He turned his pointed beard to the West without getting any inspiration. Then he turned it to the East and despatched across all the forests and mountains and seas and swamps and deserts that separated him from the land of the blameless Ethopians what he felt to be the swiftest kind of prayer. “What actually is it that I have done,” he asked himself, “to vex her as much as this?” And he drew a sigh that really came without any pretence from the very bottom of his being, “I’ve prayed to her as if my prayer were a wave, a wave that must bring her back. Yes, I’ve sent a wave to the Eastern edge of the world! It’s a wave of the sea I’ve sent; only it’s not merely making a furrow of sea-water; it’s making a furrow of earth-mould, a furrow of broken branches, a furrow through all the forests of the Mainland till the Mainland itself reaches the edge of the earth!”
The old man’s pointed beard seemed to follow his thought as if it possessed the power of transforming itself into the wave its owner was imagining. “But what sort of thing is the edge of the earth,” Odysseus wondered; “and do the blameless Ethiopians peep over that edge as I peeped just now at the sleep of the Dryad?”
As he pondered on this, he saw in his mind a terrific chasm of absolute darkness along the fringe of which hung suspended gigantic smoke-blackened shapeless rocks, beneath which there was nothing but a hollow bottomless abyss. And then it seemed to the king, as he imagined himself lying on his stomach on one of these blackened rocks and staring down into the abyss, that he saw the sun coming up out of that unspeakable gulf.
“Do the blameless Ethiopians,” he wondered, “ever fall over that frightful edge?” He imagined the great goddess who was his friend, standing there in all her divine beauty, with the terrible Aegis-shield on her arm, its magic tassels dark with the darkness of the gulf of Erebos, while from her breastplate glared forth upon all who dared approach her the dreadful head of Medusa, the dead Gorgon, with the still living hair of its twining serpents feeding on the obscure mystery of its human fate.
Standing motionless the old man gazed for a long moment over that imaginary world’s edge. “She would be with me if she could,” he murmured aloud; and then shrugged his shoulders. “The gods with me or the gods against me,” he thought, “I shall do what I shall do; and what will come of it will be what will come of it!”
He then swung round but instead of leaning against the uneven edge of crumbling and rotten wood and peering down at the sleeping old creature as he had done at first, he now proceeded to call upon her by name; thus giving her an opportunity to arrange her appearance a little before presenting herself. There was enough light to catch her expression fully and clearly when, after a couple of minutes delay, she appeared at the entrance to her hollow tree.
“What — is — it?” she groaned hoarsely. “Has Krateros Naubolides attacked the Palace?”
The old king smiled under cover of his beard. “Not yet, my friend, not quite yet. But no doubt if the Palace doesn’t take precautions and take them quickly too he will attack us before we know where we are. And that, my dear old friend, is precisely why I have come to disturb you so early. I feel ashamed of myself for breaking up your dream but there’s something I’m very anxious to know, and you are the only mortal or immortal, the only Nymph of land or sea, who can help me to attain this knowledge.”
Never in all his days had the crafty old wanderer seen such a look of unmitigated beatitude as rushed into the haggard face of Dryad! “O my dear child!” she cried, “I never thought the Olympians would give me a chance to”—Here the ancient creature had to struggle grimly with a rush of up-surging sobs—“to help the son of Laertes at a real crisis in his life. And I never would have presumed to push myself forward, whatever knowledge I might happen to have, without some sign, some invitation, some request, at least some permission, some opportunity, some door ajar. But now that you yourself have spoken, my dear lord, and have as the Persians say, stretched out your sceptre towards me, I can tell you all I know.”
“Tell me, old friend, tell me quick; so that I can act at once. It has become fatally clear to me at last, though it took many days to make me believe it, that my wise goddess and ever-faithful protectress must have hurried away in anger and contempt from our wretched and ignoble quarrels and from this ‘complicated world-crisis’ as our more pompous contemporaries will love to call it, though of course, as you and I know well, if every battle between Gods and Titans is a ‘world-crisis’ our poor old world has never been free from one. Yes, it is natural enough that she should do what our great Olympians have always done at a crisis, gone off; gone off to recover her faith in the natural piety of humanity by enjoying for a while the innocent worship of these guileless races. And so, my dear friend, I’ll put to you without further delay, the question I should have implored our great Goddess to answer. It is this.
“I have been assured by Eurycleia that the maiden Eione who has lately come to serve in our household, and who is, she herself declared, when I found her in the Cave of the Naiads, a sister of our excellent herdsman Tis, has revealed in recent conversations the discovery of an extremely important secret.
“It was to reveal this discovery to her faithful brother Tis that Eione came here from the opposite end of Ithaca. Eurycleia indeed assures me that Moros, who is Eione’s grandfather and also the grandfather of our faithful Tis, has discovered that there is a formidable pair of foreigners, calling themselves Zenios and Okyrhöe, who have occupied for several years — nobody seems to know exactly for how long — a lonely and desolate farm-house on the extreme sea-verge of a rocky headland that has been deserted for generations and left to fall into ruin. There are springs of fresh water in that lonely place, there are remains of several walls and even the remnants of a few wooden fences but the ground that was once protected by these things has been so blighted by sea-winds that it is doubtful if any grain would grow there now; and, if it did, it is certain its chance of its surviving the depredations of beasts and birds would be small.
“But grand-dad Moros swore to Eione — you’re listening to me, aren’t you, old friend? — that this queer foreign couple came here from Thebes after the death of Cadmus and that they brought with them enough treasure to keep them for a hundred years. And grand-dad Moros declares further that he has spoken with both Zenios and Okyrhöe and has learnt from them that they have under their protection in their half-ruined dwelling a young maiden who is the living daughter of the great prophet Teiresias.
“Eione’s grand-dad swears he has been told by this couple, who have several times welcomed him to a lavish meal in their lonely refuge, whose local name is Ornax, that this young daughter of Teiresias, who has inherited from her father a startling amount of his prophetic inspiration, declares that if Odysseus does not sail from Ithaca this Spring on his last voyage he will die miserably in his bed, yes! in his bed in his ancient palace, of an ignoble disease flung upon him out of the deep sea by his deadly enemy Poseidon. Unlike other youthful prophets this young girl has never once contradicted, never once altered by a single breath, this terrible prediction. Her protectors Zenios and Okyrhöe swore to old Moros again and again, so Eione tells Eurycleia, that if ever Teiresias’ daughter whose name, it seems is Pontopereia, came here, with this prophecy of hers, she would inevitably convince us all of its truth.”
The aged Dryad gave two or three jerky hops forward till she stood on a heap of last year’s dead oak-leaves. Here she became more erect than Odysseus had ever seen her; and raising her withered arms above her head she began clasping and unclasping her gnarled fingers tightly round the back of her neck.