The heraldic master of ceremony from the land of Phaiakia would certainly have described our friend Zeuks as an egregious and unconscionable rogue; but it is certain that as this same Zeuks slowly and carefully — though chuckling very often as he did so over private quips of his own — escorted the old, bent, white-headed Ajax, by the nearest way he could think of, to the rock-hewn House of Odysseus, he had some startling shocks.
The nearest way that was familiar to Zeuks was the unfrequented path through that haunted region that from Time unknown had been, and to Time unknown would always be, called Arima, and which really seemed, now it was deserted by Eurybia and Echidna, almost more ghostly in its loneliness than when those two phantasmagoric Beings disputed in their dreadful dialogue who first, who last, had broken loose from Erebos.
“You are taking me a little, just a little, too fast!” murmured the aged Ajax as they passed the spot where Echidna used to be.
Zeuks stopped at once to give the old man a chance to get his breath and to look round. He himself also looked round; and in doing so he noticed a blaze of golden light not far in front of them. It was a peculiar blaze. It was like nothing that Zeuks had ever seen before. He stared at it in positive amazement. Then suddenly, though entirely without any rational cause, he associated this fiery marvel with the presence of the aged warrior at his side.
Nor was he mistaken. Ajax, though much taller and broader-shouldered than any of the other Greeks in the Trojan war, was now terribly bent. There was indeed something impressively pitiful, even you might say, grotesquely pitiful, about the way his white head — for his hair instead of having become grey like the hair of Odysseus, had become as white as hoar-frost — or rather about the way his bent spine, curved like a great bow, had come to bring down his white head towards his feet, which were now encased, as he stood looking up under his deeply wrinkled and majestically moulded forehead, in massive almost coal-black sandals.
Ajax took longer than his guide in discovering that mysterious blaze of golden flame isolated in this haunted place.
“What in the name of Hermes is that light over there?” gurgled the old man, in a voice the significance of which Zeuks had been trying for the last couple of hours, in fact ever since he had first helped him from the ship to the shore, to catch and understand. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand the meaning of the old hero’s words. The difficulty was not there. He couldn’t understand the mental and psychological frame of mind, the temper of mood, the drift of feeling, that was giving the very simplest of the groans, cries, sighs, ejaculations, murmurs, whispers, repetitions, interruptions, protestations, that issued from that long, narrow, pointed, friable, brittle-looking jaw whose dominant peculiarity was its extreme sensitiveness to emotion, whether that emotion was one of attraction or repulsion, of satisfied complacency or furious irritation.
The longer Zeuks pondered upon the psychic implications of the old warrior’s tone the more he became convinced that the picturesque apophthegm, purporting to give a characteristic idea of the man, that had already, long ere his death, spread throughout all Hellas, was substantially correct. You had only, Zeuks told himself, to observe for half an hour, as you followed the man, the twitchings, quiverings, tightenings, relaxings, compressions, releases, explosions, of his mouth, his lips, his jaws, to realize that the muscles which set these objects working were themselves set in motion by the drift of his whole spirit.
It became clear in fact that when Ajax in a fit of blind rage “defied the lightning” he was not in any mood of metaphysical rebellion, not, for instance, obeying Zeuks’ own precept of philosophic prokleesis, but was quite simply giving way to a natural fit of violent human fury. But whether his mood at this moment was normal or abnormal the febrile nerves of his malleable mouth were now twitching like something subjected to an extreme emotional stress.
“It’s an extraordinary light!” he cried. “I must go and see what it is! It’s like that dream I’ve always had since my childhood! And do you know what started that dream?”
At this Zeuks felt more interested than he had expected to feel in the outbursts of this white-haired hero.
“I would greatly like to know,” he answered.
The tall, thin, bent figure swung round, using its left heel in its black sandal as a pivot.
“My father whose name was—” The old warrior suffered from some impediment in his throat, an impediment which his attendants usually mistook for phlegm, but which was in reality the fragment of a golden arrow-head which the exceptional adaptability of the man’s flesh and blood had appropriated to themselves and rendered innocuous, and it was now as he struggled with his father’s name that a sound like a suppressed lion’s roar burst from him.
“Telamon”, interjected Zeuks patiently. “Telamon”, the man repeated, — “who was king of Salamis, used to tell me of a rock on that Island near the village of Cychreus through which there was a bottomless hole.
“To this hole every infant born in Salamis was brought; and into this hole, whether it was a boy or girl, it looked, and sometimes saw nothing but impenetrable darkness, and sometimes saw a dazzling light; and its parents knew by its cries of joy when it saw the light and by its cries of sorrow when it saw the darkness. And once when I told my father — Telamon that is, and it’s a good sign you’ve heard of him — when I told my father that I always dreamed of meeting a laughing man at the bottom of that hole he said it would be a son of the great god Pan I should meet and that when I met him I should die.
“He said — Telamon I mean, and it’s a good sign you’ve heard of him — that the light in that hole came from a dancing-lawn of the Nymphs on the other side of the earth and that among the Nymphs the most beautiful of all was Maia who was the mother of Hermes, who himself was the father of the great god Pan. And now when it’s such a good sign for me that you said ‘Telamon’, and when there is that light over there, I must go and see it.”
Zeuks never forgot how Ajax looked, as once more, with that weird gurgling sound in his throat that resembled the suppressed roar of a half-dead lion, he cried that he must go to that light. What made the man look so specially grotesque — and yet he was the noblest-looking human being Zeuks had ever seen — was the manner in which, while his tall thin majestic figure was bent almost double, his snow-white hair and ivory-white forehead not so far away from his jet-black sandals, his head was twisted sideways in order that he might fix upon Zeuks the intense stare of his yellowish-green eyes, a stare that had about it just then a golden effect, as if that fragment of solid gold that had incorporated itself among the native elements of his throat had the power of emitting gold-dust rays, even as the terrible Typhon breathed forth fire and smoke!
Zeuks, who had no more idea than Ajax himself what it really was that burned so grandly in the sun’s afternoon rays, moved with him now in the direction of the tree-carved Hector standing there in heroic isolation. But little did he guess for all his cleverness what was on the point of happening.
They had moved together about fifty paces from the point where they had, so to speak, stopped to get their breath, and had joined issue on the matter of the prophetic words of Telamon of Salamis.
Suddenly Ajax began swaying backwards and forwards as if he had been sprinkled with a handful of the holy dust from that Cychrean hole, and each time he swayed, first to the East and then to the West, just as if he were indulging in some ancestral and primordial ritual, he managed to accentuate into a grotesque distortion of his whole gaunt frame the way his white skull bent sideways to stare at Zeuks while it came bowing down from the mystery of the East to the mystery of the West.