But as he paced nervously up and down, avoiding the now motionless feathers of Pegasos’ prostrate wing, he couldn’t help glancing now and again at the almost pathetic contrast between the illuminated beauty of Pontopereia’s face and the clumsy heaviness of her limbs and indeed of her whole body from the waist down.
“What is prompting me,” he thought, “to be so absurdly critical as to demand that a girl should be this or that before I can let myself fall in love with her, or think of her in my mind as my particular choice? Well! that’s how I am,” he concluded, “and there’s no use making a fuss about it! I only pray that that accurst Goat-foot has encountered Enorches and made such a Dionysian raid upon that scoundrel’s oldest wine that by this time he can’t distinguish a young virgin from an old midwife.”
Meanwhile Pontopereia was announcing in a tone whose prophetic intensity was no less assured, though it was calmer than when she first entered the kitchen, that if they wished their ride to be a success they must not wait till morning; no! not even if by morning they meant an hour before “Wolf-Light”. On the contrary they must start at once; and if they felt sleepy they must console themselves by thinking how sweet it would be to lay their heads on their own pillows when they got home!
As far as Nisos could judge from the acquiescent pose of Zeuks’ neat and pliant figure, for the face of the advocate of “Prokleesis” was turned towards Pontopereia, the man seemed prepared to do whatever she proposed; and it was a surprise to the boy when in the silence that followed her declaration Zeuks swung round and exchanged a rapid series of signals and significant signs with Pegasos, an exchange in which the horse’s trailing wing played less of a part than its quivering ears, and the man’s expressive hands less of a part than his thrust-out and sucked-in thick lips.
“Do you really think they’ll get Odysseus to agree to such a thing at such an hour?” Nemertes remarked to Nisos when Zeuks followed Pontopereia out of the kitchen. “But though I’m only an old woman in an old kitchen and no prophetess I would advise you, sonny, to slip off, now you have the chance, and see our Master, yes! see Zenios himself, whom you’re sure to find in his treasure-room at the bottom of that flight of stairs — you saw those stairs, didn’t you, laddie, as you went into the dining-hall? — for what I fancy your old king has forgotten, and what I’m certain this queer fellow Zeuks has forgotten, is that great sack of treasure you unloaded up there in the porch. It was treasure, wasn’t it? I saw, by the way you lifted it, how heavy it was; and I also saw, for we old women notice things like that, that when Zenios came back with Moros the first thing he did was to get the old man to help him trundle that sack of yours down those stairs. He has a queer sort of mind, has our master Zenios; and though I don’t suggest for a second that he intends to rob anyone of whatever that sack contains, I know him by this time well enough to know that if six hours or even four hours are allowed by destiny to pass over a neighbourhood where our Master and any precious treasure are to be found, at the end of those hours, and generally long before they end, the master of whom we are speaking and the treasure of which we are speaking will have been brought into physical contact as if by the use of a magnet.”
Nisos looked at the old lady in admiration. “By the gods,” he cried, “I’d completely forgotten that curst sack! Why! You’re a soothsayer too, though you do work in this old kitchen! I certainly will do just what you say, and see what’s happened to that great golden mixing-bowl! I can tell your master, anyway, something about it — though whether the old king got it from his queen’s father or whether Alkinoos gave it him in the land of the Phaeakeans I forget at this moment; but if I see it and touch it I daresay I’ll remember what Eurycleia told me about it! Old as she is, her memory never fails her! Yes, I’ll go straight down those steps and talk to Zenios!
“O I do thank you, lady, for putting it into my head! What I expect has been in our old king’s mind all along is some sort of an idea, though it seems horrid to say so,”—at this point Nisos lowered his voice; not so much in order that his hearer’s three sons shouldn’t hear, as from an instinctive courtesy — proof, thought Nemertes, as she listened to him, of how well he’d been brought up—“some sort of an idea,” he threw out in a hurried whisper as he rushed off—“of paying some sort of ransom or tribute for Pontopereia!”
As Nisos hastened to the northern edge of the pre-historic semicircle of stone ruins that these unscrupulous explorers from Kadmean Thebes had modernized and made habitable, he said to himself: “Tribute? Ransom? I wonder I didn’t say ‘Offering’. What of course it will really be, if the old king leaves that treasure behind without a word, will be buying the girl from him as we buy slaves in the market.”
It was when he was feeling his way down those steps, and though it was quite dark he could see a light between door and doorpost at the foot of the stairs, that he stopped short, with one foot on the third and the other on the fourth step, and the extended fingers of his left hand spread out against the wall, for he had a sudden inspiration. “I’ll suggest to Odysseus,” he thought, “that I ought to visit Tis’s home along with old Moros, now I’m so near, and that it might be a good thing if I went into the Naiads’ Cave on my way back to see if the ship-keel is still as it was.”
Meanwhile if Nemertes could have observed what was going on in her master’s chamber at the bottom of that staircase she would have felt, well! not, as people say, “completely justified”, for Nemertes had seen too much of the treacheries of life ever to feel precisely that, but she would have felt that she had not been far wrong in her knowledge of the ways of her master, as a collector of pre-historic treasures.
Long before Nisos had begun to make his way down those steps Zenios had been sitting on a low, rough, oblong couch of fir-planks covered with several layers of sheep-skins, a couch which in his lonely moods he preferred to any other. He was holding in his hands the heaviest and most precious of that sack’s marvels. This was an unusually large Mixing-Bowl; the sort of Mixing-Bowl that among the more civilized Achaean tribes was generally known as a “Depas”.
This particular “Depas” was an enormous one. It had a flat stand at its base and a circular handle on each side of its circumference and it was made of solid gold. It was in fact made of gold so heavy, so massive, and so purged of every kind of alloy, that as Zenios caressed it it gave him the feeling that it was something so totally different from all other things in the world and so absolutely divided from all other things in the world that when he gave himself up wholly and entirely to the pure sensation of this feel of it, he himself became isolated from everything else on earth. The handling of real gold, massive gold, pure gold, solid gold, had become the one positive lust, the one supreme indulgence, the one ecstatic cult, the one ultimate paradise of Zenios’ existence; and when he did so, as he was doing now, he grew so identified with the precious thing he held, that with no effort other than passive surrender to bliss he became what, save for a few blameless Ethiopeans both in the extreme East and in the extreme West, a man seldom becomes, namely a motionless orb of convulsed sunlight, or even starlight, for whom the mere alternation of inbreathing and outbreathing is not only a sufficient satisfaction for one life, but a sufficient satisfaction to justify an infinite series of lives.
But meanwhile, very cautiously, and inch by inch, Nisos was descending the stairs towards this absorbed gold-worshipper. Now the approach of the aboriginal wild creatures in the forests of the earth towards one another has been from the beginning the cause of innumerable invisible vibrations across various expanses of earth and air and such primeval vibrations, whether of attraction or repulsion, or of pure warning, have never completely vanished from the human scene all the way down the ages.