mos bound for a Hellenic
shrine, but hating all Hellenes in his soul. A verse of Homer consoled
him-the words which Phocion spoke to Achilles. "Verily even the gods
may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are
greater than thine; yet even these do men, when they pray, turn from
their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows." The
Far-Darter must hate the hubris of those Hellenes, and be the more
ready to avenge it since they dared to claim his countenance. "No race
has ownership in the gods," a Lemnian song-maker had said when Atta had
been questioning the ways of Poseidon.

The following dawn found him coasting past the north end of Euboea in
the thin fog of a windless summer morn. He steered by the peak of
Othrys and a spur of Oeta, as he had learnt from a slave who had
travelled the road. Presently he was in the muddy Malian waters, and
the sun was scattering the mist on the landward side. And then he
became aware of a greater commotion than Poseidon's play with the ships
off Pelion. A murmur like a winter's storm came seawards. He lowered
the sail, which he had set to catch a chance breeze, and bade the men
rest on their oars. An earthquake seemed to be tearing at the roots of
the hills.

The mist rolled up, and his hawk eyes saw a strange sight. The water
was green and still around him, but shoreward it changed its colour.
It was a dirty red, and things bobbed about in it like the Persians in
the creek of Sciathos. On the strip of shore, below the sheer wall of
Kallidromos, men were fighting-myriads of men, for away towards Locris
they stretched in ranks and banners and tents till the eye lost them in
the haze. There was no sail on the queer, muddy-red-edged sea; there
was no man on the hills: but on that one flat ribbon of sand all the
nations of the earth were warring. He remembered about the place:
Thermopylae they called it, the Gate of the Hot Springs. The Hellenes
were fighting the Persians in the pass for their Fatherland.

Atta was prudent and loved not other men's quarrels. He gave the word
to the rowers to row seaward. In twenty strokes they were in the mist
again...

Atta was prudent, but he was also stubborn. He spent the day in a
creek on the northern shore of the gulf, listening to the weird hum
which came over the waters out of the haze. He cursed the delay. Up
on Kallidromos would be clear dry air and the path to Delphi among the
oak woods.