Wonder Stories Part 10

Then the river-G.o.d grew very angry. His green robe changed its color to that of the black of the sea in a storm, and his voice was as loud as that of a mountain cataract. Achelous could be almost as powerful as Hercules when he was angered.

"How do you dare claim this royal maiden?" he roared, "you, who have mortal blood in your veins! I am a G.o.d and the king of the waters.

Wherever I take my way over the earth grains and fruits ripen and flowers bud and bloom. The Princess Dejanira is mine by right."

Hercules frowned as he advanced toward the river-G.o.d. "Your strength is only in words," he said scornfully. "My strength is in my arm. If you would win Dejanira, it must be by hand-to-hand combat." So the river-G.o.d threw off his garments and Hercules his lion's skin, and the two fought for the hand of the princess.

It was a brave and valorous battle. Neither yielded; both stood their ground. Achelous slipped in and out of Hercules' mighty grasp a dozen times, but at last the hero's powerful strength was too much for this G.o.d who had to depend upon adroitness only. Hercules gripped the river-G.o.d fast by his neck and held him, panting for breath.

Then Achelous resorted to the trickery that he knew. He suddenly changed his form through the magic arts he could practise to that of a long, slimy serpent. He twisted out of Hercules' grasp and darted a forked tongue out at him, showing his fangs. Hercules was not yet undone. He only laughed scornfully at the serpent and grasped the creature by the back of its neck, ready to strangle it.

Achelous struggled in vain to escape and at last resorted once more to sorcery. In a second the serpent had changed its form to that of a ferocious, roaring bull. It charged upon Hercules with lowered horns.

But the hero was still unvanquished. He seized hold of the bull's horns, bent its head, gripped its brawny neck and threw it, burying its horns in the ground. Then he broke off one of the horns with his iron strong hand and held it up in the air shouting,

"Victory! Dejanira is mine!"

Achelous returned to his own shape and, crying with pain, ran from the castle grounds where the combat had taken place and did not stop until he had plunged into a cooling stream. It had been right that Hercules should triumph, for his was the strength of arm, not of trickery.

The Princess Dejanira came to him and with her the G.o.ddess of plenty, Ceres, to give the conqueror his reward.

Ceres took the great horn which Hercules had torn from Achelous' head and heaped it full to overflowing with the treasures of the year's harvest. Ripe grain, purple grapes, rosy apples, plums, nuts, pomegranates, olives and figs filled the horn and spilled over the edge.

The wood-nymphs and the water-nymphs came and twined the horn with vines and crimson leaves and the last bright flowers of the year. Then they carried this first horn of plenty high above their heads and gave it to Hercules and the beautiful Dejanira as a wedding present. It was the richest gift the G.o.ds could make, that of the year's harvest.

And ever since that long-ago story time of the Greeks, the horn of plenty has stood for the year's blessing of us.

THE WONDER THE FROGS MISSED

Latona had very wonderful twin babies and the queen of the G.o.ds, Juno, was jealous of her on account of these little ones. Perhaps Juno had the power to look ahead through the years to the time when Latona's children should be grown up and take their places with the family of the G.o.ds on Mount Olympus.

Who were these twins? Oh, that is the end of the story.

So Juno, who could work almost any good or evil which she desired, decreed that this mother should never have any fixed home in which to bring up her babies. If Latona found a shelter and a cradle for the twins in the cottage of some hospitable farmer, a drought would descend at once upon his fields and dry up the harvest, or a hailstorm would destroy his fruit crop so that there would be no food for the family. If Latona stopped with the vine dressers, laying her babies in the cool shade of an arbor while she helped to pick the grapes, a gale might arise and sweep down upon the vineyard and all would have to flee for their lives.

She was obliged to wander up and down the land with her little ones, wrapping her cloak about them to shield them from the weather, and she grew very weary and despaired of ever raising her little boy and girl to be the fine man and woman she longed to have them.

One day in the heat of the summer Latona came to the country of Lycia in Greece and it really seemed as if she could not walk a single step farther. The babies were heavy and she had found no water for refreshing herself for a long time. By chance, though, she saw a pool of clear water just beyond in the hollow of a valley. Some of the country people of Lycia were there on the edge of the water gathering reeds and fine willows with which they were weaving baskets for holding fruits. Latona summoned all her strength and dragged herself to the pool, kneeling down on the bank to drink and dip up water for cooling the babies' heads.

"Stop!" the rustic people commanded her. "You have no right to touch our waters!"

"I only wish to drink, kind friends," Latona explained to them. "I thought that water was free to all, and my mouth is so dry that I can hardly speak. A drink of water would be nectar to me. The G.o.ds give us as common property the sunshine, the air, and the streams and I would only share your pool to revive me, not to bathe in it. See how my babies, too, stretch out their arms to you in pleading!"

It was quite true; Latona's little ones were holding out their arms in supplication, but the rustics turned their heads away. They did more than this. They waded into the pool and stirred up the water with their feet so as to make it muddy and unfit to drink. As they did this they laughed at Latona's discomfiture and jeered at her sorry plight.

She was a long suffering mother, but she felt as if this unkindness was more than she could bear. She lifted her hands toward the habitation of the G.o.ds and called to them for help.

"May these rustics who refuse to succor two children of your family be punished!" Latona begged. "May they never be able to leave this pool whose clear waters they have defiled!"

The company of the G.o.ds, and perhaps Juno also, heard Latona's entreaty and one of the strangest things of all mythology happened.

The rustics tried to leave the pool and return to their basket-making, but they discovered that their feet had suddenly grown flat and shapeless and were stuck fast in the mud. They called for help, but their voices were harsh, their throats bloated, and their mouths had stretched so that they were unable to form words. Their necks had disappeared and their heads, with great bulging eyes, were joined to their backs. Their flesh was turned to thick green skin and they could not stand erect.

It was as Latona had asked. These boorish, unseeing country clowns would never leave the slimy water into which they had stepped, for the G.o.ds had changed them into the first frogs.

"This is indeed a terrible punishment for so slight an offence as ridiculing a stranger," the people of Lycia said to each other as they visited the pools and rivers during the seasons that followed and listened to the continual, hoa.r.s.e croaking of the frogs. The river G.o.d, Peneus, knew them also and so did the lovely nymph, Daphne, his daughter, who was never happier than when she was flying on her fairy like feet, her soft green garments fluttering about her, along the edge of some stream.

Daphne was more like a spirit of the woods than a girl. She would rather live within the shadow of leaves than under a palace roof, and she liked better to follow the deer and gather wild flowers than to have any intercourse with the boys and girls of the villages. But she was unmatched by the most beautiful daughter of all Greece, her long hair flung loose like a veil over her shoulders, her eyes as soft and shining as stars, and her body as graceful and well moulded as some rare vase.

At that time a strange youth was seen to haunt the forests and banks of the river G.o.d. He was as fair and well shaped as Daphne, and there was also something unusual about him. Whenever he was seen, there seemed to be more light along the paths where he walked. He made the daytime brighter and the gold rays of the sun shine more gloriously. When this youth stopped for a while with a shepherd, no wolves attacked the flock, and he kept herds safe from the mountain lions. He had made a lyre for himself, a musical instrument of many tuneful strings that had not been heard in Greece before. He was touching the strings into a song about the pastures and the woods in the spring one day when he suddenly saw the nymph, Daphne.

He had seen her before moving like a green bough blown by the wind along the sh.o.r.es of many waters. He thought that he had never seen so beautiful a creature or one so much to be desired, but whenever Daphne caught a glimpse of this strange, strong youth, she was frightened and was at once off and away. Now, though, he was determined to pursue Daphne and catch her. He dropped his lyre and ran after her, but she eluded him, running more swiftly than the wind.

"Stay, daughter of Peneus," he called. "Do not fly from me as a dove flies from a hawk. I am no rude peasant, but one of the G.o.ds and I know all things, present or future. It is for love that I pursue you, and I am miserable in the fear that you may fall and hurt yourself on these stones and I shall have been the cause of your hurt. Pray run slower and I will follow more slowly!"

But Daphne was deaf to the youth's entreating words. On she sped, the wind blowing her green garments, and her hair streaming loosely behind her. It was, at last, like the fleet running hound pursuing the hare; the youth was swifter and gained on her. His panting breath touched her neck. In her terror she did not stop to understand that he pursued her only because he loved her so much and that he would not do her any harm.

At last she came to the edge of a stream.

On one side of Daphne were the croaking frogs and the water reeds and the deeper waters beyond. On the other side was her pursuer. Daphne called to her father, the river G.o.d,

"Help me, Peneus! Open the earth to take me into it out of sight and sound!"

But the G.o.d of light and music knew what was better far for Daphne than this. He touched her fair form and it stiffened and her feet stood firmly upon the bank of the stream. Her body was suddenly enclosed in tender bark and her hair became leaves. Her arms were long, drooping branches and her face changed to the form of a tree top. There had never been a tree like the one into which Daphne was transformed, the green laurel tree.

The young G.o.d looked at her and saw how fair a work of his hands was this changing of a nymph. The tree would never fade, but would stretch its green top up toward the sky to feel the light that he would pour down on it. When the wind touched the laurel's leaves they would sing as his lyre sang.

"Come and see what beauty I have given to the nymph, Daphne, whom I loved," he called, and out of the forest came a brave young huntress, a deer walking quite unafraid at her side. It was Diana, his sister, and she hung her quiver of arrows on the laurel tree and led the deer to a shelter underneath its branches.

"This shall be my tree," he said putting his hands on the laurel. "I will wear it for my crown, and when the great Roman conquerors lead their troops to the Capitol in triumphal pomp it shall be woven into wreaths for their brows. As eternal youth is mine, the laurel shall always be green and its leaves shall never wither."

The sun began to sink behind the hills and the youth saw the light fade in terror. He could give the laurel the brightness of day but he had no power to keep it safe through the darkness of night. Just then a silver ball appeared in the purple sky rising higher and higher and sending down long white beams to brighten the dusk.

"Diana, see, there is a light in the evening sky!" the youth exclaimed, but his sister had disappeared. Diana, the huntress, was now Diana, the moon, the queen of the darkness and shedding her light on the laurel tree that her brother, Apollo, the G.o.d of the sun, loved so much.

The frogs along the river bank croaked harshly and could not understand any of these wonders that had come to pa.s.s right beside them. They had missed a wonder when they were rustics, too. There are some people like that. They, too, would see only a ragged, weary stranger with her tired babies, not worth the trouble of helping, when those little ones might be an Apollo and a Diana, the G.o.ds of the day and the night.

WHEN PHAETON'S CHARIOT RAN AWAY.

"You are only boasting, Phaeton. I don't believe for a moment that your father is Apollo, the G.o.d of light," Cycnus, one of his schoolmates, said to the lad who had just made this proud statement.

"It is true," Phaeton replied. "You won't believe me because I am alone here in Greece, cared for by one of the nymphs and learning the lessons that all Greek boys do. I shall show you, though. I will take my way to the home of the G.o.ds and present myself to my father."

That was indeed a bold plan on the part of this youth who had not been beyond the sh.o.r.es of his native land in all his life. But Phaeton set out at once for India, since that was the place where the sun which lighted Greece seemed to rise. He felt sure that he would find Apollo at the palace of the Sun, so he did not stop until he had climbed mountains and then beyond and higher through the steeps of the clouds. Suddenly he was obliged to stop, covering his eyes with his hands to shut out the brilliant light that dazzled him. There, in front of Phaeton, reared aloft on shining columns, stood the palace of the Sun.