The house-fly, who had listened to this outburst with troubled concentration, was now turning the subject over and over in his great heavy black head. At last he hummed: “I am afraid, my dear Pyraust, that I can’t quite follow your reasoning — but, heavens! how right you are about this terrible wind! I almost feel as if our living protector, this immortal club of Herakles, must soon be blown out of the king’s hand!—
“That priest of yours certainly was beside himself with anger; that much I cannot deny: and when men are like that, whatever it may be that has roused their fury, they are all alike. They fall into a fit of abandoned rage and every kind of reason vanishes.
“But have you noticed, Pyraust, my pretty one, how this great weapon in which we’re travelling so fast, yes! this club of Herakles itself and nothing less, has been for some time, as we have been whirling along this infernal coast, conversing with the rocky ground itself, yes! actually with the very ground against which the eight hooves of our bearers have been striking, and very often striking fiery sparks?
“Have you noticed this queer fact, O soft-hearted one?”
Both the insects were quiet for a minute listening intently. Then Pyraust murmured in rapt admiration: “Yes, Myos most clever, Myos most discerning, Myos most sage, you are perfectly right! Our thrice-blest travelling shrine is talking to somebody or something. How marvellous of you to have found that out! I suppose we could scarcely dare — eh, my wise one? — to speak to our sacred Sanctuary and ask point-blank — no! I fear that would be too rude and impertinent! What do you feel?
“Could we dare?”—and the brown moth turned to the black fly the yearning of her whole quivering being. Again they were silent, listening to the wind whirling past them as they huddled together in the deepest shadow they could find in that narrow refuge.
“Why can’t we listen to them without asking leave?” whispered the moth a moment later.
The fly made no answer. But his dark and corrugated countenance contorted itself into creases that could have been naturally interpreted as the tension of a profoundly scientific brain interrogating and interpreting Nature according to an elaborately technical process of his own invention.
“He’s talking to our Sixth Pillar,” he whispered at last—“O! O! how nice and out of the glare it is now! Do you know how that comes about, Pyraust?”
The moth shook her head; while her eyes opened wider still in dumb amazement that there should exist in the world anyone as wise as her friend the fly.
“The cause of this particular obscuration of dazzlement,” announced that philosopher with the shrill certainty of a successful scientist, “is simply a human hand. Yes, whenever the old king who is holding the weapon that is our travelling equipage changes the position of his fingers, owing probably, but we can’t be perfectly certain on that point, to some faint feeling of cramp, there occurs an over-powering alteration in the nature of our environment.”
The moth bowed her small head and folded her silky wings in a paroxysm of passionate humility before such insight. But the sound of a very curious humming and drumming now presented itself to the startled attention of both of them.
“Do you hear that, my beautiful one?” enquired the fly.
“I most certainly do,” replied the moth. “Can you explain this also? Has this any connection with the way our ancient king holds his club of Hercules?”
Very gravely did the fly consider this simple question; and then he said, speaking very slowly: “My own feeling is that this curious sound has no connection at all with our heroic old king, or with the way he is holding the weapon which at this moment is our hiding-place.
No, precious one; my feeling is that this sound has to do with a conversation that is actually going on now, between the weapon which is our most blessed vehicle and the ground itself, including all the rocks and pebbles and even the very grains of sand, over which these astonishing horses are carrying us all on their backs.”
The brown moth uncurled her silky wings a little and stretched out her tiny legs with an even less noticeable movement. Then with one of her antennae she touched the precise centre of her friend’s heavy forehead and after having done so she licked the spot she had touched; and then instead of withdrawing her tongue and curling it up she made vague motions with it in the air as if inscribing upon that most elusive of all elements her unspeakable reverence for the wisdom of the fly.
Since it was the black-maned son of Poseidon, by the Earth-Mother in her disguise as a Mare, who was leading this singular cortège, and since Odysseus, who was holding Arion’s bridle-reins, along with the club of Herakles, at outstretched arm’s length, was, of all the warriors of that age, owing to the rockiness of Ithaca, the least acquainted with horses, it was natural that, quite apart from the dazzlement of the burning afternoon sun and the aridity of the rocks and sands and shelving stretches of bituminous gravel and shingly marl over which those eight unusual hooves clattered, there should be several abrupt arrests in their advance, and not a few perilous debouchings from the simpler direction indicated by commonsense.
But something or other, either the imperturbable spirit of the old king or the resolution of both the horses, kept them going. The bloody wound in Arion’s shoulder made by the rape of half his mane did not seem to unsettle his mind; nor did the stream of bantering railleries addressed to the badly injured Pegasos by the incorrigible Zeuks diminish that godlike creature’s speed.
And the pace they were going seemed to accelerate the scientific conclusions of the alert Fly. “No, by Aidoneus!” he suddenly cried; “No! my precious Pyraust! I was right in calling that weird sound we hear all the time a conversation or colloquy; but I made a mistake as to the identity of one of the interlocutors to whose dramatic secrets we have been listening.
“I took it for a simple dialogue between our Heraklean Club and the curving sea-banks of our sacred isle. But do you know who it is with whom our House of “Rest in Motion” is conversing?”
The brown Moth fluttered the feathery points of both her wings and allowed the proboscean sucker at the tip of her tongue to make a receptive gesture. “Yes?” she whispered, “yes? O I can’t wait to hear!”
“It’s none other,” announced the triumphant Fly, “than our old Sixth Pillar in the Corridor at home! So I really am a Discoverer! Eh? What?”
The astounded Moth could only feel herself grow an infinitesimal portion of an inch smaller.
“What,” she murmured, “does our Protector say to the Pillar? Isn’t there a danger that the startling news of our being carried to the other end of the island by Pegasos and Arion may give the Pillar such a shock that its marble frame will split open, as that image of Themis did when the Harpies attacked it with their nails?”
But the Fly, after licking the sensitized tip of each of its front legs and after drying these delicate members on its transparent wings, made use of them with exquisite care and chivalrous nicety as dainty brushes to remove any feathery film that might be obstructing the hearing of the brown Moth, and ordered her to give herself up to listening and not to forget all that the Pillar itself had taught them about the universal language of matter in use even by its minutest particles.
“Don’t ’ee forget, dear Pyraust,” he added, “how when we began our study of the alphabet of matter we learnt how much more important the sensations that certain words convey to us are than the precise nature of the words used or the number of syllables they contain.
“Above all, my dear girl, don’t forget what the Olive-Shoot always tells us, how in the science of language it is a combination of assonance and alliteration that conveys the idea; and thus it is only in poetry that the real secret of what is happening is revealed.”