For Nisos at this moment almost all the inhabitants of the earth, at least such as were not included in his school-geography-books, were “blameless Ethiopians”; and what he conjured up at that instant over the entire face of the earth’s surface were millions of men no different from those he knew so well, no different from the king and the king’s son, no different from his own father, Krateros Naubolides, or from the old man, Damnos Geraios, or from his own familiar bosom-crony, Tis, the herdsman from the other end of Ithaca, all of whom, as they went about their affairs, fell now and again into these day dreams of fate where, asleep and yet not asleep, they created without knowing it their future destiny.
And as he looked into the eyes of Atropos he seemed to become the blood-brother, the “Kasi”, or school-camerado, of all these day-dreamers, till their dream was his dream, and without any “pomposizing,” or processioning in the manner of Hermes, he became aware that with this whole great multitude, including not only his fellow-men but all creatures upon the earth, he was, without knowing it, living a double life, in fact two quite separate lives, one in this world and one in some other world.
“Why it’s just as if,” he said to himself, “I was in one of those dreams when I know I’m dreaming, and could, if I wanted to, wake up, quite naturally, easily, and without any particular effort, rather than go on dreaming.”
He was beginning to feel almost reassured, when suddenly he received an extremely unpleasant and thoroughly disconcerting shock. He beheld those two hovering Horrors make a downward swoop towards the Spruce-Fir against which Atropos was leaning. It was a shock that gave him a very disagreeable sensation, a sensation as if his heart-beats, his pulses, his quick-drawn breaths had been pounded into one single blood-dripping welter, and that this welter of automatic physical functionings might at any moment absorb the attention of his whole conscious being.
“What on earth can be going on in her head,” he thought, “to give me such a feeling?” And then without warning, and still under the power of her eyes his entire mind became concentrated upon the old Odysseus. “I’m not going to endure,” he thought, “no! not one day longer, this wretched plot that father and Agelaos and the rest of them are working up against the old man. Arsinöe’s with them of course. That’s only natural since she’s a Trojan. But none of the rest of us are Trojans! What’s come into us, what’s come over us, that we’re so against the old man?”
The unpleasant sensation he had just been through of feeling as if the beating of his heart, the flicker of his eyelids, the throb of his pulses, the breath of his lungs, had got mixed together in one raw palpitating bubble of blood-streaked eruption, now began, as Nisos disentangled himself from this reeking blood-sweating mass, to take its due proportion in his mind as he connected it with the drowsy passivity of his body, and not only of his body, but of all the bodies of all the human and sub-human creatures as they pause in their work or in their play, in their hunting or in their fighting, to forget themselves in day-dreams and trances.
And it was then that Nisos realized that not only heroes and kings and prophets and soothsayers but all living things are subject to an unseen, unfelt, unrecognized fate, and that it is this fate whose current flows, above or below, it matters not which, the heart-beats and pulse-beats of the lives of us all.
And the boy finally realized that there are points in our lives that we ourselves think of as turning points, but which, under the eyes of Atropos, the one with whom is no turning, are in reality only the fulfilment of our inherent destiny.
The boy had hardly reached this conclusion when the threatened attack began. The Erinys and the Gorgon descended with a sickening stench from their foul throats, with a horrible hissing from their bosom serpents, with an excremental vapour from their festering flesh and putrid scales, and with a screaming and a barking that silenced every bird and every wind.
It had nothing to do with the eyes of Atropos, for they had left him perforce — the instinctive impulse with which the boy now flung himself into the midst of that terrible struggle. The final issue may not have been in doubt; but Nisos was too young, and, just then too wild with desperate courage and too dazed by supernatural shocks to think of anything but his physical contact with that pair of Horrors and with their serpents and their stench and the sounds they made and with their appalling strength.
One comfort he had as he fought on, gasping and sweating, to free that oldest of all the beneficent powers in the world from those two demons, and that was nothing less than her own faint though very clear voice, encouraging him.
Another comfort he had was the uninterrupted humming of small insects round the Lykophos-Mound. These little creatures seemed quite oblivious of what was going on. Up and down across the surface of the rock they flew, dodging one another with quivering antennae and hovering wings; while first one, and then another, snatched a sip of Nectar from between petals of flowers so delicate that from their disturbed rims rose no sounds audible to human ears; though to lesser insects no doubt they sounded with the rain-drop clarity of tiny bells.
But what gave the boy a strength beyond his years was not only the fact that the oldest of all the goddesses was calling upon him to aid her, but that, although her voice was as faint as the remote sound of the sea-wind in a sea-shell, it was a voice with the most far-reaching echo he had ever heard.
For the echo of the voice of Atropos was no ordinary echo. It was a special and peculiar one, and it responded to every syllable that the old creature uttered; for through the substances of all the material elements of which the Island of Ithaca was composed this small faint echo of the oldest of the Fates could pass. Through substances that seemed bent on resisting its passing this echo easily and naturally passed. The old Fate’s voice went forth first; and then the echo followed it like a faithful disciple doing the will of its master. Passing through everything that resisted them they went on; till they reached the yawning void where all echoes cease.
And the echo of the voice of Atropos had the peculiarity of entering into all the substances that carried it forward, as well as using them to help it on its way towards the ultimate void. The echo entered now into the fluttering insects who were sucking the Nectar from those tiny flowers. It entered into the burning sun above those three immortals and above this one mortal just as it entered into the heart of the Lykophos-Mound.
The curious thing was that the boy accompanied his final terrific effort with his human hands and feet against the two monsters by a low-murmured, very rapidly enunciated, rational argument, defending his own and his mother’s friendly attitude towards the old king of Ithaca compared with the hostile one of his father Krateros and his brother Agelaos.
It was indeed only when he reached the culmination of this rapidly murmured, rational, and almost legal argument, with which he was punctuating, so to speak, his violent physical struggles, that he suddenly discovered that the battle had been won and that the Fury and the Gorgon had vanished. In his relief at this consummation, just when the throes of the struggle had become more than he could bear, the boy lost consciousness.
When he recovered he found that Atropos also was gone and that it required so much effort to leave the Lykophos-Mound and to drag himself up the rest of the hill that all that had passed grew steadily more blurred and more indistinct. One thing alone limned itself clearly on his mind, like a reflected image in water amid a crowd of globular bubbles, and that was some reference made, either by himself or by the oldest of the Fates, to a certain woven stuff.