Finding however that the position in which a person thinks about thinking has an appreciable effect on his thought Nisos returned his right foot to that queerly-coloured floor with some violence. “We can’t think properly about thinking,” he thought, “without bringing in ourselves. Atropos has to be Fate unswerving or she cannot think. Athene has to be the natural daughter of Zeus’ brain or she cannot think. Was this new kind of priest not thinking of himself at all but, busy in the establishment of some Secret Society, or Holy Cause, or Community Conspiracy, compared with whose dark and inhuman and impersonal purpose, he himself, the man Enorches, was as nothing?
“When I think,” the embryo prophet now told himself, “I think like Athene and like Atropos and like the old Odysseus, from myself outwards. But I have a revolting suspicion that, when this horrible Orpheus-man thinks, he thinks towards himself inwards.”
It may have been partly due to the queerly-coloured stone-work of this square cell, but our young friend’s mind at this point turned, as if automatically, to an interior vision of those two letters carved upon the oldest Pillar in the Porch of the Palace. He felt, as he thought of those letters, as if they were engraved upon the substance of his own soul.
“From now on,” he told himself, “I shall dodge, avoid, and undermine in every way I possibly can, these infernal ‘Mysteries of Orpheus’.” Having decided this point the youthful challenger looked round him more carefully than he had done before. Yes, this chamber into which that man had thrust him was certainly a naked one! It was as if he were imprisoned inside a hard, square, semi-precious stone: a stone that, with him inside, might have been worn by some tremendous titanic giant, a giant as big as Atlas who was reported to hold up the sky.
The boy had been thinking too hard, thinking with a cleverness that had become a strain. His nerves now began to behave as if they might in a little while make the sound of popping, after the manner of certain seed-pods. In pure nervousness he began to do funny things. He went up to the wall directly under a little square hole, that let in all the light the place had, and began to scrabble at it with his nails; at nothing in particular, just at the wall.
But this silliness was brought to an end by his wondering if it were possible that there might be — but this was probably only a little less silly — any scratches on these walls that resembled that “U” and that “H” on the base of the Pillar in the Palace-Porch. “Apparently,” he thought, as he looked carefully about him, “to escape in soul from a Priest of Orpheus is easier than to escape in body!”
But he set himself the task of examining his prison in the manner in which he fancied his old friend, Myos the fly, would have examined it if he had been the one to show scant reverence to Orpheus. In his nervous excitement Nisos almost laughed aloud when he imagined Pyraust, the moth-girl, asking Myos to tell her who Orpheus was, and the fly describing him to the moth as the first original spider.
But he now meticulously examined every one of these four walls dutifully thanking as he did so the sky-god Ouranos, Zeus’ grandfather, for the light that came from a small half-a-foot-square window near the top of one of them. He was growing nervous again now. With his birthday in sight, for he would be seventeen in a few days, he felt he must hurry up with his mental development if he were to be recognized by the whole Island as the Prophet to the strong by the time his brother, duly married to Leipephile Pheresides, had inherited their father’s claim to be king in succession to Odysseus or even — here he looked round in real apprehension now; for where, in the name of Zeus, was the door through which he’d been thrust into this place? — even instead of Odysseus!
“Oh popoi!” he groaned. “Was there ever such a fool as I am? Of course it’s to stop Odysseus from hoisting sail like a real king and to keep him petering out in his palace till he dies of idleness, or what Mummy calls ‘malakia’ or some such word, that Dad and Agelaos have been hiding up for years all the ‘othonia’ or sail-cloth they can get hold of!
“If ever,” Nisos thought, “there has been a fool in Ithaca I am that fool!” But he had no sooner “given himself to the crows”, as the island saying had it, as the greatest fool among all the “kasis” or class-mates of his age from coast to coast, than he suddenly become certain he had caught sight of the Pillar’s “U” and “H”.
Madly he rushed towards those scratches and pressed against them with both his bare hands. By Zeus, the Pillar had saved him! A great stone in the wall moved outwards, fell silently on a bed of moss outside, and lay there motionless. In the sun that stone took to itself a completely different colour from the one that had characterized it within those walls.
It struck the boy, as he jumped upon it, and jumped away from it, and ran off free, that that heavy stone looked as if it were drinking in, in that one second, enough air and sun to give it a new colour for a thousand years!
CHAPTER IV
A few days after the momentous encounter between the oldest but far the most powerful of the Three Fates and the boy Nisos who had now reached the age of seventeen, the hero Odysseus awoke in the grey “wolf-light” of the pre-dawn, and, with nothing on but his blanket, his sandals, and his broad ox-hide belt, scrambled down the ladder and shuffled across the intervening space to the Dryad’s hollow tree.
It must be confessed that on this occasion the old king was the awakener of the old Dryad, and not the other way round. It gave Odysseus indeed something of a shock when, in that pallid “wolf-light”, with one hand on the soft-crumbling edge of the phantom-grey orifice, he peeped down upon the crumpled heap of faded substances, patches of linen, pieces of cloth, bits of bone, fragments of withered flesh, tangled twists of lichen-coloured female hair, in fact all the accessories and visible appendages of what might well have been an aged human female’s bed, including the old lady herself reposing within it.
The patches of linen and cloth were so pitiably the kind of objects that a wandering female beggar would have picked up in her capricious travels that Odysseus drew back with that sort of instinctive reluctance to disconcert a sleeping female that any male householder might feel who finds such an one slumbering in one of his out-houses.
But, along with this feeling, another and a very different one came over him as once more he thrust his bowsprit beard and his massive almost bald skull over the edge of that crumbling orifice.
This was a much more intimate and personal feeling, though sex and sex-shyness entered into it. It was indeed the sort of self-restrained courtesy on the relations between the sexes such as Odysseus had learnt as a child from his mother, Anticleia, the sophisticated daughter of the crafty and mischievously magnanimous Autolycus. In an island-palace such as theirs, crowded with alien visitors from half the coasts of Hellas, some kind of calculated refinement in ordinary personal contact was essential; and it was the dignified reserve of such well-brought-up behaviour that the old man felt he had outraged by peering down upon this sleeping old woman, as she lay half-naked amid her long-accumulated bits of human finery like some moribund forest-fungus that had just managed to survive the winter.
“I must wake the old creature somehow,” he thought, “for if I’m to carry through this touchy business of appealing to the people in open ‘agora’ I must find out more about these strangers from Thebes who’ve got the daughter of Teiresias in their keeping, and the Dryad is the only one who can help me.”