Spirit of the Place

by Gregory Feeley

  Hamilton shoved the book across the desk, vowing to read no more Latin. He went down the corridor to the main cabin, where Squire sat over a sheet of calculations. “Does the captain eat better than we do?” the engineer asked without looking up.

  “I do not believe so,” Hamilton replied. “His cabin is slightly larger than this one, although that advantage will be negated if he has all three of us as guests tonight.”

  “I shall be glad simply to be dining out,” Squire said, perhaps dryly. Hamilton left him with that thought and went above, where he saw Leake wearing his other coat, evidence enough that the captain was entertaining his passengers as a lot.

  Leake nodded at him affably. “I have not spent these last months studying the topography of Greece, and seeking the actual locales of famous exploits, without also wondering where the whirlpool of Charybdis lay,” he began, as if their earlier conversation had never ended.

  “You are a good traveling companion, Leake. I just passed Squire, who I believe could not speak of aught but engineering.”

  Leake laughed. “Squire possesses a narrow bore, which certainly fires farther than my blunderbuss. We shall see him tonight, where he shall no doubt surprise you.”

  In fact the surprise came entirely from Captain Eglen, who had not looked at Hamilton with an unclouded countenance since they had left the Piraeus. In his cabin, however, he seemed an inveterate host, affable and relaxed as he poured port from his private reserve. The ceiling was too low to stand comfortably, so the four men sat at Eglen’s small

  table, which was indeed more crowded than when the passengers dined by themselves.

  His back pressed against the bulkhead and his knees touching the table’s underside, Hamilton felt as snugly fitted as a wooden inlay. Shall this be regarded a privilege? He reminded himself that the captain did well to invite such a crush into his sanctum.

  “You are better, I trust, after your recent indisposition?” Eglen asked as he handed Hamilton a largish tot.

  “Quite better, Captain, thank you.” Hamilton was not happy to hear that the captain had heard of his swoon, but the ship was plainly too small for any event to go unremarked.

  “I hope it is not the intermittent fever,” Leake said from his place opposite Hamilton. “If that was what you contracted in Athens, you may suffer relapses, with shaking and delirium, for months to come.”

  “My physician assured me it was not,” Hamilton replied firmly. Eglen was frowning, no doubt at the prospect of carrying a sick passenger on a ship too small to have a surgeon on board.

  “The intermittent fever cannot, in any event, be spread to the rest of the crew,” Leake observed. All heads nodded at this, then turned as Wigton opened the door.

  “Fresh fish?” asked Hamilton, looking at the plates. “I marvel that your crew would surrender their catch for the officers’ dinner.”

  “They don’t like the stuff,” Eglen answered. “You gentlemen have been inland, eating lamb and cheese on your travels, but my crew has not left the docks these several weeks, and the smell of fish is ever upon them. They are happy for their hard beef and grog.”

  “I am told that some sailors regard fish as Israelites do swine: as unclean creatures,” Leake said. “Certainly they eat trash.”

  “So do mushrooms,” said Squire unexpectedly. “When a ship sails as slowly as we do now, one can catch fish. Foolish not to.” And he took a bite.

  The men fell to eating, but the remark about their speed evidently moved Eglen to speak. “Our cargo is heavy,” he said, “though not too heavy. We do sail slowly; we are a laden vessel.”

  Hamilton hoped there would be no more allusions to the hatches. “We carry the heritage of the great culture, and it is weighty,” he said. It rang sententious to his own ears, and he added, “Memory is heavy.”

  That sounded worse yet, and he blushed; but Squire looked at him acutely. “That is interesting, sir. Memory possesses mass?”

  “Well, not to the Greeks.” Hamilton realized that he was not quite himself. “They regarded memory as song, just as inspiration was a kind of breath. The poet would ask his Muse to sing him knowledge of the great deeds he was to tell.”

  “The Muse would sing out the story?” asked Eglen, his brows furrowed.

  “No, it was more complicated than that. Ordinary memory was mnemosyne, but the minstrel who sang the epics would appeal to mimnesko, by which the Muse would place his mind in contact with some distant time and place, that he might witness exploits from the Age of Heroes.”

  “His mind’s eye would gaze directly upon the vanished past?” asked Leake.

  “As though a channel had been opened, cutting across a bend in time’s river to connect the water where he stood with currents long passed.” Hamilton seemed to be feeling the afflatus of inspiration himself. “Aristotle spoke of the horama, the vision in which a future event is presented. The gods may open conduits to both past and future.”

  “Are the Muses gods?” asked Eglen doubtfully.

  “Minor divinities, let us say—beautiful, benign, and excluded from the intrigues and battles of the elder gods. Not unlike the Graces.”

  “Or the nymphs, I suppose,” added Leake. Hamilton looked startled.

  Squire, who had not been following this digression into ethereal matters, returned to the previous subject. “It is not the gods’ memories that possess weight, but their statues. All England,” he said gravely, “shall prove grateful for the exertions Captain Eglen and Mr. Hamilton have made to preserve his Lordship’s stones.”

  Eglen and Leake guffawed, and even Hamilton produced a nervous laugh, mostly in having been caught by surprise. Seeing his reddening face, Leake asked kindly, “And what of your own stone, Mr. Hamilton: the great tablet with the hieroglyphic writings?”

  Hamilton waved deprecatingly. “Hardly my own, sir. It was sent to England last year, where no doubt some antiquarian is even now poring over it.”

  “What is this?” asked Eglen.

  “A great flat stone that a Frenchman discovered outside a village called Rashid—the Europeans call it Rosetta—which came into our hands after the capitulation of Alexandria. It contains passages in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and in the hieroglyphic alphabet. Should the passages all be translations of the same text, they may prove helpful in allowing scholars at last to decipher the mysteries of hieroglyphs.”

  “And you helped take it from the French?” asked Eglen. “Splendid, sir. I trust it did not fill the hold of the ship that conveyed it to London?”

  Hamilton shook his head, wary of this theme’s recurrence. “’Twas but a single stone. If students of ancient Egypt learn something in studying its glyphs, I shall be pleased: but that culture is no ancestor of ours. I shall be remembered, if at all, for my role in recovering the Parthenon’s marbles.”

  The captain seemed satisfied with this, but Squire spoke up unexpectedly. “Were there not reports of groaning timbers in the hold?”

  Hamilton looked alarmed, but the captain waved the matter away. “Nonsense,” he said briskly. “Were any boards warping, the ship’s natural seepage would accumulate at an increased rate, and the boys who work the pumps would notice. They have not, nor, I assume, has Mr. Hamilton.”

  “Indeed, no,” Hamilton replied. So the captain had noticed his sojourns below. He inclined his head courteously, happy enough not to have to account for them.

  Perhaps dried beef would have absorbed the port they drank: the fish, in any event, offered little more cushion than an empty stomach. With the second glass Hamilton’s head was spinning, and he resolved to drink no more. The others all had a third.

  “His Lordship’s stones,” Squire repeated musingly. “They have had a rough year, one gathers.”

  The others seemed to find this mirthful. “His nose . . .” Leake suggested.

  “Yes, well: once you lose the nose—”

  General laughter, which Hamilton didn’t join.

  “It was a terrible misfortune,” he ob
served after a moment. “The alteration in his appearance is of course quite dreadful, although I imagine that its effect was mitigated for her Ladyship and their children, who observed the malady’s progress over a period of weeks. It shall be a tremendous shock for his mother, the Dowager Countess.”

  “Such exotic fevers must be quite unknown in Britain,” Squire said with a peculiar emphasis. Hamilton gave a puzzled frown.

  Leake was meanwhile attempting to stifle a fit of mirth that had apparently overcome him as he lifted his glass. “I beg your pardon, Hamilton,” he said with a cough. “But the image of Lord Elgin appearing in London, in his present lamentable condition, to present his collection of chipped and disfigured statuary—”

  The other two joined in the hilarity as Hamilton blanched. “They would think that his Lordship found this new ‘Greek ideal’ so compelling that he chose to adopt it personally!”

  “Better than the likelier suspicion.”

  “Gentlemen, please! This is quite unseemly.” Hamilton was struggling between indignation and distress.

  “Quite so,” said Eglen, who seemed to recollect his obligation to his employer. “My apologies.”

  Leake and Squire looked slightly chagrined. “It’s a nasty stroke, whatever its cause,” Squire allowed. “And the earl seems to have other problems on his hands.”

  “His Lordship’s expenses have been tremendous,” Hamilton agreed. “But I do not doubt that His Majesty’s Government shall recompense them.”

  Leake and Squire exchanged glances. “Well,” said Leake at last. “His Lordship’s policies have caused great unhappiness, at least among the Greeks of Athens, and he may bring great unhappiness home with him. Was that not one of the Greeks’ tales, Hubris preceding Nemesis?”

  “It was not,” Hamilton said warmly. “Nor do I see how his Lordship might ‘bring unhappiness’ back to Britain. Whatever financial or political problems he may suffer for it, his Lordship has done a great thing; and I know that he will consider himself a happy man so long as his family is well.”

  At this Leake colored so plainly that Hamilton at last apprehended his meaning. “You are not—I beg your pardon, sir, but you are not referring in any way to the conduct of . . . of a certain lady? This is infamous!”

  The other two men now intervened. “Here, Captain Leake makes no reference at all: surely you see that,” said Squire, placing a hand upon Hamilton’s sleeve; while Eglen muttered, “If the matter has reached even the ears of his Lordship’s secretary—”

  A long, slow swell lifted the ship, tilting it farther than its usual list before slowly subsiding. Captain Eglen looked alert for a moment, before evidently deciding that the situation did not call for his presence on deck; but Hamilton felt his guts loft higher than the rest of him, and a wave of nausea struck.

  “Pardon me,” he said as he staggered and caught himself. “I fear I am not well . . .” His stomach knotted, and his head swayed like the branches of a tree that is being shook. “Gentlemen, I fear I must go below. My apologies for any intemperance, which you must attribute to my infirmity. Oh dear, good night—”

  He stumbled from the cabin, fearful that he would spew in sight of his companions, or—now that he was without—the crew. But the fresh air seemed to steady him, despite its freight of salt and fishiness, and he straightened his back with a sudden clearheadedness. The next swell however set his feet wobbling like skittles, and Hamilton grabbed at a railing, which he continued to grasp, like an invalid holding his nurse’s elbow, as he proceeded to the head. I must below, he thought.

  He made it without incident back across the deck and staggered down the steps, where he surprised Gavallo and the other servants at cards. “Don’t get up,” he said as he lurched past. A second swell assisted him into his bunk, where he lay with his senses spinning. Could it indeed be the intermittent fever, back to pull him once more onto the dance floor?

  It was a poor tactic to seek to dissolve one’s anxieties in port, he thought; drink diffuses more than that. His weakened frame had offered little defense, and it had loosened his tongue from its moorings like a vagrant boat. Hadn’t one of the Greek celebrants, maenads or bacchae, maddened themselves with wine? No, it was the centaurs did that. Humans suffered some species of divine madness: atê if one is a hero, some lesser derangement for ordinary mortals. With a start Hamilton remembered that the word was nympholeptos: to be caught by nymphs.

  He rolled himself out of his bunk and nearly crashed to the deck.

  “All’ amunon, o theas pai, tei t’ emei duspraxiai,” he muttered as he rose shakily to his chair: Help me, O goddess-born, in my sore distress. His fingers were too unsteady to open the ink bottle, and Hamilton took a pencil from his pocket, gripping it as though to draw strength from its wood.

  Is she Singular, he wrote, or the last of a once-populous Race? Hamilton knew that the extinction of species was a controversial issue among naturalists, although it seemed clear to him that all living members of a species could perish, as had befallen those outlandish birds of the Mauritian islands. Had the ancient forests of Attica once harbored creatures whose existence no rational European would suspect, their numbers now reduced perhaps to a unique individual?

  If the latter, then a Race unlike any now living: that changes Form, and left no Fossils. Hamilton frowned at this. He wanted to call for coffee, but feared that word he was feeling better might prompt Leake to come down. Rising carefully, he listened to the servants playing up the passageway, then slipped (quietly as his legs allowed) out the door and through the curtain.

  A strange odor rose from the hold, touching Hamilton in the darkness with surprising intimacy. For a moment he felt he was standing outdoors, a hundred indefinable scents afloat in the dry night air. He inhaled deeply, but could identify nothing. I am not entirely well, he warned himself, and began carefully to descend.

  Stepping upon the keelson, Hamilton steadied his hand against a crate in the darkness. It was one of the large ones: a long slab, he remembered, that had broken in two while being crated. Trying to ignore the faint buzzing in his ears, he shuffled forward until the air currents told him he was within feet of the stern, then turned to face slightly to the right.

  “Gunai?” he called softly. He thought she might be offended at being addressed by name. “Lady?”

  “Not a lady.” The voice was no louder, but seemed to have gained clarity, as the outline of a crag will sharpen as the morning fog dissipates.

  “Eurynomethyia, then, Lady of the Ash Tree.” It would sound pompous in English. “I come to you, filled with wonder and . . .” Was it right to speak of deisidaimonia, the awe one felt before gods? Hamilton settled upon the milder “aidos.”

  “You are mortal.” Hamilton had never heard the word, so common in Greek texts, uttered from outside their confines. “Your brief furious life is like a fly’s, and you wonder at an immortal’s periope.” He did not understand everything, but had no time to ponder. “Do you know what it is like to be polychronios?”

  “‘Polychronios’?” Hamilton repeated.

  “Makrobios,” she offered, with a hint of impatience.

  “You mean, very long-lived?” he asked.

  “Of course! Do you think that Nymphai live forever, like the gods themselves?”

  “My pardon, Lady. I cannot imagine what it is like to live as long as you.”

  There was a pause. “It is to live like Kronos, between starry sky and the wide-bosomed earth.”

  “I do not fully understand you,” said Hamilton carefully. He was sifting the phrases for additional meanings. “Ouranou asteroentos” might contain a reference to Uranus, while “Gai eurusternos” certainly personified the Earth. Were they the parents of Kronos?

  “Fingers reach up into Sky, down into Earth, gripping both realms. Such a hold lasts long. Rhythms slow, and the succession of the seasons becomes like night following day. The psyche hardens, resistant to foolish change. The nympha dendritis senses much, but perceives more. D
o you understand?”

  Hamilton did not. “Psyche” here probably meant consciousness and not the soul, but he could not understand how a nymph of the trees could distinguish between aisthema and aisthetikos. “Please explain further,” he said, hoping not to provoke her.

  “Learn you from your friends?” she asked abruptly.

  “Lady?”

  “You eat with two friends, above?”

  “Oh! Yes, a mapper and a builder.” “Topographos” and “technetor” were not the rustic Greek that a tree spirit would know best, but those were the only words he could think of.

  “And you touch senses—” That is what she seemed to say, but Hamilton was not sure he had understood her correctly—“and learn from them?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well then.” The ancient voice carried a tone of satisfaction. “Our

  fingers feel much, but they also touch each other, in air or under the ground. Such touches convey. When forests of pine and oak covered the lands from shore to shore . . .”

  She lapsed into silence, which lasted for more than a minute. Hamilton was trying to think. If nymphs could communicate through the touch of branches and roots, then those groves of dryads, seemingly silent, may have buzzed like a crowd, unheard by human ears.

  He had never imagined that Eurynomethyia would appear before him as a beautiful woman. Had she possessed this power in her youth, when she had stood an intact tree? Hamilton could not say; but it seemed plain that the cut planks were not speaking by emitting ordinary sound: might not a being that put words into the ears of anyone who ventured close enough be able, in the fullness of its original power, to affect his eyes as well?

  He found that he could not ask Eurynomethyia about the diminution of her powers. Instead he began, “Those forests . . .”

  “To the sea they reached, filling the valleys and thinning only on the mountain peaks. Can you imagine this in the barbaros land of your birth?”