“O thou ‘still youthful Maia’, cannot you see that what I need is to strengthen my will to forget till it is ten thousand times more powerful than any god as yet discovered by us whether in earth or in air or in fire or in water? If I had this power, O thou ‘still youthful’ great-grandmother of mine, I could enjoy sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, each one of them separately or all together, and in the pleasure of satisfying hunger and thirst, and in the pleasure of satisfying lust and desire, and in the pleasure of diving into earth and air and water and fire, and through them and out the other side, if there is another side, I beseech thee, O Maia, thou Nymph forever young, let me learn the greatest of all the arts, the art of forgetting!”
By one of those pure caprices and casual happenings that occur under the dispensation of Tyche the great goddess of chance such as we mortals call “a stroke of luck” when they suit us and “the cruel irony of things” when they don’t, it happened that when Zeuks began heaving up the body of Ajax, with a view to carrying it to the Corridor of the Pillars, there occurred a faint but unmistakable flicker at the outer corner of the dead man’s left eyelid.
This incident was solely and simply due to the sudden jerk to the corpse’s head when Zeuks lifted up that long, lean, painfully muscular body preparatory to making the effort, which was not at all an easy one, of balancing it on his shoulder. But this negligible and unimportant accident made, for a special reason, a most agitating impression on the mind of Zeuks.
What it did for him was to set going a peculiarly morbid infirmity of his imagination; namely the fantastic illusion that his own automatic blinkings and pulse-beats and heart-throbs and blood-circulations, yes! and even the naturally drawn breathings from his lungs might suddenly be intensified to a degree beyond bearing and he might be driven so wild by all these reiterative pulsings, pumpings and poundings that he’d be sent raving through Arima like a naked madman!
His face was contracted into a desperately grim scowl as he staggered off from the Hector-Tree with the body of Ajax on his back. “And so,” he told himself, “it has now come to the point; and the question is, can the great-grand-son of immortal Maia keep his ‘will to forget’ intact when his whole taut skin drums from within to the tune of ‘remember!’
Staggering along for a dozen strides at a time, every few seconds Zeuks had to stop to take breath. His shoulders were broad enough; but his legs were short; and the corpse he carried was so tall that its toes, for he carried it face downwards, kept tapping against his own heels.
But it was the horrible feeling that at any moment this repetitive pounding and pulsing and blinking might split his skin that was spoiling that moment for him rather than any effort of carrying Ajax. And it was at his tenth stop that he made a really desperate attempt to deal with this insane attack. He planted his feet firmly in a patch of damp and mossy soil, not far from the spot where Eurybia used to exercise her curious sedentary witchcraft, and where she used to argue with Echidna from twilight to twilight as to whether this breaking loose out of Tartaros, about which all the Attic world was now talking, was due to feminine wiles or to titanic straining.
Having got the heel of one sandal hidden in that soft wet moss and the under-curve of the other sandal covering something brittle below that wet moss that might easily have turned out to be the ivory-white thigh-bone of a still-born child, Zeuks now took up his own consciousness, as if it were a massive plummet of lead sharpened at the end, and drove it down deep into the earth.
Had either of his youthful acquaintances, Nisos or Pontopereia, been at his side at that moment they would have had, in the case of the former a male inspiration, and in the case of the latter a female inspiration, simply from Zeuks’ visage. It was literally distorted, contorted, convulsed with pure exultation when at last he hauled up into the light the mental self he had let down into the abyss. What pleased him so much was the supreme success of his supreme effort; for his horrid, loathsome, disgusting mental illness, revolting in itself and attended by the wildest and maddest terrors, had actually been left behind in the depths of the earth like an after-birth at the bottom of a weedy garden.
This was a relief so incredible that it confused him by its very beatitude. “Never again,” he told himself, “never once again shall I have those horrors!”
And Zeuks remembered how when he was farming in the vicinity of Cuckoo-Hill he once heard Enorches, the Priest of the Mysteries, curse a rash young neighbour who had tried to seduce the neophyte-priestess Spartika, the daughter of Nosodea, and the sister of Leipephile; and how the pompously perverse and the necrophiliastically censorious tone of the man in his assumption of priestly authority had for long haunted him because it jumped with his own peculiar mental malady: “May your crime exude from every pore of your body like stinking pus! May it burst from every inch of your skin like gangrenous necrosis! May it reek from your body like putrid decomposition! May it cross every sight you see with a streak of fœtid blood! May it infect every sound you hear with an explosion of foul wind! May it taint everything you touch with vile and viscous glutinosity! May all you taste have the tang of brine and all you smell have a reek of the mortuary! May your consciousness of yourself become a consciousness of empty eye-sockets and rattling cross-bones! May the clock-strokes of annihilation record the hours of all your nights and the dust-motes of disillusion drift over the minutes of all your days!”
Zeuks could not only remember the shock he got from this curse, he remembered also the intensity of the particular prayer about his own fate which was his reaction to it. He had prayed to Arcadian Pan that he might become the supreme lord of the Island of Ithaca, dwelling, as Odysseus the son of Laertes did, and as Agelaos the son of Krateros Naubolides hoped one day to do, above the Corridor of the Pillars. “Why do I think of that prayer at this particular moment?” he asked himself as he staggered and shuffled under the weight of the tall corpse he was carrying, up the much-trodden path across the burying-ground of the slaves that led into the olive-garden.
But Zeuks the son of Arcadian Pan didn’t hasten to leave the graves of the old slaves in order to reach the cradles of the young olives. On the contrary he moved more slowly than ever. He was clutching the dead man’s wrists so tightly with both his hands that the warrior’s toes still in heavy silver-clamped sandals tapped against his own bare heels causing him pain. In this slaves’ cemetery Zeuks was on fairly familiar ground, for several of the farmers of Cuckoo Hill who were too poor to possess cemeteries of their own brought the bodies of their dead slaves to this spot.
Zeuks in his previous visits to the place however had never noticed that one of these graves and this a very deep one had not been filled up but was gaping wide-open. Now what, in the name of Persephoneia, the Queen of all the Dead, was the explanation of this? There were no inscriptions here at all and there had been none for centuries; so that the identity or identities of the occupant or occupants of this deep hole in the earth could only be revealed by such as had lowered him or her into this deep and narrow sepulchre or had recently robbed this nameless sanctuary of its inmate.
By this time the sun had already gone down below the horizon and night was rapidly approaching. “What in the name of Aidoneus and Persephoneia will our old man do with this other old man?” Zeuks now asked himself in perplexity. “He must be-entertaining the Princess by this time in the Dining-Hall and if that incredible old Eurycleia weren’t the woman she is our old king would be in a fine fix! But that’s just what this amazing old woman must have been doing again tonight, saving him from the shame of failing in any of his kingly duties! But what in the name of Aidoneus would the old man feel at this overpowering moment, when he’s not only got the Phaiakians on his hands, along with that crazy Herald of theirs, but has had to confront this Princess of all Princesses, if I were to appear before him with the corpse of Ajax!”
Very carefully and very slowly Zeuks lifted the long lean body, all bone and muscle and sinew, from his shoulder and laid it on its bac
k on the indescribable rubble and litter that surrounded that gaping hole. Then, with his eyes on a smashed pot that looked as if it might have been the first piece of pottery ever made by the hand of man, his thoughts turned to Okyrhöe, “I hate that woman. I know she’s up to some game. Yes, I hate her! Oh, why is it that in this world there’s always somebody we have to wish in Hades? It’s not a matter of war or revenge or rivalry or just family against family, or tribe against tribe, or race against race. Those things are all part of the game, part of the way things are, part of the price we have to pay for being alive at all.
“Krateros Naubolides wants to keep the king here, so that without any trouble he can slip into his shoes when he dies. Odysseus on the contrary naturally wants before he dies to make such a thunderous commotion and such a roaring rumpus that his personality will go resounding on, like the beating of brazen swords upon brazen shields, till it’s heard over both the horizons of the world; heard where the blameless Ethiopians at the Gates of the West cry their farewell to the burning sun on his nightly journey, and heard where the blameless Ethiopians at the Gates of the East cry their welcome to the burning sun as he rises for a new day!
“No, what’s wrong isn’t our having enemies, it’s our having friends like this woman Okyrhöe! The old man will never be able to be happy again with Nausikaa while that cunning bitch is about. It’s a wicked shame.”
Staring with a frown at those smashed bits of discarded pottery Zeuks was now absolutely astonished to find himself sobbing. What in Hades’ name did this mean? Was he not exultantly happy? Had he not shuffled off the coil of his worst horrors and left their scurf and their scum at the bottom of the abyss? “For what then—by all the Harpies”—he said to himself, “am I a grown man blubbing like a baby?”
He sucked in both his lips at this point which gave him an extremely odd expression, an expression which would certainly have interested his great-grandmother Maia if from some Valley of Eternal Youth she could have seen it; and with this expression—which was a mixture of fussy punctiliousness, touchy querulousness, and irritable contrariness, mingled together by a sort of impish gravity—fixed upon his features like an actor’s mask, he placed his hands under the armpits of the dead man and lowered him down feet foremost into the open grave till he was standing erect in it.
Then Zeuks set himself to fill up the grave with the rubble that lay several inches deep in every direction. This was an easy task and Zeuks accomplished it in quick time, using both his extremities. What he didn’t kick down into that hole from the litter around it he threw down into it with his hands.
And when he had finished his job he stamped heavily and obstinately on the rubble round the top of the corpse’s head, leaving, however, for the benefit of his own private and secret knowledge and information, but only just recognizable even by himself, the little bronze spike on the top of the small bull’s-hide head-piece that continued to surmount, even after all the knocking about that that warrior-body had undergone, the snow-white head of the dead chieftain.
With his lips still sucked into his mouth in that odd way Zeuks spent several minutes covering and revealing, revealing and once more covering, that little bronze spike, to conceal which finally, and it was almost dark by now, he made use of a cracked oyster-shell.
All this accomplished, he made the special ritual gesture practised for a thousand years at ceremonies where the dead had been buried rather than burnt, and when this had been done he moved cautiously through the olive-garden and bent his head in the darkness lower than he need have done before passing beneath the arch into the corridor of pillars. He felt in some odd way humbled; and every sort of pride, whether human or godlike, seemed to have been drained out of him simply by the fact of having lived all these hours with Ajax, who, whether alive or dead, was so natural and so true to his essential self, that he made any other persons seem vacillating and wayward.
“Didn’t somebody tell me‚” Zeuks said to himself, as he emerged from under the low-bowed arch into the corridor of pillars, “that there was an olive-stump inside here ready to discuss the newest and the most difficult problems in philosophy? But I smell meat! The old king must be already at dinner. Hades! But I mustn’t make a sound or I’ll have them all rushing out!” His sandals were of tougher leather than those worn by his neighbours on Cuckoo-Hill and he suddenly became fearful of their creaking. He felt better when he had slipped them off and was holding them in his left hand; but he felt better still when he had extricated with some difficulty from the lining of his outer vest or “chiton” his two-edged dagger, whose small bronze handle was covered with a particular kind of cloth specially adapted to soak up blood without letting it drip.
But the odd thing with Zeuks just then, as inhaling the rich waftures from Eurycleia’s ancestral cooking he stared wildly at the Club of Herakles propped up between its two projecting quartz-stones, was the fact that his irresolution at that critical moment connected itself with a feeling that went beyond humility.
“What has happened,” he cried out from the depths of his heart with a wordless, soundless cry, “what has happened to you, O Maia, the Nymph who gave birth to Hermes, the begetter of Pan? You were not one, O Maia my own, O Maia, my more than Mother! You were not one of those tragic mortal ones who die, as the old Dryad here must have died along with her aged oak! Of the fate of the Nymph of Master Dryops I know something; and of the fate of the Nymph who bore Pan to Hermes I have heard much: but whither, I implore you to answer me, whither, O whither, have you fled, immortal mother of my father’s father, you for whose sake the lyre was first strung? Are you still being visited by the son of Kronos in some hidden cave in Arcady? Or perhaps at this very moment, beyond the reach of us all, caught by the rising flood in some royal chamber in Atlantis, your far-floating, filmy-textured, chestnut-coloured hair is washing backwards and forwards, while stiff-finned fish and scaly-tailed sea-snakes press their snouts against your cold breasts?
“Have I prayed in vain to you all my life as an immortal, and have you all the time been cold and dead as Atlantis itself? Surely you are immortal among the Nymphs, oh mother of my father’s father? Don’t they say that the great earth-mother bore you at the beginning of all things, before she was over-shadowed by Ouranos or knew what it was to have connexion with any elemental power beyond herself? Aren’t you, along with all the Nymphs of the Mountains and the Springs and the Lakes and the Seas, different altogether in the hierarchies of the gods from a pathetic old creature like the family-Dryad of this place who has now perished with her oak?”
He must have been himself at that moment, poor Zeuks, a somewhat pathetic figure, with one hand clutching that double-edged weapon under his “chiton” and with the other pressing his sandals against his ribs. At any rate the easily moved moth murmured to her friend the fly: “I do so, so wish, my dear friend, that we knew whence this fellow Zeuks originally came. I don’t mean just now, for, of course, we know that well enough! I mean at the beginning of his life. Do, for Heaven’s sake, Myos, wake up, ‘and see’, as rude boys learn to say at school, ‘what the cat has brought in’! I’m afraid you ate far too much of that beautifully-cooked bread-sauce! I warned you against it. Oh how I did warn you against it! For the same thing has happened to you before. It shows how we cannot be trusted not to fall into the sin of gluttony when we are safe at home and in no danger of being swallowed up alive by voracious insectivorous monsters. Listen to me, Myos, my only friend! Listen to me, most learned of revered teachers! I hate to speak of such tragic things: but don’t you remember how often we’ve seen dead flies, lying mute and silent, never to hum, never to buzz, never to murmur again? And where, I ask you, have we seen them?
“On plates and under plates! On tables and under tables! On window sills and under window sills! You flies are far too sensitive and intellectual and highly-strung to take risks with your food. It’s different altogether with us. We’re made for risks like that! If we don’t take risks every day of our lives we very
quickly degenerate. I oughtn’t to scold you, my precious wise one”—here the beautiful moth showed signs of emotion, for her right wing quivered and her left antenna groped freebly in a whiff of steam-infected air from the hall within—“because I have myself been yielding so weakly to my admiration for your learning that I have not yet, though I heard his inspired speech, flown to enquire how the noble Priest of the Mysteries has borne up after his exhausting oration.
“But, O thou wisest of flies, I do feel such shame when I think”—It was then that there broke in upon their conversation the voice of their living and moving tent, namely the Club of Herakles, who when in the company of his special and most privileged associates always called himself “Dokeesis” a name which in that dark Nemean Forest, where he was brought up, has the meaning of “seeming”, because there are so many shadows there that it is often hard to distinguish between appearance and reality.
“It is I who am speaking to you, again, Sixth Pillar, yes it is I, the Slayer of the Nemean Lion, and I want to know whether I heard you correctly, Sixth Pillar, when you spoke of receiving the news that the great Goddess Hera the Queen of Heaven, had suddenly left Olympos empty of her divine presence and had gone to Gargaros, the summit of Ida, with the intention of persuading the Son of Kronos, by the help of Desire, and by the help of Sleep after the satisfaction of Desire, to yield up his third portion of Power over the Kingdoms of this World to his two Brothers Aidoneus and Poseidon?
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