He began to wonder what kind of divinity he would be most fitted to represent, and most happy in representing. And as he pondered on this important point he found himself staring at one particular blade of grass the top of which, the point as it were, of this brightly green dagger, had turned into a pale brown colour. The point had not shrivelled or crumpled in this transformation. It was still as smooth as the rest of that leaf of grass; but it was discoloured.
Something had bitten it or the excretion of some poisonous creature had sucked the life-blood from it; or, for all Nisos knew, this single grass-leaf with all the consciousness it possessed had uttered a curse against Zeus himself, the lord of high heaven, and had thus drawn upon itself an individual flash, especially adapted to a small object, of celestial lightning.
At first Nisos couldn’t help associating this discoloured point with Petraia’s unseemly outburst; but as he went on staring at it his secret dream about his own future on this island stirred within him.
“Yes, by Aidoneus,” he thought, “I know what special kind of prophet I’ll be, a kind that has never existed in the world before! I’ll not be a prophet to the clever who are weak and timid and nervous like me. I’ll be a prophet to the strong who have been hurt in some way. Yes, I’ll be a prophet to the healthy and strong who are like this leaf of grass with a brown tip.”
“Listen to me,” I’ll cry, “all you who are strong but yet are stupid; you who are hurt and hit without knowing why! Listen to me!” He stood still, imagining himself a man with a long flowing beard, taller than he was now, much more distinguished than he was now, and possessed of philosophical secrets known to no other sage in Hellas. He glanced casually up the slope in front of him. All those glittering marble buildings he knew so well were hidden by the grassy ridge at the top of the ascent and he noticed that Petraia had entirely vanished.
“She must be visiting Stratonika,” he said to himself. “Yes,” he thought, “I’ll be a Prophet to the strong who’ve been hurt, and the healthy who’ve fallen sick! The half-dead ones, the tortured ones, the mad ones, the diseased ones have all got prophets; but strong, stupid, silly things, like this blade of grass with a brown tip, who just stares back at a person, think they don’t want a prophet; but they do! O yes! you do, stupid grass, whatever you think! You wait till I’m older and cleverer and have a beard; and you’ll soon see! It’s the stupid things that need the clever prophets!”
Having decided on his future in general, Nisos now felt a need for beginning to practise the art of prophecy in a more special and particular manner; so he began plodding steadily on, with drops of sweat falling from his forehead and his eyes upon his sandals which were discoloured by pollen-dust and rabbit-dung.
Suddenly he turned his attention, drawn by an impulse for which he couldn’t account, away from the ridge in front of him to a clump of trees on his extreme left; and he even began walking hurriedly towards it. The trees were only a portion of the group of natural objects that was now his objective. In the blazing sun and against all this greenery the many-coloured mound he was aiming for had almost a purple look.
Nisos knew the place well. It was of natural rather than artificial origin, formed by the intermingling of three separate things, a rather oddly scrawled rock, the stump of an oak, and the twisted root of an ash. Over this dusky excrescence there grew a mass of waving ferns and thick clumps of a specially dark moss; and as Nisos now advanced towards it its queer purpureal tint appeared to be spotted by blood-red patches which glowered like raw wounds in that burning sun.
Everyone who knew Ithaca knew this spot and it was locally called Lykophos or “Wolf’s Light,” a name which implied that faint grey light before dawn that was more suitable to eyes of wolves than of men. The Lykophos-Mound seemed especially prominent at this moment. Its queerly scrawled rock, its oak-stump, its ash-root, together with the sap-filled living energy of its ferns and moss and honeysuckle, and its minutely delicate early Spring flowers and their clambering foliage, accentuated just then something about it, some powerful atmospheric emanation, that always made it an object towards which certain living people and certain living creatures gravitated with magnetic or hypnotic attraction but from which others shrank away with instinctive dread.
Nisos himself was one of the former sort; but his friend Tis, the herdsman, though he used simpler words, had given the boy the impression that to him there were always shocking blood-drops oozing out of that rock; while, for all its ferns and mosses and small spring-flowers and spreading foliage, there were always raw skinless hollows between its hieroglyphic surfaces and its leaf-mould ledges that suggested festering wounds and pus-exuding sores.
Among our other friends from the porch of the palace the black house-fly was repelled much in the same way as Tis. What the fly felt every time it flew near the Lykophos-Mound was an aching void in the pit of its stomach; as if some poisonous-looking meat-cover of brassy gauze had suddenly been precipitated out of the air to surround every half-crumb of edible farinaceousness and every half-drop of absorbable stickiness in the entire world.
It was however quite calmly and thoughtfully, and yet rather doggedly, for he was anxious to pick up for his extremely human Mummy a few fragments of more ordinary, more domestic, more everyday news than had recently been bewildering him from so many thaumaturgical if not supernatural directions, that our young friend was approaching the Lykophos-Mound, when he heard in the air above his head the strangest combination of startling, terrifying, and unbelievable sounds that he’d ever heard in his life.
And as, trembling with pure terror, he looked up, he saw a sight that froze his blood. What he saw gave him the impression that he was in the midst of a nightmare and that if he burst into a wild cry himself, these other cries, together with the incredible shapes that were descending from out of the air, would cease and dissolve and sink away, shaken into nothingness by his mother’s approach as she answered his frantic screams.
But not for nothing had he been brought up by a mother like Pandea and a nurse like Petraia. Not for nothing had he listened as intently as that wicked old toad of a grandfather, Damnos Geraios himself, to the tales exchanged between his mother and her grand gossip, the mother of Leipephile and Stratonika. Above all it hadn’t been for nothing that he had done housework for the aged lady who had been the nurse of three generations of royalty. As, half-petrified with terror, he gazed upward at what he saw, these two wide-winged female Horrors, uttering these appalling screeches as they flapped down towards the Lykophos-Mound in the half-circle of a raven-like swoop upon their prey, he knew at once who they were. One was an Erinys, one of the Avengers of Blood or Furies, and the other was a Gorgon.
Talking about it later with the old palace-nurse he came to the conclusion that the particular Erinys who made this attack must have been Allekto, whose name means “the never-ending” and that the Gorgon who tried to help her in this attack was Euryale whose name means “the wide sea”.
But at the actual moment he had this appalling experience he only knew that without question one of them was most certainly an “Erinys” or “Fury” and the other was most certainly a Gorgon. The pair were clearly much too absorbed in catching their victim off-guard to notice Nisos at all. In fact they behaved as if he were a short, branchless tree, devoid of all sensibility save of a passive vegetative kind.