Okyrhöe watched him, thinking: “I must make them stay and I must give him something to lie on in the Mirror-Room.” Pontoporeia watched him, thinking: “Yes, I agree with this absurd ‘prokleesis’ up to a point; but he doesn’t make it personal enough, for it ought to be some way, some mood, some turn of the mind, some twist of the reason, that would help you when you wanted to make friends with a person.”
And finally, while the club of Herakles, still leaning against the elbow of that narrow seat cut out of the pre-historic wall, watched him, thinking: “how annoying if he starts a vibration that brings me crashing down!” Zeuks felt as if an irresistible unseen power compelled him to fling back his head and to gaze out into the darkness through a half-open door; and though the lights about him made the darkness outside absolute, the same power that compelled him to lift his head forced him to treat that darkness as if it were the whole vast immeasurable bulk of the massed material of the thick-ribbed earth, ridge upon ridge, hill upon hill, mountain upon mountain, towering up in its enormity to a toppling height, high above the encircling ocean that encompasses all, forced him to treat it as if it were this, and at the same time forced him to plunge into it and with his soul gathered together to break through it, to cleave it, to wrench his way through it, until he reached a certain particular spot on the earth’s surface.
What particular spot? Ah! That’s the point! “That’s what has been”—and it was Zeuks himself who flung this jaggedly-splintered shaft of rending interjection into the thick bulk of that darkness—“What has been led up to in all this”—for the spot he was being forced to visit was nothing less than a stone shed near-by with a massively-closed iron-barred door in which Pegasos had been imprisoned ever since Odysseus released him.
In this shed, tied by the neck, Pegasos was at that moment groaning piteously and twisting his head from side to side; for the rope that tied him crossed and re-crossed and chafed abominably that raw part of his shoulder from which the wing had been torn and from which even yet dark drops of blood, mingled with ichor, were trickling down.
Slowly therefore now, in spite of all the eyes that were upon him, Zeuks rose, and deliberately crossing the hall to the open door through which that unknown force had just drawn his soul into the palpable darkness, he resolutely, but still slowly and very quietly, left the company and went out. Once outside and alone in the air it was not nearly so dark, and it didn’t take him long to discover the stone shed where in the haste of their arrival Pegasos had been tied up. It was still necessary, however, to get some kind of torch or lantern; and with this in view he made his way, led by the smell of the fragrant smoke to where Nemertes was already drying, after having cleaned and washed with the exquisite care and nicety exacted by Zenios of all who touched his possessions, the vast array of plates and dishes used at tonight’s supper.
She certainly was a shrewd and intelligent woman, this mother of Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos; and now when Zeuks entered her domain to get a light so as to deal with Pegasos, and found her directing her three sons in the complicated task of piling up and putting away all this precious crockery, he was conscious of being delivered, merely by drawing her attention to his situation, from a whole load of tiresome responsibility.
She told him at once to fetch Pegasos out of that cold and dark shed and to bring him into the kitchen; and when he obeyed her and they had tied this mutilated and one-winged creature, who had once flown above the turrets of Arabia and the domes of China and the pyramids of Egypt and had distended its quivering nostrils in its flight to catch the enchanted odours that are wafted down on certain human midnights from the ghostly valleys of the moon, to one of the shadowy meat-hooks that broke the flickering fire-lit surface of those friendly walls, it was easy to see from the immortal animal’s grateful eyes as they were turned first to one and then to another till they finally rested on the woman herself, that the prospect of a night behind the cyclopean pre-historic walls of Ornax after his windy lodging on the outskirts of Cuckoo-Hill was now wholly congenial to him.
Nemertes hesitated not to take entire possession of Zeuks at once and to tell him exactly what he had better do if he wished his one night in Ornax to be really a pleasant one.
“You will have to sleep in the porch of the Chamber of the Mirror so as to be a guard for the sleep of the Mistress. This will be the sleeping arrangement with which nothing must interfere; but if you, my Lord Zeuks, and you, my Lord Pegasos, agree to accept this arrangement, it is in my power to give you”—and she turned to Zeuks—“and you”—and she stroked the great free beautiful useless unhurt wing of her animal-visitor which now trailed across a third of the floor, “the peacefullest sleep you’ve ever had in your lives.”
“Give us this?” enquired Zeuks in his most cheerful and humorous intonation.
“How will you give us this?” asked Pegasos with his appealing eyes.
And the woman answered by immediate action. She went to a great brazen receptacle in a corner of the kitchen and scooped up two handfuls of oats which she forthwith presented to the winged horse, who reverently swallowed them. Then she lifted the lid of a substantial chest made of sycamore wood from the main-land and brought out a small loaf. This she deliberately broke into four pieces, one big piece and three small pieces; and handing one of the small pieces to each of her sons who straightway began munching and masticating it with intense satisfaction, she gave the large piece to Zeuks who promptly kissed it and crammed it into his mouth, but allowed half of it to remain in one cheek, and half of it in the other, un-chewed and un-swallowed.
It was at this point that Zeuks noticed a hurried whispered conversation going on between Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos; and before he had made up his mind whether to ignore what he perceived or to boldly ask them what was the matter, Omphos, the eldest of the three, crossed the kitchen with obvious nervousness, while Pegasos, answering this respectful courtesy with equal consideration, did his best to move his unhurt wing out of the young man’s way.
When Omphos reached Zeuks he stood in front of him like an earnest-minded school-boy summoned for an oral examination; and Nemertes couldn’t help noting how quaint it was to see the two cheeks of this examiner of young men bulging so auspiciously for his own future enjoyment but rendering him practically inarticulate before an academic questioner.
But the question asked by Omphos was a simple one. “Could you tell us, my Lord Zeuks, exactly what you thought of when you say we must still practise ‘prokleesis’ though we were soon going to be cut to pieces by those pirates?”
What Zeuks desired to do at this point was first to use his tongue to push both halves of that delicious little loaf into one bulging cheek, and then with that same tongue to discourse so eloquently on the practice of “prokleesis” when you were watching people tortured or when you were being tortured yourself, that not only Omphos but his sympathetic brothers and possibly even their wise mother would decide to try how it worked in the ordinary vexations of every day.
But all he could blurt out at the moment was: “Of course nobody can bear more than a certain amount of pain; and if you’re watching its infliction on others there comes a point when you break out or go raving mad; but nothing helps anyone to endure what can be endured more than forcing yourself to feel in the way ‘prokleesis’ makes you feeclass="underline" for when you feel like this it isn’t the cruel enemy or executioner or torturer or murderer you are defying; it is Life itself!