And with gentle words in their longing ears she answered and spake:
“Of a surety for blessing to you and deliverance out of your toil,
Hitherward came but now one ruthless and shameless, to spoil
Our guardian serpent of life; and the Goddesses’ apples of gold
He plucked, and he bare them away, and he left us sorrowful-souled.
For there came yestreen a man most fell in wanton despite,
Grim-shapen, whose eyes ’neath his scowling brows flashed terrible light,
A pitiless man: in a monster lion’s fell untanned,
Raw hide, was he clad, with a stubborn olive-wood staff in his hand,
And a bow, with the arrows whereof he shot yon dragon dead.
And he came, he also, as one that afoot overland hath sped,
Thirst-parched: and questing for water with diligent haste he sought
Through all this place—but, I ween, he was like to behold it not!
Howbeit a certain rock by the mere Tritonian stood:
This, or of his own device, or a God wrought so on his mood,
Did he smite with his foot, and forth did the water in full burst flow.
Then down to the earth on his hands and his breast he bowed him low;
And out of the rifted rock an unspeakable draught he swilled,
Till his mighty maw, down-stooped like a beast of the field, he had filled.”
So spake she; and they right glad thence hasted, until they came
To the place where Aiglê had told of the spring; and they found the same.
And as when earth-burrowing ants swarm round their narrow pit,
All hurrying to and fro, or when clustering flies, that have lit
Where lieth a drop of the honey sweet, a tiny gout,
Insatiate-eager are thronging, so in a huddled rout
The Minyans round that rock-spring crowded on every side.
And with wet lips thus in his gladness hero to hero cried:
“O strange!—how hath Herakles saved his companions forspent with stress
Of thirst, though afar he were! Would God that he yet might bless
The eyes of us finding him faring on through the wilderness!”
Then shouted in answer they which were ready-dight for the deed.
And they parted, and this way and that way questing the lost did they speed.
For the tracks of the hero by winds of the night had been wholly effaced,
As they drifted the sand. And away did Boreas’ two sons haste,
Putting trust in their wings; and Euphêmus trusting his feet flying fast,
And Lynkeus the piercing glance of his eyes afar to cast:
And Kanthus, the fifth of the searchers, darted away with the rest,
Whom the doom of the Gods and his manfulness drave to essay that quest,
That of Herakles’ mouth for certain tidings he so might inquire
Where he left Polyphemus, Eilatus’ son; for with earnest desire
Was he fain to ask of the hero concerning his lost friend’s fate:—
But he mid the Mysians had builded a city glorious and great;
Then yearning for home came o’er him, and seeking Argo he passed
Far over the mainland, until he came to the land at the last
Of the sea-board Chalybans: there ’neath the mastering doom did he fall,
And there up-piled is his grave-mound under a poplar tall
Facing the sea. But Lynkeus deemed that he spied that day
Over measureless spaces of land lone-faring and far away
Herakles—saw him as one that hath seen or hath thought he hath seen
The moon, when the month is young, through mist-veils floating between.
To his comrades returned he, and told them that quester thereafter should see
The hero no more as he journeyed. In like wise came those three,
Even Euphêmus the swift of foot, and the scions twain
Of the Thracian Wind of the North, having toiled and striven in vain.
But, Kanthus, in Libya thee did the fell Fates bring to thine end.
Upon pasturing flocks didst thou light; and the shepherd, that wont to tend
Those sheep, in defending them smote thee, when thou thereof wast fain
To take for thy comrades’ need, and there of his hand was thou slain
By the cast of a stone; for in sooth no weakling there kept ward,
Kaphaurus, the grandson of Phoebus, Lykoreia’s Lord,
And of fair Akakallis the princess, whom Minos drave from her home
In Libya to dwell, when the fruit of a God was found in her womb,
His daughter she; and a glorious son unto Phoebus she bare,
Amphithemis namèd, and Garamas—twofold the names of him were.
And a Nymph, the Lady of Trito’s Lake, did Amphithemis wed;
And Nasamon’s might and Kaphaurus the strong she bare to his bed,
Even him which smote down Kanthus, defending his sheep as he fought.
Yet from the chieftains’ avenging hands escaped he not,
When they learned what deed he had done; and the Minyans sought their dead,
And they took up the corse, and they laid him to rest in the strait earth-bed,
Mourning, and took thereafter the slayer’s sheep for a prey.
There also Mopsus, Ampykus’ son, in the selfsame day
Did a pitiless fate cut off. Stern doom might he nowise shun
By his prophecy-lore, forasmuch as avoidance of death is there none.
For a dread snake lay mid the sand from the mid-noon sun to hide,
Too sluggish to strike of his will at such as would turn aside;
Nor yet would he dart full face upon one that in fear shrank back.
Yet into whomso but once he should spit his venom black,
Of all that on life-sustaining earth draw living breath,
Not a cubit’s length should be left of his path to the mansion of Death,
No, not though the Healer God—if this I may say, nor sin—
Should medicine him, if only his teeth should have grazed but the skin.
For when over Libya flying godlike Perseus came—
Who is also Eurymedon; so did his mother name his name—
As unto the king the Gorgon’s head new-severed he bore,
Whatsoever to earth dropped down of the dark-red gouts of gore,
All quickened, and serpents thereof of the selfsame brood did there spring.
Now Mopsus pressed on the ridge of the spine of the deadly thing,
Setting his left foot-sole thereupon; and the beast in his pain
Writhed round it: the flesh ’twixt ankle and calf in his fangs hath he ta’en,
And he tare it, the while Medea and all her handmaids fled
In affright. Howbeit the seer was handling, nothing adread,
The bleeding
