Spirit of the Place Read online

  “I am William Hamilton,” he said clearly. The vowels sounded oddly in Greek. “And who are you?”

  “I? I am no one.” Hamilton felt a thrill in comprehending the full sentence. “No one and nothing. O lost!”

  He wondered whether a given name was contained in those words, then decided not. “Tell me your name.”

  “My name? It is Eurynomethyia. I was the daughter—” He could not understand the rest.

  “Daughter of whom?” Hamilton asked. He felt a horror that the answer might take him past the shallows of his modest comprehension.

  A rush of fluent syllables, like smooth rocks tumbling in water. “Long ago,” the voice added after a pause, then was silent.

  “Thugater” certainly meant daughter, and Hamilton recognized the name’s suffix as female. That he was conversing with a woman seemed certain. Still, he hesitated to ask the next question.

  “And you are . . . what are you?”

  “‘What’?” There was no mistaking the rhetorical echo, nor the indignation.

  Hamilton could not think how to frame an apology in ancient Greek. “You are, you are not a daughter of Man, no?”

  “Daughter of gods, tyrannos dendritos. I am one of the nymphai th’ has melias.”

  Absolute ruler of the trees? Hamilton remembered that tyrannos could also mean a ruler’s queen or princess. Perhaps she simply meant mistress. He had less trouble with “nymphs whom they call ash trees.”

  She did not seem willing to use the word itself. Hamilton wanted to hear it unprompted, but her insistence on circumlocution—if that’s what it was—compelled him, hobbled by uncertain Greek, to ask directly.

  “Eurynomethyia,” he said. “Are you a dryad?”

  “No!” The voice was not louder, but had sharpened to a knife’s edge. “Melia, not drys! I am no host of kermes. O miserable, that now I am” (something) “by dogs!”

  Hamilton thought upon this as the voice subsided to mumbling. The creature took “dryad” to mean the nymph of a drys, which he remembered meant oak. He didn’t know what “kermes” meant, and had not understood the final verb, though it sounded like an inflection of “prosoureo.” These facts only offered knowledge of a negative form.

  It did not matter. The person in front of him (the theological term came irresistibly) spoke ancient Greek, identified herself as female, and was somehow manifest through the agency of the ash hull planks. She was also very old. I don’t know that, he thought; but he did know it: nothing was more certain to him than the conviction, unsupported by anything more substantial than a rasping voice, that this being was inconceivably aged.

  He did not want to leave without saying something. He wanted to ask, Are you in pain? but found he was uncertain how to phrase it. Finally he ventured: “Do you feel agon?”

  She answered slowly, as though sensing that his comprehension was poor. Hamilton understood each word perfectly.

  “Such pain as you cannot know.”

  The voyage seemed to extend like the horizon, rounding out of sight without landmark or milestone. Hamilton spent most of his time in the main cabin, where the light ports allowed one to read without lamps on a cloudless day. He had no adequate history of ancient Greece, so had to rely on Homer, Pindar, and Apollodorus. He could find in Homer no references to dryads at all, although the epics were filled with nymphs, who were moreover divided into genera: oceanids, nereids, naiads, as well as fountain nymphs and even a “nymph of the Gygaean lake.” Perhaps Homer knew only of watery nymphs, or else his subject matter kept him to them.

  Pindar made occasional reference to nymphs, but they all seemed watery in nature. He made no mention of dryads. And while Apollodorus did, Hamilton knew him to be much more recent, centuries younger than Pericles. If dryads were real, why would they appear in the literature only so late?

  Hamilton sighed and set down his book. Straightening his back with a wince, he rose and went above, where sailors in the rigging called to each other like birds. Captain Eglen stood on the poop watching them, while Leake at the starboard rail seemed to be studying a low mass of clouds with a spyglass.

  Hamilton blinked and swayed, for the moment discomfited as a mole. By the time he had acclimated himself to the sunlight Leake had collapsed his glass and come over.

  “Too close below, yet noisy above, eh?” his friend asked good-humoredly. “One might envy the seamen, who ascend to reach airy levels closed to us.”

  “Where the ship’s list, however, is proportionately increased. Tell me,” Hamilton began, “have you ever heard of ‘kermes’?”

  Leake seemed surprised at the question. “A kind of red dye, is it not? Not often used since manufacturers discovered how to brighten cochineal with tin.”

  “A dye?” Hamilton frowned. “Perhaps it has another meaning in Greek.”

  “Let us ask the pilot.” Leake walked over to where Malis stood at the wheel. He put the question courteously in Greek, but seemed not wholly to understand the answer, and as Hamilton approached the two men began bandying terms interrogatively, of which he heard one to be entomon.

  “Insect?” asked Hamilton. “Is the kermes a kind of vermin?”

  “Exactly!” cried Malis, pleased to be understood. “Lives in trees, those that produce the balanos. Men—” he faltered, then made vigorous crushing gestures, “to produce the color red, for cloth.”

  “‘Balanos’ perhaps means acorn?” Leake ventured.

  Hamilton nodded. “It’s in Homer.”

  “Well, there you have it.” Leake seemed quite satisfied at having this established.

  So the oak tree harbors insects, which are used to make dye. And is consequently looked down upon by the ash? The key turns the lock, but the door swings open to look upon Bedlam.

  Hamilton excused himself to Leake, who hoped that he was not feeling a resumption of his infirmity. Descending the stairs unsteadily, he considered calling for brandy, then decided to content himself with the solitude. He sat at the table, now covered with books, and pushed them about so that he could read their spines.

  The volume of Hesiod caught his eye, and he pulled it over. He began skimming through the Works and Days, and while he did not find a single reference to nymphs, there were several to oaks. Hamilton remembered that oaks were said to be long-lived, and that

  the great forests of Europe contained specimens more than five hundred years old.

  It seemed an unbelievable span for a living thing to endure; yet how much longer were two millennia! Could a tree, standing unmolested in some remote Boeotian valley, live two thousand years? If it was never blasted or felled (and Hamilton supposed he could imagine geographical circumstances that would protect against both), a deep-rooted, thick-barked tree might last through centuries of unchanging climate, until the oppressions of the Turks drove peasants to find the unremarked frith and clear it.

  Hamilton began working through the Theogonia, ignoring the difficult syntax and concentrating on the nouns. Although the meaning of most Greek passages eluded him until he unraveled the inflections, the language’s small vocabulary allowed him to recognize most words. He was scarcely into the poem before he encountered a reference to nymphs who lived hai naiousin an’ ourea besseenta. The lexicon confirmed that besseeis was a woody glen.

  Fifty lines further, he found it straight:

  Nymphas th’ has Melias kaleous’ ep’ apeirona gaian.

  Even Hamilton’s indifferent command could translate this immediately as “The nymphs they call Meliaea over the limitless earth.” Nymphs of the ash trees, emphatically not nymphs of oak, and indignant (one could imagine) at the suggestion that the word for drys-nymphs might somehow become generic. Might have someday become generic, for Hamilton was suddenly certain that Eurynomethyia was older than the word “dryad,” had perhaps ceased listening to humans before the word was coined. How amenable is one to change when one’s limbs are shoots, thickening and hardening over decades, encased in deepening folds of protective bark? Hamilton h
ad seen obstinacy in dons, in his ten-years-older employer; what inflexibility might have developed in a being that had stood in solitude for hundreds of years?

  He retired to his cabin and drew down the swinging flap that served as a writing desk. The business of unstoppering his ink bottle and trimming a quill was itself conducive to reflection, but it was only in squaring the sentences on paper that he could set his thoughts in order.

  Hamilton drew forth a sheet of paper, looked a moment at its unblemished surface, and wrote: I am in communicatn with an Intelligence not entirely Human. Reading it over, he canceled “not” and replaced it with “no longer,” then drew a line through “entirely.”

  It identifies itself as Female—gives a name appropriate for a Greek maiden, tho’ one not known to me—evinces feminine indignatn as being reckon’d below her Station. Otherwise, Confusion & Dismay, (understandable in its circumstances) upon discovering itself translated into an inert and meanly us’d Form.

  Hamilton read and pondered. Do I know all this? He decided he did. He wished to note the singularity of the hewn boards speaking (one would not hear the words of a parrot from its roasted drumsticks) but directly he attempted to frame the sentence, the folly of seeking to rank marvels became apparent. Should he declare a speaking tree one degree less implausible than a speaking plank?

  In the ancient Literature, Nymphs appear’d to Mortals only in their Human Guise: Homer gives no Account of a Tree, a Wave, or a Hill-side speaking aloud. But this meant little, Hamilton reflected: Homer probably did not accompany the Achaians to Troy, and Shakespeare had employed poetical license in his plays of the English wars. Yet plainly this Person need not employ a Larynx to speak.

  How came these vibrations to be produced? As well ask by what tympanum she heard, what nerves she felt. Hamilton understood that he was not dealing with a creature classifiable by Linnaeus. Neither, however, was he dealing with a theophany: it was a creature that he had spoken to, not the daughter of a god. My faith in Providence is not shaken, he told himself.

  One afternoon he asked Leake about monsters. “Do you mean the malformed creatures born sometimes to calves and ewes, and indeed sometimes to women?” the topographer asked.

  “I am thinking rather of marvelous creatures, radically unlike those known in Christendom, that were long supposed to inhabit strange corners of the world.”

  Leake smiled. “Such as the Scythian Lamb, or the Cockatrice? Any good musty library will contain folios with wondrous prints, as I remember my grandfather having. Creatures that eat stones, have eyes in their belly, or live in flames! I remember one said to live in Libia, that killed with its poisonous breath.”

  Hamilton would have quailed at Leake’s jesting tone, save that he knew of a monster below. “I cannot but wonder whether some extraordinary creatures indeed live in unexplored lands, or reside yet unobserved in nearer ones.”

  “Doubtless some do,” said Leake judiciously. “Many regions have been but scantly visited, and creatures we know now to be real, such as the giraffe, are as outlandish as any in Pliny. But I fear that the truly fabulous beasts must repine in the libraries, for all creatures reliably reported eat, breed, and die in manners like those we know. I have read that the mammals of Australia lay eggs, but no one reports they breathe fire.”

  This was so sensible that Hamilton could think of no way to respond, save to report the evidence of his senses. How would this be received? And to take Leake below, to show him the boards that cry out, was impossible for him.

  Leake stepped back toward the railing and gestured for Hamilton to come closer. “Do you wish to know where Man may yet discover monsters? Not in trackless deserts or the ranges of unscaled mountains: but here.” And he pointed, not in any direction on the horizon, but down to the waters below.

  The two men peered over the railing. “There, where no skeletons lie to be found, where all we can see is what comes to the surface—what monsters may lurk in those depths? Mariners tell of enormous whales, of octopi that threaten ships—do you discount all of them? I do not; the sea is too deep, its reaches still unsailed.”

  Hamilton stared at the wind-sped waves, each curling white as it crashed against the hull. Homer’s monsters were of the sea, as were his nymphs. Did such creatures originate in the sea, and only later venture onto land?

  Something silver flashed beneath the waves, visible only for a second. A dolphin, or else a shark, attracted by the fish that followed boats. Easy to imagine its sleek outlines a human form, too slim to be male.

  Leake’s marvels of the vasty deep were not, Hamilton suddenly knew, the explanation for what lay below. If Eurynomethyia was not semidivine, as Hamilton knew she could not be, then she was a person outside naturalists’ classifications—an intelligentsia separata, older than men, perhaps—Hamilton felt this with a chill—older than

  Man. Such creatures had been posited by Renaissance cosmologists, but Hamilton could perceive nothing of the Renaissance, its prospective stance and vaunting limitless confidence, in the dwindled, miserable, unthinkably ancient creature in the hold.

  Yet when his thoughts turned, even here—the deck washed in light, the ship responding to the adjustments of myriad hands like a finely tuned instrument—to the gnarled intelligence that somehow resided in those planed boards, Hamilton felt his reasoning faculties falter, his agency for his Lordship shrivel, and his pride of accomplishment vanish like poor garments to leave him cold and naked in his awe.

  Hamilton fell asleep in his bunk, dozing in the waning late-afternoon light over his volume of Ovid. Something brushed his hand, and a faint buzzing came near enough his ear to wake him. A bee.

  He waved away the insect, which looped up and disappeared, evidently out the door. A word echoed, fading, as the last shreds of sleep fell away, and Hamilton caught it as the rest of the dream disappeared. A torn cry, “Telos!” in a timbre too anguished for dreams to confect.

  Hamilton winced at the sudden recollection. He had been on the Hill when it happened, present because the Disdar himself had come to observe the removal of the metopes—the temple’s finest—from the eastern pediment. Knowing the Disdar’s history of attempting to interfere with their operations, Hamilton had stood by as his Lordship’s representative while Hunt vigorously reiterated his contention that their authorization to “take away pieces of stone” while making drawings and measurements extended to removing sculptures from the Parthenon itself. In time the workmen mounted their scaffolds, and every person on the Hill—Englishman, Greek, and Turk—stood staring as the metope was slowly pulled free and hoisted, wavering slightly in its ropes, into the air.

  Hamilton didn’t see what happened next: the machinery of the windlass had blocked his view. He got only a glimpse of the cornice as it fell to the ground. The roar as it shattered seemed to go on forever, rebounding off the ruins as the thousands of tumbling fragments spread skittering across the ground like escaping mice.

  Others must have cried out, but it was the Disdar’s groan that lodged in Hamilton’s memory. “Telos!” The magnificent cornice, which a tearful workman later told him had been weakened when the metope was removed, had not been among those that Lusieri’s draftsmen had yet managed to draw. The awful gap, emerging in his mind’s eye behind the rising white cloud of marble dust, still ached like broken teeth.

  Would he feel such pain forever? Hamilton had not overseen the preparations for taking down the metopes, nor had he resolved upon their removal to England, nor deployed the mixture of threats and bribes that had won over the Disdar and earlier the Voivode. The fury that Lord Elgin would feel upon learning of the cornice’s destruction would contain no tincture of the remorse that gnawed at Hamilton, nor did the mishap burn in the conscience of Hunt. Was his Lordship’s secretary to be the goat, the sin-eater for this entire venture?

  He looked at his Metamorphoses, over which he had fallen drowsing. Here were stories of tree nymphs, now called dryads, who also made numerous appearances in Vergil, including
a reference in the Georgics to those who sought “Dryadum silvas saltusque sequamur intactos”—the unspoiled forest of the dryads.

  These pretty passages were of no use to Hamilton. What did Vergil know of the wilds of central Greece? Even Ovid, whose tales of bodies changing form seemed to hint at something important, was retelling accounts far removed from any genuine experience.

  What the Romans were first to say was too late to be true; too late, he suspected, if it appeared as recently as Euripedes. The playwrights were Athenians, city folk: only the Boeotian Hesiod knew to speak of Meliades. Hamilton wished that the Mentor held a library more extensive than his trunk.

  He was recalling the voyage of the Argonauts, another tale that appeared only suspiciously late, when he remembered something so abruptly that he sat up. The Argo, according to Apollonios Rhodios, had carried in its bow a beam taken from the Dodonian Oak, sacred as an oracle of Zeus. This wood possessed the power of speech.

  More late romancing? It was impossible to know.

  A rap at the door broke his reverie. “Come in!” he shouted, expecting Gavallo.

  It was Wigton, Eglen’s man. “The captain’s compliments, sir, and would you join him for dinner?” The sailor smirked in a manner that

  suggested his appreciation of something—the dubious honor of captain’s table in such a small ship? bad food tonight?—unknown to Hamilton.

  “Tell the captain that I shall be pleased to do so.” Hamilton turned back to his book until he heard the door close.

  Dinner anywhere other than the cramped cabin would be welcome, Hamilton thought as he turned the pages. He was about to close the volume when he saw the name of Dryope. He had forgotten about her, and quickly read her story, which told briefly how she had incautiously picked the berries of a water-lotus tree (the tree had once been a nymph) and was turned into a tree herself. Had this anything to do with dryads? She did not seem to have been turned into an oak.