The uproar that had reached the kitchen came from two opposing groups of angry armed men, one of whom was shouting abuse of the House of Odysseus and the other abuse of the House of Naubolides. Matters might have got worse at any minute and serious blood-shed might doubtless have ensued, if an event had not occurred so unexpected by both parties that they turned, as if by mutual consent, from their furious confrontation of each other; and both sides gazed with awe-struck amazement at what they saw.
And what they saw was indeed a sufficient wonder to quell the wildest altercation. Walking quite gently, slowly, carefully and quietly, his wounded wing evidently grown again, and its roots completely healed, while the long feathery tips of both wings were folded against the animal’s sides like those of a colossal moth, there came up through the crowd, from the corridor of the pillars, the winged horse Pegasos. On his back, seated there with the utmost ease, and evidently in a mood of radiant high spirits, was the young girl Eione, Tis’s little sister, who the moment she caught sight of her brother by the side of Nisos kissed one of her hands to them both while with the other she waved in the air an extraordinary-looking object which she was clasping in triumph.
Pegasos bore her straight up to the old king, the two contending groups of people automatically separating to let them pass. When they reached the throne, across the back of which Odysseus, with great practical shrewdness, was already leaning forward above its empty seat, his body wedged between the chair’s back, across which he leaned, and the massive table which protected his rear, Pegasos stopped, and lowering his head, consented to enjoy the natural equine satisfaction of munching a couple of large lettuce-leaves which the old King lost no time in snatching from the table behind him and placing on the seat of the throne for the god-like creature’s special delectation.
At that moment all the uproar ceased and so eager and anxious were both parties to catch every word of the dialogue between Eione and the king that in the silence which fell upon the whole company the sound of Pegasos munching the lettuce-leaves was audible from the door of the steps to the corridor to the door of the passage to the kitchen.
But everybody in the place was soon conscious of an absolutely different sound, a sound that closely accompanied the winged horse’s munching of lettuce-leaves. This came from the mysterious object which Eione was now showing to Odysseus across the horse’s bowed head. It was a sound like the sound of the wind. And the sound in this object was not limited to the sound of the North Wind or of the South Wind or of the East Wind or the West Wind. It was just the wind. It was all the winds together. And it was so powerful that it made many people at the back of the hall, who were unable to see that the sound was caused by what the girl was showing to the king, look up at the windows beneath the roof at one of which Pontopereia had been recently sitting and through which they supposed this wild rush of wind must be entering the hall.
The real power of it could only have been appreciated at that moment however by some observer who could read human thoughts; for this roaring, sighing, crying, wailing, laughing, lamenting, groaning, shrieking sound was so startlingly an embodiment of the real wind that it produced upon those who were nearest to the object out of which it came the identical effect that the hearing of such a wind, had it been real, would naturally have evoked. It made Odysseus feel more strongly than he had ever felt before his absolute determination to sail over the waters into which Atlantis had gone down. It carried Nausikaa back to her girlhood upon an irresistible rush of the wings of memory.
She had a hundred times recalled that day when she and her playmates were disporting themselves at their game of ball, in relaxation from washing their clothes, when the godlike stranger suddenly appeared among them and clasped her knees in a passionate appeal for help. O how well she remembered how he had followed up the impression he made upon her by uttering the hope that when she met her true mate, he and she together would soon find out how such a true union between lovers could be lucky to their friends and unlucky to their foes; and how they themselves would alone know what it really meant.
It brought to Pontopereia the feeling that she was gloriously giving herself up to a thrilling and convincing rush of prophetic inspiration. It raced through the mind of Nisos with the impossible romantic wish that somehow, somewhere, he would be triumphantly justified in possessing both Eione and Pontopereia as his Loves!
To Okyrhöe this sound of the wind, issuing forth from Eione’s gift to Odysseus, brought a sense of deep, abysmal, desolate loneliness. She found herself identifying her own inmost being with this mysterious wind that had suddenly appeared, only the river Styx knew from whence, and which was associated with this ghostly “Arima” that sooner or later she would have to face if she remained with Odysseus.
While the wind of day and the wind of night were thus working upon various living creatures in various different ways, Eione was explaining in meticulous detail precisely how this extraordinary instrument worked; how it could be stopped, how intensified, how diminished, how directed, how reduced, and how expanded at the will of the wearer. Thus there was no special start or spasm of astonishment in that dining-hall when finally, just before Pegasos had lifted his head from the last lettuce-stalk left on the seat of the throne, Odysseus took the thing from the girl’s hands and raising it carefully in both his own fixed it on his head.
Once on his head, though it had a certain vague resemblance to a brazen helmet from which hung long twisting snakes, it looked much more like a complicated, convoluted sea-shell, a sea-shell that might have been worn by the sea-god Triton, or even by some greater deity of the salt deep. After a few more less solemn directions from Eione as to its use, the old king removed it from his head and half-turning round placed it beside his wine-cup on the table. He then, in the face of the whole company, gratefully, respectfully, and devotedly kissed both Eione’s hands, caressed the head of Pegasos, and instructed Tis, who was staring awestruck at his sister, to take the bridle of the winged horse and lead him, if his girl-rider saw fit, to a more restful feast in the royal stable adjoining the cow-stall of Babba.
When Tis had led away his sister and Pegasos the old king summoned Nisos, who had engaged Pontopereia in a whispered conversation behind the backs of Nausikaa and Okyrhöe, and told him to fetch Zeuks. This command he had no difficulty in obeying, for the son of Arcadian Pan had fallen into such a deep sleep in that queer-backed and queer-legged chair that it was easier to get him awake and to escort him, a bit dazed but no longer muttering in his sleep about “Ajax and the Lightning”, to where the king and his two ladies were once more seated at the table with their heads close together, than it would have been to explain to him all that had happened since he had fallen asleep.
But if it had been difficult to arouse the great-grandson of “still youthful Maia” from his trance in a chair that had both roots and horns, Odysseus did not seem to have the least difficulty in seating him on the throne now calmly and resolutely vacated.
“Fetch me, child,” he said to Nisos, laying a caressing hand on the boy’s head and drawing up for himself, to the acute vexation of Okyrhöe, an empty chair to the side of Nausikaa, “my club of Herakles, the weapon called ‘Dokeesis,’ from the entrance porch.”
There wasn’t a person in that hall that night who didn’t hear these momentous words; nor was there one who didn’t catch their significance. This was in fact a declaration that, armed as he would be when Nisos brought “Dokeesis”, and possessed as he now was of the Helmet of the Winds, the oldest and weakest and frailest, but far, O far the wisest, of the Fates, Atropos herself, the great-aunt of all the heavenly powers, had decided in an uncontroverted decree that, whatever the issue, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, was to sail over the towers of Lost Atlantis before he perished after the manner of men.