dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her
fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they yet moulded in prophetic grace of
structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek
apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms : all is gone. Agendath is a waste
land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is
no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of
rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and
goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and
yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come
trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous, revengeful zodiacal host!
They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted
with the tusked, the lionmaned the giantantlered, snouter and crawler,
rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude,
murderers of the sun.
Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven’s own magnitude till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And, lo, wonder of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer! It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus.
Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father. All who wish you well hope this for
