But it had been to Akron himself, who had spent a day and a night in his younger days voyaging to Kephallenia to find Eumolpos and persuade him to join them, that the “Teras” owed her incomparable steersman. It was fascinating to Nisos to see the reverential respect with which the Master of the “Teras” followed now every faintest movement of the rudder by an expert in that difficult art.
The rudder was made of a young fir-trunk, peeled smooth and white; and, by its exquisite pressure upon the carefully squared and polished piece of wood directing the ship’s course beneath the water, it caused the “Teras” to obey the firm unswerving hands of Eumolpos of Kephallenia with a perfection that was indeed awe-inspiring.
Nisos edged himself as far back into the stern as he possibly could, so far indeed that the round pole of the rudder pressed against his left thigh. But from this position he was able to get an unforgettable view of the whole spectacle. The moon was obviously full that night and its lustre flooded everything with a liquid luminosity that had nothing ghostly or spectral about it and yet was decidedly unearthly.
The Island of Wone, when once they had got the “Teras” off that sharp-jutting rock, by no means towered above them. Its structure was indeed that of a flat table-land raised only three or four feet above the surface of the sea; and the single mast of the “Teras” rose so high into the air as to quite out-top the two weird Divinities from Arima, Eurybia and Echidna, who, as they had done from time immeasurable, were still arguing with each other in a tireless monotonous dialogue.
The object upon which Nisos finally fixed his attention was the neck of the terrific Figure-Head of the “Teras”, which he had been assured he must regard as terminating in the actual head and features of its super-human designer.
These monumental features were at this very moment, so he had been solemnly told, no different from what they had been a hundred-thousand years ago and no different from what they would be a hundred-thousand years hence. “Had this supreme enemy of the everlasting gods,” he asked himself, “been able to invent a way of surviving beneath a volume of water half-a-mile deep?”
And what had happened to that fire-breathing monster Typhon? Had he been, as it had been said, “intercepted”, on his way to join the infernal foes of the gods who live forever? Nisos had been hearing, ever since he first came on board, extraordinary stories about this super-human Being whose features — and the legend ran that the Personage Itself had carved its own features — were neither divine nor human, neither of any conceivable Past or conceivable Future, but totally outside and beyond all we have heard, seen, remembered, imagined, dreamed, feared or hoped!
“It seems strange,” he said to himself, “that I, Nisos, the son of Pandea the wife of Krateros Naubolides, should be squatting by this helmsman, staring at the curving neck of this creature beyond all creatures, created by this creator beyond all creators, whose dragon-swan neck ends in some ultimate vision, the vision of a Being that is both more Divine and more Titanic than anything we know, that is in fact outside all we know. And isn’t it an unusually queer chance,” Nisos now asked himself, “that I should know not one single person, except I suppose the men of the ship, who has ever seen the mysterious face with which the Figure-Head of the ‘Teras’ terminates?
“When this ship first entered the harbour of Ithaca was there not one single soul who saw her? When she was anchored in the harbour of Ithaca did no barge or boat or canoe or raft pass in front of her? Did no swimmer, swimming round her, look up at that face? Why haven’t I asked this question of Odysseus, of Zeuks, of Princess Nausikaa herself to whom the ship belongs? There is certainly something queer about all this.”
Nisos shuffled his uncomfortable body a little further still to the rear, until his back was pressed against the actual jet-black cross-bar of the ship’s stern, in which position every time Eumolpos of Kephallenia gave the rudder the particular push that swung the “Teras” prow to the North our friend’s thigh received something of a shock.
At one point indeed Eumolpos became aware of some sort of obstacle at the extreme reach of his helm’s thrust, and turning his head for, as a man of good stock in Kephallenia, he was naturally courteous, he murmured an apology.
“O that’s all right!” cried our friend. “It’s only that I’m so unused to a ship. All I can do is to follow the master around.”
But his word with the helmsman gave him the required incentive to put to Akron the question that was seething in his mind.
“By the way, Master, I suppose you’ve often examined the face of your ship’s figure-head? Does it look like the face of a great philosopher, or like the face of a great poet, or like the face of a great scientist?”
Akron didn’t even turn his head. “If I answered him properly you might never be able, aye, Eumolpos, to steer a ship again, all your days? But come along, Nisos! You said just now you were following me around! Well, I’ve got a bit of a job for you now.”
Nisos disengaged himself from his cramped observation-post at the extreme stern of the “Teras” and followed Akron forward.
“No, seriously, my dear boy,” the skipper said quietly, as they approached Odysseus, “it would never have done to start on all that business just then. The truth of it is that there’s something funny about the whole thing.” He grasped Nisos by the arm and they stood side by side for a minute, both of them watching, while he spoke, the wild half-naked figure of Enorches, the Priest, who was clearly haranguing the old king about something; something that made it necessary for Odysseus to sit down again on his coiled ropes.
“He wants me,” said Akron, “to put the Island of Wone well behind us before night. His hope is that a cloud may cover up this confounded Moon before dawn and leave us free to get a good vision of the special stars by which he wants us to sail or to row — whichever may be necessary—due West. No, my dear boy, we of the ‘Teras’ have a natural instinct against talking about that matter of which you enquired just now; I mean about the face of our Figure-Head. The truth of it is there has been ‘borne in upon us’, as one of us called it the other night, an absolute conviction that only someone who in everything else was so simple, so much of an innocent that people felt they must treat him as if he were a vegetable or an animal or a fish of some kind or an inanimate thing, would be able to face that face without ‘getting’, as we say, ‘the horrors’.
“If you were such an animal-like innocent I’d let you, if we had our anchor out, swim backwards and forward in front of our bows till you could look face to face at this enemy of the Olympians; but you my dear boy are anything but an innocent! On the contrary in most things you’re a damned lot cleverer than I am or any of the rest of us who run this old ship.”
“What kind of horrors would come upon anyone who wasn’t an innocent, and who dared to face the face?”
“Do you want a straight answer, lad?”
“Of course.”
“Well, as it happens, I, who now am talking with you, can tell you of one case.”
“O quick, quick, captain! Tell me, before that face, scaring the gulls, gets round the next rock!”
The master didn’t turn his eyes away from their steadily advancing mast, with all its ropes in order, though without a sail, but as he spoke it was clear to Nisos that ninety per cent of his consciousness was at that moment in his words.
“It was the officer I had before we got Thuon. Poor old Thuon can’t bear even to look at the thing’s neck from this side after what he’s been told. The man’s name was Teterix and he came from Zante and it was while I let them cast anchor for a while to catch some fish that this randy fool of a Zante-man began playing his games and swimming round the prow. I’d told him he weren’t to do it, but he wanted to show off to the others; so as he swam he not only stared at the face but made faces at the face: and, in no time at all, there he was, climbing up on deck and dancing about in front of us with all his fingers pointing at his head. And such was the power of the horror on him that he forced us to see him as he saw himself and as he felt himself; that is to say with no human head at all, but with a raw bleeding neck out of which three bloated worms hung down who swayed to and fro and kept turning and twisting round.