“And what may that be?” responded the moth in a voice so faint with sarcasm that it was hardly audible.
“Tell yourself a story about it happening,” said the fly, “and die before you get to the last chapter.”
“I sometimes think,” whispered the moth, “that that’s what I’ve done.”
When Nisos and his oddly-attired companion reached Odysseus, Pontopereia took care to move aside and to be as inconspicuous a figure in that crowded landscape as was possible for a girl with her strikingly beautiful and intellectual face. Hardly conscious of what she was doing, however, when Nisos did begin to speak she kept on moving nearer and nearer to the old king; but since her reputed mother or at any rate her official guardian, Okyrhöe, also moved nearer, her interest must have seemed to Nisos entirely natural.
One thing about this new encounter of these two young people certainly showed the daughter of Teiresias in a dignified and admirable light, namely the fact that in her excited interest in what Nisos was telling the old King she forgot completely the shame and humiliation she had herself suffered so short a time before. In fact she forgot, as apparently Odysseus himself had forgotten, what a central dramatic part in turning the tide of popular feeling she had been brought there to play. And now it was all over and done with, as utterly as was the life of the old Dryad and her tree, both of them reduced to dust and ashes.
“It was when I had only just left the Cave of the Naiads that I first saw it.” And here Nisos made a rather formal and yet quite a dramatic pause; and Pontopereia couldn’t help noticing that the presence of the ornately-dressed, portentous-looking stranger who so punctiliously kept one of his brocaded knees on the ground while he watched the face of Odysseus with obsequious impassivity, did have the effect of stiffening just a little the unconventional naturalness of speech which the direct frankness of their master usually evoked in those who were closest to him.
And the girl also noticed that the spontaneous island-schoolboy attitude to all the fantastic ceremonials and the symbolic rituals of Persians, Libyans, Phoenicians, Babylonians and Assyrians, which she had marked in most Achaian and Hellenic lads, an attitude partly humorous, and partly fascinated and even a little awed, had resulted in this case in the way in which, though he did not kneel, Nisos stood respectfully before the king with his head bare and his hands clasped behind his back.
“I knew at once,” the boy went on, “that it was a foreign boat. I knew that by its build and by its curious-looking sail. I knew also that it couldn’t have come from very far away, for it was too small to have crossed such a formidable mass of water as that great Western Ocean in which we are told the gods have drowned the land of Atlantis. Well, O King, I climbed down to the sea’s edge so as to direct them, by waving and shouting, to the estuary where they could lower their sail, fasten up their vessel, and land on our shore. It took a long time to do this for them. I had to scramble over a lot of steep rocks, didn’t I, Euanthos?” And Pontopereia noticed that, instead of turning and giving a responsive smile to the speaker, this palatial individual, with one knee still on the gravelly ground and his submissively reverential gaze still fixed on the king, who by this time was crouching like a somnolent steersman on a rough lichen-covered ledge with the club between his knees, replied to the lad’s appeal by making a solemn little bow, a bow which, in the relative position to which chance had brought them, might have been directed to the four staring eyes of the pair of fascinated insects.
“But when they were safely landed — when you were landed, Euanthos!” and Pontopereia, not to mention Okyrhöe, who kept edging nearer and nearer, noted a repetition of the same quaint performance—“I soon heard the great news. Thou, O King,”—and it was clear to both those observant ladies that this boy-messenger completely misread the relaxed attitude of the old hero he was addressing, taking his drowsy abstraction as a sign of nonchalant indifference, when all the while it was really an instinctive animal withdrawal into cover, under the mask of which the wily old warrior watched the course of events, noting with shrewd precision the particular direction in which, under the pressure of numberless conflicting entities, the tide of destiny was moving.
“Thou, O King, art about to be visited by a famous royal Princess from the land of the Phaiakians whose parents and brothers enabled you to sail for home in a ship full of rich gifts.”
“And what, my young friend,” enquired Odysseus, throwing into his tone, the two ladies decided, a deliberate weariness and tedium, “do those of her court who are with her say is the name by which she is known to her own people and by which she wishes to be known to those other lands whither her ship carries her; for among all men who live by bread there are none to whom their parents do not give names, whether they be rich or poor, slaves or free, tillers of the earth, or wielders of royal sceptres.”
“The name,” cried Nisos, in a high-pitched excited voice, “of this visitor to the shores of Ithaca is none other than Nausikaa, the daughter of Arete who was the daughter of Rhexenor, and of Alkinoos who was the son of Nausithoos.”
Neither Okyrhöe nor Pontopereia missed the rather startling swallowing sound, as if he had been munching a too big mouthful of bread and having retained it till it was in an almost liquid form in his mouth had sucked it down in one terrific gulp, which the old man emitted as the word “Nausikaa” reached his ears.
But Nisos had a still greater shock in store for his king. “From a couch of purple at the bottom of their boat,” he went on, “they helped to land the most noble figure of a man I have ever seen or could ever imagine. His hair was white with age and his shoulders were extremely bent, but the grandeur of his features and the beauty of his form, even in old age, were more like those of a god than of a human creature. I looked at him with awe and reverence, O king, and still more was I reduced to wordless amazement when the stately and distinguished Euanthos here”—and once again the two ladies were fascinated to watch this perfect courtier on his bended knee make that same masquerade-like inclination of his head without turning so much as the point of his beak-like nose in the direction of the person whose flattery he was acknowledging—“and I was impressed, O my King, to notice how superior to any of our modern Hellenic or Argive or Pelasgic or Danaan ways were the—”
“By Kronos, boy, you don’t mean to say the man at the bottom of the boat was Ajax?”
At the utterance of this name both the ladies gasped audibly, and the elder one, with a shiver that ran clean through her, flung her arms protectively about the younger.
This time it was the turn of Nisos to nod assent while his gaze remained fixed on a different person from the one to whom he was responding. And at the receipt of this assent Odysseus rose from his seat abruptly.
“Ajax again!” he muttered. “It must have been a dream then that I saw him among the dead when the spirit of Achilles questioned me and went off with long strides among the rest in his joy that I could assure him his son had won glory! Ajax again! Well, well, well, well! He had Poseidon as his enemy among the Olympians, even as I have! And it may be that as I found help from Circe and Calypso and Leucothea, so he has found it from some great goddess at the bottom of the Sea! Poseidon must have overturned his ship in no ordinary way; not by just a wave out of the deep: very likely by flinging a mountain upon it, as the grandfather of Nausikaa prophesied the sea-god might do one day over their only good harbourage to stop their giving convoy and ships to the enemies of the Olympians.
“And very likely by doing that very thing Poseidon ruined his own abominable and murderous intention. The great wave, or the great mountain, whichever it was may have had the opposite effect to what was intended. It may have enshrouded Ajax in forests and ferns and mosses and vast leafy chasms and yawning flowery abysses and huge cracks and crevices in the green thick rondure of the earth.