Da Vinci's Bicycle, Guy Davenport [best motivational books to read TXT] 📗

the loch he’s sae still aboot, the bairn explained to the laird.

On a spring day in 1913 the monster, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, a plesiosaurus with lots of teeth, saw Betún as clearly as his Jurassic vision allowed, an insect with five feet, black wings, and one large eye that caught the sun with a fierce flash. As a detail of the Out There, Betún held little interest, and until he came into the Here he would not eat him.

Betún’s photograph shows a long wet nose and lifted lip, an expressionless reptilian eye, and a gleaming flipper. It was published in La Prensa upside down and in the London Times with a transposed caption identifying it as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arriving in Sarajevo for a visit of state.

The Antiquities of Elis

ON THE MOUNTAIN road from Olympia to Elis you come to the ruins of Pylos. White dust, which the traveler to Greece must learn to endure, had covered my mule and my baggage, the beard and eyebrows of Pyttalos my guide, and the copper hair of Lykas my courier. It was late summer, the crickets trilled all day, there was a bronze tone in the green of the Elean forests, and Pyttalos, whose face was more wrinkled than any I had even seen, said in his offhanded way that we were in a place known to be bad for werewolves. I took him literally at first, Greeks are apt to say anything, and then I saw he was making some allusion to Lykas, whose name of course means wolf. I looked to Lykas for an explanation, or for the joke, but he was grinning as always, as good-natured as a dog.

— What do the werewolves do? I asked.

— Eat lambs, Pyttalos said. Flatten girls and wives.

I shook dust from my sleeves, observed the varieties of nettle, star flower, asphodel, and briar, and said that Lykas hadn’t bitten us yet.

Pyttalos looked surprised. He put up well with my foreign ways and astounding ignorance, though I had overheard him explaining my importance, and hence his, at Olympia. I was, he said, taking Hellas down in a book, so that the Roumeli and Calabriani could know its shrines and holy places. I asked as many questions as a philosopher, he elucidated, but was not so womanish or thick in the head.

— Not Lykas, Kyrie. Werewolves. Lykas is I should think a Bear brother, and says his prayers to Apollo Wheat Mouse, and still goes to the equinoxes with his mama. You have to belong to the Lady to get on the road you go off of into the wolf spell.

Lykas picked up a flint and shied it at a lizard.

— I’ve been to the Artemis service, he said. With my sister.

— Pylos, Pyttalos said, pointing.

The ruins of a wall ran in and out of wild olive across a white riverbed, the Ladon when the winter rains make it into a river again.

— Two rivers, Pyttalos explained. Over to the left is the Peneios. The Ladon comes into it just where the old town used to be.

I was told in Elis that this Pylos was named for its founder Pylon Klesonides, that Herakles destroyed it, that the Eleans rebuilt it, but that it never amounted to anything, and has been abandoned for a century or more. They also remarked that it is the Pylos of Homer. They could be right, for the river Alph flows through Elis, and there is no such river among the Pylians on the coast across from Sphakteria, and no one has ever heard of a Pylos in Arkadia.

Before setting out for Elis we had eaten honeycomb and goat cheese under the great oak by the sanctuary of Artemis of the Mating Dance, where the bones of Pelops lie in a bronze box. Mount Sipylos is said to be the home of that licentious and sacred dance, and Pyttalos laughed, licking honey from his fingers.

— Some dance, he said. These Eliskoi have a house for the Lady every hilltop and ash grove. I’ve seen the dance at the Thargely and by the Dog there wasn’t a bird on its nest.

Lykas chewed his barley cake and grinned.

We had been on the road for two days when we came to the ruins of Pylos. Aside from werewolves, which Pyttalos assured us appeared there at the right time of the moon, Pylos had nothing to offer but her overgrown ruins, and we pushed on to Herakleia, an Elean village on the river Kytheros. There is a spring outside Herakleia inhabited by the nymphs Kalliphaeia, Synallasis, Pegaia, and Iasis, or Shine, Leap, Gush, and Heal. Together they are called the Ionides, named for Ion the son of Gargettos, who came here from Athens. The spring is particularly efficacious in curing arthritis and rheumatism. Pyttalos remarked that it took a poultice of asafetida and horseradish to get at the root of his aches, and that he left sitting in a cold spring to the young and the not overly bright. And added that it was scarcely decent anyway.

We had an onion and some hot wine with sage in it at Herakleia, and looked at the sanctuary of the nymphs, scaring a heron as we approached. I admired the butterflies and lizards, Pyttalos found a trefoil which he picked, and we moved on toward Letrini.

There is little left of Letrini. A few houses still stand, and a temple of Artemis Alpheiaia. Alpheios, the legend goes, loved Artemis, and decided to carry her off. The goddess had come to Letrini for her night festival, to dance under the full moon with her virgins. She knew Alpheios’ intent, and she and her companions smeared their faces with river mud, so that Alpheios could not tell which of the dancers was Artemis. I think rather that the temple is to Artemis Elaphiaia, Artemis of the Deer Folk, whose cult is observed at Elis. And yet the Eleans say that Elaphios was Artemis’s childhood nurse.

The muddy face of Artemis was