It must have been some such vibration, and of pure warning too, that caused young Nisos, before he had reached the fourth step in his stealthy descent towards that chink of light between door and door-post, to change his mind completely, and, avoiding with exquisite care the least shiver of disturbing sound, to ascend those steps twice as quickly as he had descended them, and, once clear of that quarter of the restored ruins of Ornax, to set off as fast as possible to find Odysseus.
Even Zeuks would not have been able to interpret for the benefit of any other person seated on that broad back all the thoughts of Pegasos as the two of them waited patiently for their start from Ornax on their homeward journey. The whole thing is conjectural of course, but it does seem unlikely that an immortal creature however wounded could feel quite as agitated‚ as did Okyrhöe for example, when she discovered that she was really going to perch herself on the still bleeding back of a one-winged unflying flier, “with this low peasant”, as she told herself “who out of vulgar blasphemy calls himself Zeuks’’, in front of her, “and this silly old King-Hero who won’t be able to see more of me than my back”, behind her.
The whole thing was a surprise and a shock to this beautiful designer of elaborate schemes; for the last thing she expected was to have to make her plunge into the innermost circle of Odysseus’ life without the least preparation, indeed with what might almost be called a “hippodromic” leap. However! If she had to do it she had to do it, and with a courage and recklessness that would have drawn from her cautious slow-moving husband a very straight look, she rushed to one of the innermost chests in the furthest corner of her Mirror-Room and dragged forth from it a garment that Zenios had never known she had bought, for she had managed the transaction in secret with a Phoenician Merchant during a mighty purchase of golden cups.
No sooner now had she dragged out this garment and wrapped her lovely body in it than in a flash all her annoyance disappeared! It was exactly suited to the occasion. Nothing on earth could have answered this unexpected situation better. Even though the immortal creature she rode on was wet with ichor and blood, and even though “with this on” the old hero could not even see how shapely her back was, the effect of her face looking forth from that feathery cloud of heavenly whiteness was beyond what even she herself had ever dreamed of!
She walked up and down in front of Kadmos’ Mirror-Shield. She arranged herself, with this wonderful thing about her, first on a couch, then on a chair, then on the couch again, and once more on a chair. Okyrhöe had never in her whole life felt so inspired by her own beauty. And the remarkable thing about it was that her head, her critical, fastidious, detached, acquisitive, unscrupulous head, remained absolutely clear and cold.
Dramatizing herself and gesturing and posing in front of that shield of Kadmos there was absolutely nothing in the consciousness of Okyrhöe that had the faintest resemblance to the self-adoration, the self-intoxication, the self-worship of the unfortunate Narcissus. Okyrhöe’s mind was as cold and hard and ruthless as one of those short sharp Latin swords that the Nymph Egeria in her Italian cave would know more about than any Achaean woman.
Okyrhöe used her beauty purely, solely, and simply as a weapon. She fought with her beauty as if it were a sword. She sacked cities with her beauty. She dried up deep seas with her beauty. She blighted harvests, she devastated vineyards, she up-rooted forests with it. She was prepared to blacken shining stars and to put out burning suns with her beauty. Beauty for her was something wherewith to carve out empires or to drown continents.
The cloak she had extracted from the Phoenician’s most sacred and secret caravan was made of the white skin of a huge pre-historic animal called a Podandrikon whose peculiarity was that round its waist it had shining scales and round its neck it had thick white feathers. Wrapped in the Podandrikon’s skin the completely reassured Okyrhöe told herself with one last glance at the Shield of Kadmos that if this fond and foolish old king thought he would ever sail from Ithaca again he was mad.
With the face the gods had given her and in the cloak she had discovered for herself she would rule all Argos and all Boeotia and all Hellas from this old fool’s rock-cave island palace! Thus thought Okyrhöe.
But the oldest of the Fates, as it used to be said at any special pinch concerning the goddess Athene, who now was so wrought up — and who can blame her — by the blind folly of her own people in the face of all this cosmic confusion that she had taken refuge with the blameless Ethiopians, “took other counsel”. Yes, Atropos, the weakest, the oldest, but the wisest of the Moirai, or Fates, came, invisibly rushing, as she always did, to the crisis-spot and prompted Odysseus to make one of his own decisions independently of everyone. And such a decision he made; and it was so wholly material and practical, and so absolutely free from any general theory about the matter at issue, from any logical sequence of reasoning about the problem at stake, from any principle of action, from any “mystique” of action, from any philosophic metaphysic of action, that it could hardly be described as a decision at all.
Of course in his past there had been occasions, there had to be occasions, when he was forced to act according to some practical plan of action, when in fact to act at all implied a plan of action; but this was different, and the truth was that Odysseus behaved now like a skilful carpenter who has already taken the measure of the adjustments, of the shaping, the trimming, the nailing, the thickening, the thinning, the rounding off, the hammering, the polishing, which in this particular case he would be forced to employ.
Those who knew him intimately however — and of these there were perhaps now living only two persons, namely his nurse Eurycleia, whose extreme old age interfered with the expression of what she knew, and the goddess Athene, who had her own ethnological undertakings independent of any individual man or woman — would have been in a position to explain to us that there had been in this extraordinary man’s life certain far-off but quite definite, concrete and material projects to the realization of which the whole complicated organism of his formidable identity was basically aimed.
Of these vast projects, like huge islands on immeasurable horizons, Eurycleia would probably have pointed to the taking of Troy, while Pallas Athene might conceivably have named the immense but misty and cloudy notion, like an old and battered world-sailor’s fantasy, that at present loomed in the darkly-brooding background of his consciousness, the notion of sailing Westward, far past the Pillars of Herakles and the place where Atlas holds up the Sky, past even the shores of Ultima Thule where exiled Kronos awaits the day of his awakening, the notion in fact of steering his ship over the very waves of the very sea under which lie the drowned towers and temples and domes and palaces and streets of the sunken continent of Atlantis.
But what Odysseus decided upon now as his most prudent line of action was to accept Okyrhöe’s astonishing offer to share with Zeuks and himself the wounded back of Pegasos on condition that her tender maternal arms should firmly encircle the awkwardly-moulded form of the prophetic orphan Pontopereia.
He was in fact wily enough to decide then and there to use to the limit the obviously possessive power of this beautiful woman so as to make sure that no sudden, wild, girlish impulse such as might very well spring up in a daughter of Teiresias should deprive him of her as an aid to the baffling of his enemies and the furtherance of his sailing.