voices in the white-hot light. I had no idea what they
meant,
whispers of madness, guilt. I slept again, awaiting death. And then sat up with a start, a crazy idea tormenting me: the womb was the Argo who’d borne us
here,
the murdered men not those I’d lost before but those around me, grounded by the sun; and my ruin was
the sun himself:
I must go to the center of the furnace, my only prayer
for the men,
the Phaiakian maidens, and Medeia. Oh, do not think
I believed
it reasonable! The desert was hotter where I meant to
go,
and the Argo no weight for men half-starved, no water
to drink
on a trip that might take us days, if not all eternity. Nevertheless, I roused them, fierce, a lion gone mad, and stumbling, incredulous, they obeyed. I sent no
scouts ahead,
and no man there suggested it. Blind luck was our
hope,
perhaps blind love, the Argonauts bearing that
monstrous ship,
spreading her weight between shoulders meaningless
except for this,
their union in a madman’s task. In their shadow the
maidens walked,
singing a hymn of heatwaves, the pitiless sun, a dirge for all of us. And so those noblest of all kings’ sons, by their own might and hardihood, lips cracked and
bleeding,
carried the Argo and all her treasures, shoulder high, nine days and nights through the death-calm dunes
of Libya.
“I shared the weight till the seventh day. Then
Medeia fell,
unconscious, and could not be wakened. So I carried
my wife in my arms,
shouting encouragement to the men, reassuring the
maidens. The sun
filled all the sky, it seemed to us. But the maidens sang, struggled to help with the load till they fell, befuddled,
giggling
like madwomen. We dragged them on. Told lunatic
jokes,
talked with the sun, the sand, a thousand sabuline
visions—
and so we came to water. But left the desert strewn with graves, unmarked by stick or stone. One half my
crew
and two of the maidens we buried in the white-hot sand;
and not
the least of those who fell there, slaughtered by the heat,
was Ankaios,
nobleman robed in a bearskin and armed with an axe.
We buried
the twelve-foot child and wept. Our tears were dust.
Then set
the Argo down in the calm Tritonian lagoon, and
searched
for drinking water.
“The sky was blinding white, all sun. It seemed to us that we came to the body of a huge
gray snake,
head smashed, by the trunk of an appletree. From the
venom sacks down
the corpse was asleep, undreaming, the coils a thicket
of arrows,
such deadly poison that maggots perished in the
festering wounds.
And close to the corpse, it seemed to us, we saw fiery
shapes
wailing, their mist-pale arms flung past their golden
heads.
At our first glimpse of the beautiful strangers, majestic
beings
in the white-hot light, they vanished in a swirl of dust.
Then up
leaped Orpheus, praying, wild-eyed: ‘O beautiful
creatures, mysteries,
whether of Olympos or the Underworld, reveal
yourselves!
Blessed spirits, shapes out of Ocean or the violent sun, be visible to us, and lead us to a place where water
runs,
fresh water purling from a rock or gushing from the
ground! Do this
and if ever we bring our ship to some dear Akhaian port, we’ll honor you even as we honor the greatest of the
goddesses,
with wine and with hecatombs and an endless ritual of
praise!’
No sooner did he speak, sobbing and conjuring strangely
with his lyre
than grass sprang up all around us from the ground,
and long green shoots,
and in a moment saplings, tall and straight and in full
leaf—
a poplar, a willow, a sacred oak. And strange to say, they were clearly trees, but also, clearly, beings of fire, and all we saw in the world was clearly itself but also fire.
“Then the beams of the oak tree spoke. ‘You’ve been
fortunate.
A man came by here yesterday — an evil man—
who killed our guardian snake and stole
the golden apples of the sun. To us he brought anger
and sorrow, to you release
from misery. As soon as he glimpsed those apples, his
face
went savage, hideous to look at, cruel,
with eyes that gleamed like an eagle’s. He carried a
monstrous club
and the bow and arrows with which he slew our
guardian of the tree.
Our green world shrank to brambles and thistles, to
sand and sun,
and in terror, like a man gone blind, he turned to left
and right
bellowing and howling like a lost child.
And now he was parched with thirst, half mad. He
hammered the sand
with his club until, by chance, or pitied by a god, he
struck
that great rock there by the lagoon. It split at the base,
and out
gushed water in a gurgling stream, and the huge man
drank, on his knees,
moaning with pleasure like a child and rolling his eyes
up.’
“As soon as we heard these words we rushed to the place, all our
company,
and drank. Medeia — still unconscious, more cruelly
punished
than those we’d buried in the sand — I placed in the
shadow of ferns
at the water’s edge. I bathed her arms and legs, her
throat
and forehead, and dripped cool water in her staring
eyes. With the help
of her maidens, I made her drink. She groped toward
consciousness,
rising slowly, slowly, like Poseidon from the depths of
the sea,
until, wide-eyed with terror at some fierce vision in the
sun,
invisible to us, she clenched her eyes tight shut, clinging with her weak right hand to my cousin Akastos, with
her left to me.
Mad Idas wept. Doom on doom he must witness, and sad premonitions of doom, to the end of his dragged-out
days. No more
the raised middle finger, the obscene joke through
bared fangs;
no more the laughter of the trapped, that denies, defies
the trap.
He’d recognized it at last: more death than death, and
he rolled
his eyes like a sheep in flight from the wolf, and
nothing at his back
but Zeus. Such was the sorrow of Idas, the bravest of
men,
now broken.
“As soon as our minds were cooled, we came to see that the giant savage of whom the tree had spoken
could be none
but Herakles, much changed by his many trials. We
resolved
to hunt for him, and carry him back to Akhaia, if the
gods
permitted. The wind had removed all sign of his tracks.
The sons
of Boreas set off in one direction, on light-swift wings; Euphemos ran in another, and Lynkeus ran, more
slowly,
in a third, with his long sight. And Kaanthos set out
too,
impelled by destiny. Kaanthos was one who’d ploughed
for his living
and his heart was steady and gentle. He had had a