Little did either the old man or the young girl guess that the forward rush with which they both followed the Heraklean weapon, as, straining itself forward till it almost flew out of the king’s grasp, it rushed with blind defiance down that slippery slope straight towards the beautiful face in its terrible hair, had anything to do with the fact that the weapon the king carried knew so much more than they did of the creature they were encountering.
So terrific, however, was the shock of sheer panic that struck them all three when they came within reach of that swirling whirlpool of hair — the colour of the absolute void before there was any world at all — that fortunately for the two human ones it broke through, just as if it had really been a flash of metaphysical illumination, the natural barrier between the consciousness of the club of Herakles and the consciousness of the man and the girl, so that when, within a couple of yards of the wave’s edge, they finally stopped, Odysseus was able to threaten that beautiful face in the midst of that abysmal hair with the knowledge possessed by the weapon of the son of Zeus and his mortal bride Alkmene.
“Beware, you evil mother of good daughters, you mother of the Graiai, born with white hair, of the Graiai, who still live in Kisthene, the cavern of rock-roses, where there is neither sun nor moon, and where no stars shine, and who have only one eye to see with, and only one tooth to eat with! Beware, I tell you, you demon-mother of the white-haired Graiai! If ever your face is seen again near this Cave of the Naiads I shall rob your daughters of both their one eye and their one tooth; for none knoweth the road to Kisthene of the Rock-Roses better than I, wanderer as I’ve been through both the world of the living and the world of the dead!”
Had Keto, the eldest daughter of the Sea, possessed, at the back of her swirling hair, now the very colour of that Nothingness into which everything shall return, possessed a foam-drop of the feeling resembling ours, she would have been softened in some infinitesimal measure by the poignant sight of those two pathetic human beings, the little farm-girl with slender outstretched arms and the broad-shouldered shepherd of the people, brandishing his old cracked root of a twisted pine disfigured by honeysuckle and brooding on the spilt brains of lions; but that drifting face remained as impassive as the exquisite convolutions of a cockle-shell; impassive and implacable, and still slowly advancing.
But it was at that moment that behind this intolerable sea-horror with its appalling beauty and its deadly hair there suddenly rose up a three-fold prong held aloft in a vast overshadowing muscular arm. “Stop, all of you! stop, I say!” boomed the god’s terrific voice, as the outstretched trident was directed towards them.
With the sluicing and shelving roar of a hoarse, out-drawing, tidal retreat the whole volume of water, swallowing up Keto entirely as it went, rolled back about the tall and menacing torso of Poseidon. Recognizing his worst personal enemy in this insatiable avenger of the Kyklops Polyphemos and this passionate ally of the Trojans, Odysseus contented himself with shrugging his massive shoulders, with extending an imperative yet kindly hand to the young girl, with swinging the club in an almost humorous gesture of submitting to fate, and with walking, without another glance at the ship he was building, slowly forth from the Naiad’s Cave by the nearest inland path; a retreat from action that was an unspeakable relief to both the fly and the moth.
“Were you on your way somewhere, child?” he asked the young girl in a friendly voice, still retaining her hand. “I’m herdsman Tis’s youngest sister,” the girl replied in a docile voice. “Grandfather sent me with a message to him. Grandfather told me to stop at the Naiad’s Gave and see if it was true that you were building a ship. They say, down our way, that if you, my lord, sail from Ithaca, one of the Naubolides boys will be king in your place: but I tell them that’s all silly nonsense.”
The girl’s obvious sincerity made Odysseus look more closely at her and he was struck by the oddity of her appearance. She had one of the plainest faces he had ever seen, and her stomach and torso were shapeless and graceless, but her legs were as beautifully formed as those of some incomparable dancer. “I’ll take you to the house,” he said. “Tis sleeps there and the women will find a place for you.”
CHAPTER III
Never had Nisos Naubolides felt surer of himself or of his destiny than when, on this same morning of the old king’s visit to the cave of the Naiads, he set out for the Temple of Athene. He had come straight from the presence of his mother Pandea whom he had found as he had expected, not in the Naubolides homestead of Aulion, but in the house called Druinos, where lived Nosodea, the mother of the two girls Leipephile and Stratonika, who was Pandea’s best gossip, best scandal-monger, and best-loved friend.
The old Odysseus must have been still lying on his bed with his eyes closed after his nocturnal conversation with the Dryad Kleta when Nisos set out so full of confidence in himself and his future. As to Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth, they must already have discovered for the benefit of the Club of Herakles and of the inquisitive Olive-shoot which had sprung up near the club, some important news about the ambiguous activities of the Priest of Orpheus who had occupied the ante-chamber to the Temple, for they were now flying back in their return from the Temple.
At the foot of a long slope of carefully tended green grass that led away from the Temple in an Eastern direction there was an old roughly hewn ungainly statue — scarcely a statue at all for it was more like a low stone pillar or “herm”, with the crude outlines of a clumsily carved feminine face just indicated at the top of it — not of Athene but of the Goddess Themis, the special guardian throughout all Hellas of law and order and justice and decent behaviour.
Nisos stopped in amazement in front of this image. He knew every curve and every hollow and every tinge of colour upon this ungainly block of stone. But behold! there was this morning a horrible great crack clear across it. It was a crack that reached from what might have been the figure’s left shoulder to what might have been its right buttock. Nisos now examined the injured image with the utmost nicety from top to toe.
As he was doing this he suddenly paused with an excited gasping little cry, the sort of cry a young soldier might have uttered who had just discovered on the battlefield the severed head of his general.
It was not quite as startled a cry as that; but it was in the sa me category of shocked astonishment. What he had seen were unmistakable blood-marks at different places all over the stone’s surface.
“Whose blood?” was the question that shot through the boy’s mind. Down on his knees he sank and began scrabbling with both hands in the grass. Here his startled curiosity was more than rewarded. Again and again his fingers encountered certain curious horny objects, which, as he lifted them up into the sunlight that was now blazing down upon him from a cloudless sky, revealed themselves without doubt or question to be nothing less than broken finger-nails, enormously sharp and super-humanly long finger-nails, some of them thicker than others, but almost all, he soon noticed, bloody as well as broken. “Whose blood?” the boy desperately asked himself again.
His whole feeling towards these abnormally large finger-nails was an extremely queer one. It was indeed such a confused and complicated one that, clever as he was, the lad was completely non-plussed. What agitated him was not so much these large and bloody finger-nails in themselves as what they represented and the world of associations they brought with them.