Half A Hundred Hero Tales Part 22

But he implored Ulysses, by all he held most dear, to give his unburied limbs a peaceful grave, and set up a barrow, and on it plant his oar to show that he had been one of Ulysses' crew. And Ulysses granted the boon, and the spirit of Elpenor departed content.

Then, as Ulysses sat watching the trench, he saw the shade of his royal mother, Anticlea, approach; but though the tears bedewed his cheek at the sight, the pale shade stood regardless of her son.

Next came the mighty Theban, Tiresias, bearing a scepter of gold; and he knew him and spake: "Why, son of Laertes, wanderest thou from cheerful day to tread this sorrowful path? What angry G.o.ds have led thee, alive, to be companion of the dead? If thou wilt sheathe thy sword I will relate thy future and the high purposes of Heaven towards thee."

Ulysses sheathed his glittering blade, and the seer bent down and drank of the dark blood. Then he foretold all the strange disasters that would threaten and detain Ulysses on his homeward way. He told how at length he alone of all his crew would survive to reach his country--there to find his labors not yet at an end, with foes in power at his court, lordly suitors besieging his wife, and wasting his substance in riot and debauch. But a peaceful end to his long and toilsome life should come at last, and see him sink to the grave blessed by all his people. "This is thy life to come, and this is Fate," said the seer.

To whom Ulysses, unmoved, made answer: "All that the G.o.ds ordain the wise endure."

So the prophet went his way, and Ulysses waited on for his mother to come. And anon, Anticlea came and stooped and drank of the dark blood, and straightway all the mother in her soul awoke, and she addressed her son, asking whence he came and why.

"To seek Tiresias, and learn my doom," Ulysses answered, "for I have been a roamer and an exile from home ever since the fall of Troy."

Then he asked her how her own death had happened, whether his good father Laertes still lived, if Telemachus his son ruled in Ithaca, and if Penelope yet waited and watched for her absent lord, or if she had taken a new mate.

To all his questions Anticlea made answer with tender pity. Penelope, his faithful wife, still mourned for him uncomforted; Telemachus, now almost grown to manhood, ruled his realm; and old Laertes, bowed with grief, only waited in sorrow for the release of the tomb, since his son Ulysses returned no more. She herself, his mother, had died of a broken heart; for him she lived, and when he came not, for love of him she died.

Ulysses, deeply moved, strove thrice to clasp her in his arms, and thrice she slipped from his embrace, like a shadow or a dream. In vain he begged that his fond arms might enfold the parent so tenderly loved, that he might know it was she herself and no empty image sent by h.e.l.l's queen to mock his sorrow. But the pensive ghost admonished him that such were all spirits when they had quit their mortal bodies.

No substance of the man remained, said she: all had been devoured by the funeral flames and scattered by the winds to the empty air. It was but the soul that flew, like a dream, to the infernal regions. "But go," she adjured him; "haste to climb the steep ascent; regain the day and seek your bride, to recount to her the horrors and the laws of h.e.l.l."

As she ceased and disappeared, a cloud of phantoms, wives and daughters of kings and heroes, flitted round the visitant of earth.

Dauntless he waved his sword; the ghostly crew shrank away and dared not drink of the wine in the trench at his feet. They pa.s.sed, and to each other Ulysses heard them recount their names and needs. There he saw Alcmena, mother of Alcides; Megara, wife of Hercules, who was slain by him in his madness; the beautiful Chloris, Antiope, and Leda, mother of the deathless twins Castor and Pollux, who live and die alternately, the one in Heaven and the other in h.e.l.l, the favored sons of Jove.

There walked Phaedra, shedding unceasing tears of remorse for her slain love, and near her mournful Ariadne. All these, and many more, Ulysses recognized in that pale procession of departed spirits. When they had been summoned back to the black halls of Proserpine, the forms of the heroes slain by the foul aegisthus came in sight. High above them all towered great Agamemnon. He drank the wine and knew his friend; with tears Ulysses greeted him and inquired what relentless doom, what fate of war, or mischance upon the ocean, had thrust his spirit into h.e.l.l?

And Agamemnon told him all the dreadful story of his return from Troy, and the treachery of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, who slew him as he feasted, and with him all his friends; most pitiful of all, the voice of the dying Ca.s.sandra, slain at his side as he himself lay dying, still rang in his ears.

And Ulysses answered him: "What ills hath Jupiter wreaked on the house of Atreus through the counsels of women!"

"Be warned," replied Agamemnon, "and tell no woman all that is in thy heart; not even Penelope, though she is discreet and true above all other women and will not plot thy death." And he grieved for his own son Orestes, on whom he had never looked, envying his friend an heir so wise and brave as the young Telemachus.

Then he saw Achilles and Patroclus, approaching through the gloom.

Achilles knew his friend and hastened to his side. "Oh mortal, overbold," he asked, "how durst thou come down living to the realms of the dead?" Ulysses told him how he had come, though living, to seek counsel of the dead.

But Achilles made answer:

"Rather would I, in the sun's warmth divine, Moil as a churl, who drags his days in grief, Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine."

Then, like Agamemnon, he demanded news of his son, and Ulysses charmed the father's heart by telling of the gallant deeds of Neoptolemus at Troy town, and how he had escaped unscathed from the fight.

Achilles glowed with pride and delight; and as he joined the ill.u.s.trious shades of the warriors about him, Ulysses sought the side of Ajax, whom he perceived standing apart in gloom and sullenness. His lost honors perpetually stung his mind, though the fight had been fair and Ulysses had been judged the victor by the Trojans. Ulysses seeing him stand thus mournfully aloof, addressed him with tender sorrow.

"Still burns thy rage? Can brave souls bear malice e'en after death?"

he asked him sadly. But for all his appeals the resentful shade turned from him with disdain, and silently stalked away. Touched to the depths of a generous heart Ulysses started in pursuit through the black and winding ways of Death, to find and force him to reply to his earnest questioning, but on the way such strange and awful scenes met his astonished eyes as caused him to pause and turn aside.

There was huge Orion, whirling aloft his ponderous mace of bra.s.s to crush his savage prey.

There was t.i.tyus, the son of Earth, who for offering violence to the G.o.ddess Latona was shot dead by her children, and lay for ever in h.e.l.l in fetters while vultures gnawed at his liver.

Again he looked, and beheld Tantalus, whose awful groans echoed through the roofless caverns. When to the stream that rippled past him he applied his parched lips, it fled before he could taste of it.

Fruit of all kinds hung round him--pomegranates, figs, and ripening apples; but if he strove to seize the fruit, the baffling wind would toss the branch high out of his reach.

When in horror at the sight of these torments, Ulysses turned aside, he saw a laboring figure, Sisyphus, who with weary steps up a high hill was heaving a huge round stone. When, with infinite straining, he reached at length the summit, the boulder, poising but an instant, bounded down the steep again with a wild impetuous rush, and dragged with it Sisyphus into the depths of an awful cavern. Thence once again, with sweat and agony, he must renew his toil and creep with painful labor up the slope, thrusting the rock before him. This the punishment for a life of avaricious greed, devoted to a pitiless una.s.suageable l.u.s.t for gold and power.

And farther on great Hercules was seen, a towering specter of gigantic form. Gloomy as night he stood, in act to shoot an arrow from his monstrous bow. With grim visage and terrible look he lamented his wrongs and woes, and then abruptly turning, strode away.

When Ulysses, curious to view the kings of ancient days and all the endless ranks of the mighty dead, would have stood strong in this resolve to watch them, a great swarm of specters rose from deepest h.e.l.l. With hideous yells they flew at him; they gaped at him and gibbered in such menacing tones that his blood froze in his veins. In fear lest the Gorgon, rising from the depths of the infernal lake, with her crown of hissing snakes about her brow, should transfix him to stone, he turned and fled.

He climbed the steep ascent and joined his waiting shipmates. They set sail with all haste to leave the dread Cimmerian sh.o.r.e, and a fair wind sped them on their backward way.

CIRCE'S PALACE

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

After escaping from the Cyclopes, and enduring many other perils by land and sea in the course of his weary voyage to Ithaca, Ulysses arrived at a green island, the name of which was unknown to him, and was glad to moor his tempest-beaten bark in a quiet cove. But he had encountered so many dangers from giants, and one-eyed Cyclopes, and monsters of the sea and land, that he could not help dreading some mischief, even in this pleasant and seemingly solitary spot. For two days, therefore, the poor weather-worn voyagers kept quiet, and either stayed on board of their vessel, or merely crept along under the cliffs that bordered the sh.o.r.e; and to keep themselves alive, they dug sh.e.l.l-fish out of the sand, and sought for any little rill of fresh water that might be running towards the sea.

Before the two days were spent, they grew very weary of this kind of life; for the followers of King Ulysses were terrible gormandizers, and pretty sure to grumble if they missed their regular meals, and their irregular ones besides. Their stock of provisions was quite exhausted, and even the sh.e.l.l-fish began to get scarce, so that they had now to choose between starving to death or venturing into the interior of the island, where perhaps some huge three-headed dragon, or other horrible monster, had his den.

But King Ulysses was a bold man as well as a prudent one; and on the third morning he determined to discover what sort of a place the island was, and whether it were possible to obtain a supply of food for the hungry mouths of his companions. So, taking a spear in his hand, he clambered to the summit of a cliff and gazed round about him.

At a distance, towards the center of the island, he beheld the stately towers of what seemed to be a palace, built of snow-white marble, and rising in the midst of a grove of lofty trees. The thick branches of these trees stretched across the front of the edifice, and more than half concealed it, although, from the portion which he saw, Ulysses judged it to be s.p.a.cious and exceedingly beautiful, and probably the residence of some great n.o.bleman or prince. A blue smoke went curling up from the chimney, and was almost the pleasantest part of the spectacle to Ulysses. For, from the abundance of this smoke, it was reasonable to conclude that there was a good fire in the kitchen, and that, at dinner-time, a plentiful banquet would be served up to the inhabitants of the palace, and to whatever guests might happen to drop in.

With so agreeable a prospect before him, Ulysses fancied that he could not do better than to go straight to the palace gate, and tell the master of it that there was a crew of poor shipwrecked mariners, not far off, who had eaten nothing for a day or two save a few clams and oysters, and would therefore be thankful for a little food. And the prince or n.o.bleman must be a very stingy curmudgeon, to be sure, if, at least, when his own dinner was over, he would not bid them welcome to the broken victuals from the table.

Pleasing himself with this idea, King Ulysses had made a few steps in the direction of the palace, when there was a great twittering and chirping from the branch of a neighboring tree. A moment afterwards a bird came flying towards him, and hovered in the air, so as almost to brush his face with its wings. It was a very pretty little bird, with purple wings and body, and yellow legs, and a circle of golden feathers round its neck, and on its head a golden tuft, which looked like a king's crown in miniature. Ulysses tried to catch the bird. But it fluttered nimbly out of his reach, still chirping in a piteous tone, as if it could have told a lamentable story, had it only been gifted with human language. And when he attempted to drive it away, the bird flew no farther than the bough of the next tree, and again came fluttering about his head, with its doleful chirp, as soon as he showed a purpose of going forward.

"Have you anything to tell me, little bird?" asked Ulysses.

"Peep!" said the bird, "peep, peep, pe--weep!" And nothing else would it say, but only, "Peep, peep, pe--weep!" in a melancholy cadence, and over and over and over again. As often as Ulysses moved forward, however, the bird showed the greatest alarm, and did its best to drive him back with the anxious flutter of its purple wings. Its unaccountable behavior made him conclude, at last, that the bird knew of some danger that awaited him, and which must needs be very terrible, beyond all question, since it moved even a little fowl to feel compa.s.sion for a human being. So he resolved, for the present, to return to the vessel, and tell his companions what he had seen.

This appeared to satisfy the bird. As soon as Ulysses turned back, it ran up the trunk of a tree, and began to pick insects out of the bark with its long, sharp bill; for it was a kind of woodp.e.c.k.e.r, you must know, and had to get its living in the same manner as other birds of that species. But every little while, as it pecked at the bark of the tree, the purple bird bethought itself of some secret sorrow, and repeated its plaintive note of "Peep, peep, pe--weep!"

On his way to the sh.o.r.e, Ulysses had the good luck to kill a large stag. Taking it on his shoulders he lugged it along with him, and flung it down before his hungry companions.

But the next morning their appet.i.tes were as sharp as ever. They looked at Ulysses, as if they expected him to clamber up the cliff again and come back with another fat deer upon his shoulders. Instead of setting out, however, he summoned the whole crew together, and told them it was in vain to hope that he could kill a stag every day for their dinner, and therefore it was advisable to think of some other mode of satisfying their hunger.

"Now," said he, "when I was on the cliff yesterday, I discovered that this island is inhabited. At a considerable distance from the sh.o.r.e stood a marble palace, which appeared to be very s.p.a.cious, and had a great deal of smoke curling out of one of its chimneys."

"Aha!" muttered some of his companions, smacking their lips. "That smoke must have come from the kitchen fire. There was a good dinner on the spit; and no doubt there will be as good a one to-day."

"But," continued the wise Ulysses, "you must remember, my good friends, our misadventure in the cavern of one-eyed Polyphemus, the Cyclops! To tell you the truth, if we go to yonder palace, there can be no question that we shall make our appearance at the dinner-table; but whether seated as guests, or served up as food, is a point to be seriously considered."

"Either way," murmured some of the hungriest of the crew, "it will be better than starvation; particularly if one could be sure of being well fattened beforehand, and daintily cooked afterwards."

"That is a matter of taste," said King Ulysses, "and, for my own part, neither the most careful fattening nor the daintiest of cookery would reconcile me to being dished at last. My proposal is, therefore, that we divide ourselves into two equal parties, and ascertain, by drawing lots, which of the two shall go to the palace and beg for food and a.s.sistance. If these can be obtained, all is well. If not, and if the inhabitants prove as inhospitable as Polyphemus, or the Laestrygons, then there will but half of us perish, and the remainder may set sail and escape."

As n.o.body objected to this scheme, Ulysses proceeded to count the whole band, and found that there were forty-six men including himself.

He then numbered off twenty-two of them, and put Eurylochus (who was one of his chief officers, and second only to himself in sagacity) at their head. Ulysses took command of the remaining twenty-two men in person. Then, taking off his helmet, he put two sh.e.l.ls into it, on one of which was written, "Go," and on the other, "Stay." Another person now held the helmet, while Ulysses and Eurylochus drew out each a sh.e.l.l; and the word "Go" was found written on that which Eurylochus had drawn. In this manner it was decided that Ulysses and his twenty-two men were to remain at the seaside until the other party should have found out what sort of treatment they might expect at the mysterious palace. As there was no help for it, Eurylochus immediately set forth at the head of his twenty-two followers, who went off in a very melancholy state of mind, leaving their friends in hardly better spirits than themselves.