So I retraced my steps, past the place of torments, where all was proceeding once more as it would through eternities to come, and past the white cypress and its pool of forgetfulness, and the black poplars in whose crooked branches black birds of evil omen perched, glaring at us with their glinting yellow eyes, and in time we came to the ferryman’s place at the bank of the Styx, where somber Charon had put me ashore at the outset of my mission.
He was nowhere to be seen, for he has no reason to wait for passengers on this side of the river; but I brought out my lyre and let some notes drift off into the mists that lay low over the black waters, and in time I heard the sound of his oars, and his boat came slowly toward us through the darkness.
If he felt any surprise at seeing us there, he showed no sign. In his dour way he beckoned, and I climbed into the boat and heard Eurydice clamber in behind me, and we stood, one behind the other, as he took us to the other side.
There we disembarked and left Charon and his boat behind, and started off on the road back to life.
All was night here. Apollo’s heavenly light does not reach the realm of Hades, of course, but the places where the shades dwell have a certain dim glow of their own. Here there was none of that, only the dire emptiness that is the frontier of the kingdom of Hell, and a clammy dankness and a stale reek. But by the mercy of everloving Zeus I was able to see the signs of my own earlier track, the faint glimmering glow that my sandals had left when I made my way inward, and I was able to follow those faint clues as I proceeded toward the surface of the world.
Could Eurydice see those same signs, I wondered, and was she able to follow me as I went? Or would she lose sight of me and wander away from me in that multitude of branching forks?
Now and again I heard some small sound that told me she was still behind me, a soft sigh, a little gasp of discomfort as she touched her wounded heel to the ground, even a stirring in the air that perhaps she caused as she breathed. Then would come long stretches of total silence, and I would begin to fear that she had lost the way. At last after one interminably prolonged period of such silence I chose to strum my lyre again—its sudden sound, breaking into that murky quietude, was almost frightening even to me—and in relief I heard what must surely have been the quick intake of Eurydice’s breath.
Thus I guided her upward by the sounds of my lyre, through dark, steep passages that I scarcely had noticed during my descent, but which now were challenging and difficult as I went the other way. It is easy enough to descend into Hell, for its gates will open readily for anyone; but climbing back up again into the light, ah, that is not so simple! I pressed on, scrambling and clambering over the slippery rocks, and strained my ears to hear the sound of Eurydice behind me, and from time to time I thought I did. But was it so, or only the invention of my eager mind? And why, as I drew ever closer to the gateway that would lead us out into the world again, did I no longer hear anything that might betoken her presence?
I turned a sharp bend in the passageway and I saw the light of the upper world gleaming just ahead of me. And in that critical moment I became possessed of the belief that Eurydice had strayed into some side passage and become lost.
Despite Hades’ terrible warning I turned, helpless to do otherwise, to reassure myself. And there she was.
But I had only the merest hasty glimpse of her, and she of me. For an instant I beheld her pale frightened face and her eyes wide with shock and horror at my transgression. And then the grinning shadowy minions of Hades came gliding out of the darkness to cluster about her and pluck at her with their talons.
“Oh, Orpheus—Orpheus—farewell forever!” she cried, in a faint, vanishing voice. Desperately she stretched her arms to me, and I toward her. But we could not so much as touch. And then, as they pulled her back from me, she became incorporeal and ghostly, a shadow of the woman that once had been, the merest of misty shades. I lunged for her and my arms closed on empty air. I beheld only a fleeting reproachful vision moving swiftly backward, fading from me like a wisp of smoke, and in another moment she had disappeared into the darkness and all I could hear was the eerie whistling sound as those merciless phantoms hurried her away from me to return her to Hades’ kingdom.
So Eurydice met her second death, and my soul was devastated as it had not been even at the time of her first death, and I stood there frozen, dazed, knowing beyond all doubt that I had lost her forever.
8
You ask me, then, why did I turn back to look at her, I who knew that Hades had explictly forbade it, I who can see all things past and future and who understood what the consequences of that single glance would be?
And I answer you that we are none of us allowed the option of deviating from the track that has been laid down for us by the gods. I had to turn back for that fatal glance, just as Oedipus had to slay the old man he encountered at the crossroads and thereby set in motion the relentless machinery that the gods had devised for him, and Agamemnon the lord of men had to bring his mistress Cassandra back from Troy with him and thus invite the wrath of his murderous wife Clytemnestra, and Jason of the Argo similarly to bring upon himself the bloody vengeance of the witch Medea, the mother of his sons, by spurning her for the Corinthian princess Creusa after his return from his great quest for the Fleece. The gods choose our destinies for us, and once we are set in our paths no foreknowledge of consequences can turn us for long from our dooms, not even I, who travel ceaselessly on the ever-repeating current that is my life.
And so I paused there at the brink of the upper world, with Eurydice’s freedom all but achieved, and, caught in the toils of my destiny, I glanced helplessly back despite everything I knew would ensue, to see if she still followed me. Thus I lost her for all time, until the next return of existence, when I am fated to win and then to lose her again.
Even then there was more to my torment, much more. One is tempered in the fires of the gods; and because they had much need of me, they saw to it that my tempering was a thorough one.
Though I had no shred of hope it was necessary all the same for me to descend once more into Hell and follow that dank winding path to the Styx to confront stern Charon at his ferry station. “Take me across once again,” I said to him, knowing what the reply would be. If there had been any laughter in his soul, I think he would have laughed at me, but all he did was stare in that icy way of his and shake his head.
It was pointless to try to charm him with my music, as I had done the last time. There was no music left in me then, and this time, even if there had been, he would have been armored against its powers. I asked, and he stared his refusal, and I asked again and he stared again, and once more I asked, and again he was silent. Then a pale shrouded wraith appeared, a new dead soul making his pilgrimage to the kingdom within, and he stepped through me as though I were not there and boarded Charon’s boat, and the two of them glided off into the darkness on the breast of that dread river, leaving me alone on the bank.
Charon did not return. After a time I set out yet again on the ascent to the land of the living.
Seven days and seven nights I lingered despondent at Tainaron gate, unable either to go forward into the light or to make yet another attempt at the darkness below. I went without food or drink, and my lyre lay before me, untouched, like a dead thing. When finally I picked it up again the first sounds that came from it were hellish jangling ones, a dissonant cacophony, which I could not master for several days more. When finally I could play again I was able to sing only a single bitter complaining song, over and over, until the rocks about me themselves seemed bored with my constant repetitive lament.