Suddenly Odysseus murmured, as if thinking aloud: “I have felt this happen before, once, twice, three times before! There may be nothing in it; but, on the other hand, it may be — We must doubt everything—including doubt. Yes, there! There it is again! So be it. I can only try.” He lifted the club an inch or two, held it very lightly, and waited again. He held it as if he were testing its weight. He held it so that in its whole length it was removed from contact with the back of Pegasos. Then, still holding it lightly with his right hand, but grasping the horse’s bridle with his left, he began walking rapidly straight past the rock and into what looked like the thickest part of the fir-forest that completely surrounded them. Nisos, lifting his head now, thought silently: “He is making the club lead us! O Atropos, let us get back in time to save her!” The path by which they had come had vanished; and now indeed there was no path at all. But Odysseus led them forward without the faintest hesitation, nor was there any hesitation in the manner in which Pegasos followed, the treasure-sack propt on his rump, and Nisos keeping it from falling, while Zeuks with a large fern in his hand followed close behind, driving the flies from the raw on the horse’s back whence Enorches had wrenched the wing.
Thus they steadily advanced, weaving their way in and out among the closely-growing fir-trees, and every now and then ascending and descending some small eminence usually of a circular shape and not unfrequently crowned with incredibly ancient stones of a kind totally different from any the island itself supplied, and in some cases, Nisos noticed as they passed, engraved with hieroglyphs not one letter of which he could recognize as Achaean or Hellenic.
And as they went on it was still the club of Herakles who led them; and Nisos often wondered whether he himself or Zeuks could have possibly caught, just through the palm of their hand, that subtle, illusive, delicate quiver, like the faint ripple of water seeking its level, by which the club conveyed its intimation of direction to the hand that had blinded Polyphemos.
Meanwhile within his “life-crack”, as to himself the club called their refuge, the silky wings of Pyraust, the brown moth, were fluttering with a desperate desire to fly homewards in the track of Arion and Pan.
“You shan’t! You shan’t! You shan’t!” shrilled the black fly in its highest-pitched voice. “I’d perish before I’d let you do anything so crazy! Don’t you see, you sweet, delectable, adorable, little fool, that the trees are already throwing long shadows, and didn’t you notice that on the crest of that last little hill we crossed the tree-trunks had a golden glow on their bark?”
The lovely little moth hurried to retort to this in an ironic assumption of pitiful weakness and naive innocence that not only made the fly feel a complete fool but removed from his proud heart every drop of that sweet metheglin of male superiority with which he had been intoxicating himself as he pictured their flight home together side by side in the “Wolf-Light” of the early dawn.
“Oh I know, I know,” cried the brown moth, “how lazy and luxurious it is of me to think of flying in the dark. But O it’s so nice, though I know it’s naughty of me to enjoy such a thing, to feel the great big strong black night holding me up on every side and whispering to me all the time: ‘Lean on me and you’ll be absolutely safe! Spread out your beautiful wings under me and you’ll see how soon you’ll learn to swim with me, ride with me, float with me, yes! you darling little moth, till I fill every nerve beneath your skin, and every pore in your skin, and every cavity in your lovely and trembling form with my calm and cool support!’
“Thus whispers the black night; and nobody can ever know,” continued the subtle and teasing moth, “all that the darkness of night means to me!”
The fly gave such a jerk of metaphysical excitement at this speech that the club’s consciousness of a shock in the “life-crack” of his honeysuckle-twisted or ivy-twisted bosom very nearly disturbed the whole piloting of their cortège.
“Why then, O most lovely and bewitching of self-deceivers, do you always try so desperately to burn yourself to death in any flame of light?”
The beautiful moth’s answer to this piece of logic had, however, to be postponed; for it was at that very second that they arrived at the end of the wood. There, before them, lay the salt waves with their islands and ships and rocky reefs and wide-stretching curving bays. And there, beyond all these, in far-away, vision-fulfilling, story-ending, mystery-resolving, resting-places for the imagination, the eyes of those three human beings were led further and yet further, to the vast horizons of the encircling sea.
And the great Club of Herakles ceased its rudder-like quiverings as impelled by an irresistible impulse Odysseus lifted the great weapon high above his head and shook it in the air as if he, a man among men, were taking it on himself to challenge that golden sun-path which, originating behind him, was now flowing across the darkening waters!
Yes! and to challenge the divine ether itself he lifted it up, the ether under which the sea-spaces before him extended beyond the ships, beyond the islands, beyond the main-land, beyond those far-away Asiatic mountains, on the Eastern verge of the world, where from the image of Niobe, the mother of mankind, fell no longer that ceaseless torrent of tears, and finally to challenge the very trident of Poseidon himself as he strove to dominate the multitudinous waves.
The two men, the now one-winged horse, the Heraklean club, the two insects, and our young friend Nisos, they were all silent; they were all gazing in front of them. What they saw as they gazed was the ruin of a building so colossal in its pre-historic enormity that the first impression Nisos had of it was that it ought to have sunk down by its own weight thousands of years ago to the very centre of the earth.
But what else did the boy see that made him even forget, as he looked, Eione’s danger from the shaggy lasciviousness of the Goat-foot from Arcadia? He distinctly saw, erect on a huge flat stone under a cyclopean arch, the figure of a young girl, a young girl of about the same age as Eione, though she may have been a little taller, and it seemed to him as if, with an outstretched arm, that figure was waving to him; not to the others, but to him — to him alone.
CHAPTER VI
“But you don’t answer my question, Pontopereia. Why do you keep climbing the tower and looking inland like that? You’re not up to some game with any of these farm-boys round here, are you? I’ve always told you I wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing; so you’d better not begin it.
“I don’t mean that you’re not to climb the tower, child; so you needn’t put on that sulky look. I know you like looking out over the bay and counting the sails and watching for foreign ships. I like doing that myself. Yes I’m always ready to play our old game of pretending we’re waiting for the King of the Blameless Ethiopians; and that when his ship shows itself it will have a black sail, so that we shall know it.
“No, no! You’re not to slip off like that without a word! You’re much too fond of doing that; and I’ve noticed it’s grown on you as a regular habit these Spring days. Of course I know all young girls get Spring-Fever. I used to get it myself. In fact, old as I am, I do still. The wily old Earth-Mother herself must have had it, or something uncommonly like it, when she left her daughter alone with those daffodil-pickers, a proper temptation for the King of Hades. Daffodil-pickers! She had to swallow a few Pomegranate-seeds before she learnt how close lie the borders of Heaven and Hell!
“But you weren’t looking seaward, or counting ships, or pretending to be waiting for a black sail. You were staring at those fir-trees and at all those half-bare oaks and at that open clearing on the top of the ridge, where on fine days we can see the Rock of the Nymph of Dryops.