Spirit of the Place Read online

  If a Statue had the Pow’r of Speech, he wrote, then set his pen aside as a long swell pushed his nib into the paper and marred the sheet. Eurynomethyia was older than a statue, and her situation, he must admit, was worse than that of a marble undergoing removal from one place to another. A statue might speak of what it had witnessed; but Eurynomethyia, in her present extremity, would speak only of what she had suffered.

  Perhaps others—scholars, historians steeped in Greek culture, even men of Greek blood—would elicit from her the story of her origin and life, the truth of her nature. Like the stone from Rashid, Eurynomethyia would be conveyed to England, abetted by William Richard Hamilton, though he would not be present for (or assist in) the disclosure of her secrets.

  That is not enough. Hamilton pushed the paper aside and stood. He pulled on his heavier coat, irritably snapping a tendril that had twined into one sleeve. He threw open the door and breathed a different air, salt spray rather than leaf mold. A cold wind blew through the corridor from the unhatched stairs.

  Gavallo was sitting at the table with Squire’s servant, both with steaming cups that smelled of rum. “Going up, sir?” he asked in guilty surprise.

  “No, down.” Hamilton turned and pushed aside the curtain.

  He could hear the pump working in the bow, manned by two querulous and cursing boys whose Greek now seemed strange to his ears. Hamilton stood a moment, wondering whether they had heard his footsteps; but when he began to descend the ladder their sounds vanished with all thought of them, as dry breeze and the soughing of leaves suggested spaces beyond the invisible landscape of crates.

  “Eurynomethyia of the ash tree, I have returned,” he said. He could sense her presence, withdrawn and utterly still, like the indefinable sense of strangeness that can be felt at an ancient grave or battlefield. He had to take a step forward, and address her once more, before she spoke.

  “Who is my abductor?”

  Hamilton could not pretend he did not understand her; the verb was common in Homer. “My lord is a powerful statesman,” he said. “He makes compacts with our allies against a common enemy.” He did not see fit to add that the greatest ally was Greece’s invader and occupier, who had rewarded his Lordship by permitting him to strip the Parthenon.

  “He does not know of me.”

  “No, Eurynomethyia, he does not,” Hamilton admitted. “Only I know of you.”

  “Send me home,” she said suddenly. “Release me from this ship; send my poor trunk back to its valley and plant me there. Even now I might drive fingers into soil, send forth shoots and leaves. You know what I can do for you, now and later.”

  “Lady—” Hamilton began. A dozen objections rose to mind, all useless to voice. Atop everything else, he thought helplessly, he could not say in what remote valley Eurynomethyia’s ash tree had grown: and neither in all likelihood could she.

  “Think,” she persisted. “The favors of a nymph grow sweeter with repetition, and my powers will return with soil and good water. Even now, pressed against bronze and sea, I am able to extend my reach. Wood answers wood, and the rain-washed oak brings sensation like awakening limbs. Unrooted as I am, my trunk reaches higher over this sea than ever it did upon land!”

  “My lady, I am pleased at this.” Hamilton could not understand most of what she was saying, but these shifts between sullenness, entreaty, and exultation confused him still more. And she once could behave in a manner sufficiently human to be taken as a maiden?

  I can better comprehend the emotions of a hound.

  She was muttering again, and Hamilton had to direct his attention before her words swam into comprehension. “. . . Ulikumi, whom the Greek-speakers called Typhoeus. The storm-god alone sees both land and sea; would know me, help me, were he.”

  “Lady?”

  “No god answers. Once my ears and fingers stretched west to the limits of land and north to Hyperboreia, where the trees end. Men crouched beneath us in fear of gods, built temples to them and to us, for we are the gods’ children. Where are they now?”

  “You hear no gods.” Hamilton meant it as a question, but his assurance came through.

  “Long have I called, unanswered. A storm comes now, but it is weak, and not of their doing.”

  “You would call down the gods upon us?” Hamilton could not hide his shock.

  “Lightning split this hull, if it could!” Her rage was fearsome, striking suddenly as a snake. “Had my vines strength, they would choke you! Did these branches obey, they would crash on you! Hewer of my heart’s wood, you are too lowborn to be cursed!”

  “That is unjust,” retorted Hamilton, indignant. He did not know whether he protested being blamed for the Meliad’s felling or the aspersion of his birth.

  “My curses, however, on your master!” It was a Homeric imprecation, the one made in petition to gods. “Master of dogs, of licentious ingrates. Honorless servant, of a master without honor!”

  “Eurynomethyia, be still!”

  “May his nose rot! May his wife deceive him, his countrymen beggar him, and drive him penniless into exile!”

  “His nose has already rotted!” Hamilton shouted. The absurdity of his words shocked him.

  “Ha!” The creature had executed one of her insane changes of mood. “My prayer is answered. Somewhere, some god yet lives who hears a nymph’s entreaties.”

  “Eurynomethyia, listen to yourself.” Hamilton was shaking, a bough tossed by the winds of unreason. He sought to speak calmly, to attain the weight and substance of the crated Phidian marbles. “My lord’s affliction is more than a year old. Your curses have not produced it.”

  “But they have! Foolish mortal, know you nothing of time?”

  “Yes, I understand time.” Eurynomethyia seemed about to speak, but Hamilton overrode her. “Time wastes. It ravages, Lady, without preference. Mortals age swiftly, like flowers that die at year’s end, but you—who have lasted so long—time has decayed so slowly you have not perceived it, like a great house that has moldered from within.” His voice was shaking.

  “You are old, Lady, and your strength has gone. I am sorry.” A sudden grief seized him, stronger than he could master. “I do not know what will become of you.” The idea of announcing the creature’s existence, parading her before scholars and naturalists, seemed plainly impossible. An encounter with a nymph, whatever it brought, was ultimately solitary, unsharable.

  Her fury raged but lacked force, like a blast too spent to flatten. “Myia! Mayfly! I will be taking lovers after you are dust! My roots will pierce your children’s graves! Lives such as yours fly like leaves, scattered in autumn winds—”

  Hamilton stepped backward, bumping against a case, and her voice blurred into incomprehensibility. A further step and it faded to silence. He was standing ankle-deep in water, and the keel rolled slowly beneath him.

  Blindly he groped for the ladder and began to climb. The air seemed to thicken as he ascended, as though he were straining to push through a membrane, and he felt a wavering disorientation. He climbed a step farther and felt something shift, as though his head had broken through clouds. The humidity of the hold abruptly struck him, and the exertions of the sailors at the pump echoed against the dripping walls.

  He staggered with his first step into the corridor, for the ship was listing severely. Leake’s face appeared from around the cabin corner.

  “Good God, man, what have you been doing? You have been down there for hours!”

  “Hours? That’s nonsense.” But there was something different about the light, even slanting through ports and staircase. Hamilton entered the cabin and turned about, feeling something deeply wrong. He ran up the steps, staggering as the ship listed hard, and stepped out on deck.

  The sky was so black that Hamilton could not have pointed to the Sun, yet he knew immediately that it was no longer morning. Driving rain stung one side of his face, and white water crashed over the bow and spread across the deck. He stumbled toward Squire, who stood gripping the f
ife rail.

  “What is happening?” he cried.

  “We are making for harbor,” Squire shouted over the wind. “That’s Cerigo ahead.” He pointed past the bow, where the outline of land broke the horizon.

  Hamilton gaped. Cerigo was less than two days’ sail from Piraeus, and they had been traveling . . . an invisible lattice crashed inward, and the strange air that had enclosed him was at once blown away. What had he been thinking? The Mentor had been under sail only since yesterday morning.

  Eglen was shouting at his men to reef the sails, while the mate gave orders to cast both anchors. Hamilton clutched the fife as the deck tilted beneath him, and an oval plane in the mast’s oak, like the place where a branch had been lopped, stirred and opened into a face. “I hear them!” Eurynomethyia cried, her expression rapt. “My sisters!”

  “You are mad,” Hamilton shouted, feeling mad himself.

  “Nereidai, heed me! Free me from my captivity!” Hamilton felt her attention fix briefly upon him. “Your shameful abduction is finished! Telos!”

  Hamilton stepped backward, shaking his head. Men were crowding the bow even as foam splashed and raced over their feet. The sails were gone, and the masts (he leaned backward to see) seemed in their naked buffeting to writhe like tossed branches. Cries from the bow—“The anchors aren’t holding!”—reached him faintly through the wind. He ran for the rail, nearly slipping as spume sluiced the deck, and stared out.

  And in the heart of the storm, he saw them. Waves rose to caps, white with foam, and the heads and shoulders of women, hair streaming, formed and rode the great swells. Their expressions unreadable, they sank and resurfaced within seconds, dozens of them, glowing like bobbing lanterns.

  He heard Eurynomethyia’s laughter somewhere above, and the cries to cut the cables as sailors swarmed back up the masts to hoist sail. The ship was drifting, its anchors clawing at the harbor floor. No rocks were visible when it struck, but Hamilton felt the impact through his soles and stumbled to his knees in the rushing spill.

  The ship turned slowly, as though twisting away from its goring. McFarlane burst through the main hatch, shouting wildly. Sailors dropped from the rigging like fruit. As Hamilton watched, one of them drew his knife and slashed through the ropes that secured the jolly boat to the deck.

  The terrible faces now appeared over the railing, and suddenly water was pouring through on all sides. The deck was crowded with men—Leake, crying after his papers, was put into the boat by two sailors—and a cask, moving like a log in a millrace, struck Hamilton and sent him sprawling. His palms plunged through water to strike the deck. He felt an instant of illumination—the entire wooden structure, even to its splintered hull and drowned crates, shrieking triumph as its final compartments flooded—then someone grabbed his coat from behind. The deck fell away before he could gain his footing, and he was kicking in water.

  A black wave smacked him, and he grabbed wildly for purchase. The cask rolled past, silent; and with inhuman singing in his ears, the Mentor, marbles, and nympha Eurynomethyia slid irretrievably beneath the foam-tipped surface of history and into the depths of mythos.

  On September 17, 1802, the Mentor, carrying seventeen cases of Parthenon marbles and nineteen men, struck the rocks of South Nikolo Bay at Kythera and sank in twelve fathoms.