We wasted no time. The rocks had moved back, but who knew for how long? I took up my lyre and began a hearty song that set the strongest of rhythms, Tiphys clung to his steering-oar with all his might, our oarsmen rowed so hard their oars were nearly bending in the water, and sturdy Argo went pressing forward. As we passed between the rocks we heard the groaning sound again, and the beginning of the thunder, and when I made so bold as to look behind me I saw the two great cliffs starting to move inward a second time. But the men rowed like demons and we went plunging forward and came safely through, though the rocks came clashing together just behind us with a sound like that of a herald announcing the end of the world. Just as our dove had lost one of her feathers, we lost a piece of our stern ornament when the rocks clashed for that second time, but we sustained no other harm.
So we left the Bosphorus and its Clashing Rocks behind, and entered onto the bosom of that great sea at whose farther end lay Colchis and the Fleece. And the tale is told among men that the Clashing Rocks, now that they had been outwitted by the Argo, grew roots in the sea and never again moved from their places.
12
The story of our voyage up the Euxine Sea to Colchis is something everyone knows, for the tale has been told again and again by the poets. But the daily toil, the pain, the struggle—ah, who can know of that who was not there? For me the suffering was a required ordeal, part of the education that the gods had designed for me; what it signified for the others, I cannot say. But though we suffered greatly, we none of us uttered a word of complaint. Through suffering comes purification.
Day after day we followed along the edge of those great waters, a voyage such as few had ever made, day succeeding day, pink dawn and golden noon and red twilight and purple night, and dawn again and noon and night, and dawn again, and noon and twilight and night, and on and on we went on the breast of that arduous sea. There was salt in our lungs, the salt of the sea-breezes that we inhaled with every pull of the oars. The blazing sun baked our skins. The hard dry wind out of the east assailed our aching eyes. Along the shore tall cities flamed in the sun, stone buildings, gold-fretted temples, courses of white paving-stones leading down to the sea, bright in the blaze of the morning light. Rarely did we halt at any of them, but continued going ever deeper into the unknown, moving past the mysterious kingdoms of the Euxine that nestled in the blue valleys descending between the great round mist-wrapped hills.
The land of the Bithynians, Phineus had told us, lay on our right, but he warned us to make no landing there. We went past it and the mouth of the River Rhebas and the Black Cape and, with our provisions beginning now to run low, we made our first landfall on the little low-lying isle of Thynias to seek meat and fresh water. There Apollo appeared before me in all his divine splendor, golden hair streaming in the wind, his silver bow in his left hand and the ground atremble beneath his feet as he strode by, and I built an altar in his honor and sacrificed a wild goat to him, and pledged myself anew to his service.
Beyond there we traveled awhile without going ashore, but when we drew near the city of Mariandyne, King Lycus’ land, Jason, feeling fretful and anxious and desirous of diversion and sport, ordered us to put the Argo into its harbor. It was an unlucky choice, one of many that our uneasy captain was destined to make.
There is at Mariandyne an entrance to the Netherworld that no one had ever entered and survived, though Heracles, some years hence, would go down into it and return—a frightful chasm through which the icy waters of the Acheron come bursting to the surface, coating the surrounding rocks with glittering frost. Perhaps it was the cold wind that endlessly blows there from below that brought us ill luck, for at Mariandyne we lost Idmon the Argive, a hot-tempered man but a tireless and valuable one. Idmon had some gift as a soothsayer, and had dreamed, the night before, a dream that seemed to foretell his death; but nevertheless he took part in a boar-hunt the next morning, and as he passed beside a reedy meadow a great white-tusked boar sprang up from the side of a stream and gored him in the thigh, so that a fountain of blood spurted from it. Peleus and Idas carried him back to the ship, but he died in their arms before they reached it.
Even while we were still mourning for Idmon we suffered an even more grievous loss, a true catastrophe. In the family of Tiphys the helmsman it was a tradition that no man could live longer than the age of nine and forty years, for there was a curse on his line: Tiphys’ grandfather had been imprudent enough once to cut down a sacred oak, and forty-nine was the number of the years that that oak had lived before it was felled. Tiphys now had reached the same age, and had known from the start of the voyage that he would not survive it. In Mariandyne he fell ill and wasted quickly away, despite the efforts of those among us who understood the medicinal arts; for the most efficacious medicines in the world are helpless against the inescapable decrees that shape our fates.
So Tiphys the irreplaceable was lost, and it was our task to replace him. Jason looked to those sons of the sea-lord Poseidon who were in our midst, of course, Nauplius of Argos, Erginus of Miletus, Melampus of Pylos, and Ancaeus of Tegea, and for a time we debated their various merits among ourselves. In the end Jason gave the nod to Ancaeus, whose strength and courage in time of crisis were beyond debate. And indeed he served us well throughout the remainder of the voyage, though no man could ever have matched Tiphys in his guileful mastery of the sea. After twelve unhappy days in Mariandyne we took to the water once more.
The wind was strong behind us and our oarsmen enjoyed a holiday as the breezes carried us along. To Sinope in Paphlagonia we went, where Jason recruited the brothers Deileon, Autolycus, and Phlogius to fill three of the empty seats on our benches, and then past the river called the Thermodon, that has only four branches short of a hundred, and amidst whose headlands the Amazon women are said to dwell, and after that to the land of the Chalybes, who dig iron from the ground and refine it in an everlasting cloud of black smoke to sell to neighboring tribes. Phineus had advised us to halt next at the Isle of Ares, which we found to be a place infested by huge swarms of such fierce predatory birds that we had to drive them off by pounding on our helmets and shouting with all our might. This we did, and the birds fled, but we wondered why Phineus had told us to put in at this inhospitable site. Soon we had our answer when we came upon four castaways, who said they were brothers, the sons of Phrixus, he who had been carried to Colchis on the back of the ram that bore the fleece of gold. They had been shipwrecked here, they said, while attempting to return from unfriendly Colchis to the land of their grandfather Athamas in distant Thessaly.
Jason, greatly surprised, let them know that he was the grandson of Athamas’ brother Cretheus, and therefore he and they were cousins. He explained that we were even then en route to Colchis to bring home not only the Golden Fleece but the troubled wandering spirit of his uncle Phrixus, their father; and we took them aboard to swell our number.
Now our goal was within reach. Nightfall brought us to an island called Philyra, which had its name because the centaur Cheiron was engendered there long ago by Cronos, king of the Titans, deceiving his wife the goddess Rhea with Philyra, the daughter of Ocean. Cronos, surprised by Rhea in the very act, transformed himself into a stallion and went galloping away, leaving Philyra impregnated with a strange creature that took on half the form of the stallion itself. Or so the story goes. I have never asked Cheiron about the truth of it. At any rate, we passed Philyra and several countries upwater from it, traveling now at great speed before a friendly wind, and saw the lofty peaks of the Caucasus before us, where the Titan Prometheus was chained after his defiance of Zeus and suffers the eternal torment of having an eagle gnaw at his liver, and then the Euxine came to its end.