Farshooter Tectaphos came to the war. Once he had been saved from fate by sucking the milk from a daughter’s breast with starving lips—she devised this trick to nourish her father—Tectaphos, parched, with crumbling skin, a living corpse. Deriades the monarch had carried out a heartless threat, and bound him fast with twisted ropes, and held him a prisoner behind lock and key in a mouldy pit, unfed, unwashed, worn out with famine, without his part in the sun or the rounded moon. There lay the man fettered in the depths of the earth, with no drink, no food, seeing no man, there in a cavern dug deep under the soil he lay in agony. Long he was wasted by famine, breathing yet like those who breathe not, as the air passed weak and fluttering through his hungry lips ; ugly whiffs came from his dry flesh as if he were a corpse. There was a band of jailers watching the imprisoned man, but his clever daughter outwitted them with delusive words, a young nursing mother, when she uttered a mournful appeal and shook her deceiving garments :
“To not let me die, watchmen! I have nothing here, I have brought no drink and no food for my father! Tears, only tears I bring for him that begat me! My empty hands tell you that! If you do not believe me, if you do not believe, undo my innocent girdle, tear off my veil, shake my dress—I have brought no drink to save his life! Do but shut me up too with my father in the deep pit. I am nothing for you to fear, nothing, even if the king hears of it. Who is angry with one who pities a corpse ? Who is angry with one dying a cruel death? Who does not pity the dead? I will close my father’s sinking eyes. Shut me up there: who grudges death? Let us die together, and let one tomb receive daughter and father !
Her pleading won them. The girl ran into the den, bringing light for her father’s darkness. In that pit, she let the milk of her breast flow into her father’s mouth, to avert his destruction, and felt no fear.
Deriades marvelled to hear the pious deed of Kérié. He set free the clever girl’s father from his prison, like a ghost; the fame of it was noised abroad, and the Indian people praised the girl’s breast which had saved a life by its cunning.
So now this man was conspicuous among the Bolinges, as Hesperos shines amid the stars and brightens the sky, Hesperos, harbinger of the murky gloom which follows when light fails.
Ginglon highheaded, and Thyraieus striding big, and Hippalmos tall as the clouds, beyond the farthest region of earth had armed the different tribes of spearproud Arachotes, and battalions of Dersaioi their neighbours, who when men are slain with steel in battle cover their bodies under mounds of earth.
Habrathods came with a host of bowmen whom he had gathered in support, but he had been slow in arming for shame of his hair newly shorn. He nursed resentment and grievance against Deriades the horned king ; because the overbearing monarch in a fit of mad folly had cut off all his hair, a bitter insult to an Indian. Compelled to join in the war, he came unwillingly, and hid the shame of his hairless temples under a highplumed helmet, cherishing secret rancour in his heart. When battle came, he joined the fight in the daytime ; but always in the hours of the night he would send a trusty servant to Bacchos, and tell him the plans of Deriades. Thus he fought secretly for Deriades, but openly for Dionysos. He brought the savage tribes of Xuthoi and of battlestirring Arienoi and the breed of Zoares and the clan of Eares, the Caspeirian peoples and Arbians?: those who held Hysporos that bright shining stream, so proud of its deep wealthy mines of amber ; and those who held conspicuous Arsanié, where the women in one day at the loom of Pallas, which they know so well, finish a whole robe with their quick hands.
Besides these came the Cyraioi, ready for diving-work in the war. They know the seabeaten coasts of islands, and they are skilful in battle by sea; but seafaring barges they know not. They go floating in coracles of untanned hide, which they manage as well as a shipwright’s vessel of wood; they guide their makeshift course in the skins, where the mariner sits in shelter, navigating over the waves and cutting the back of the sea in his mimic barge. These were commanded by Thyamis and princely Holeasos, two sons of one father, Tarbelos the javelineer.
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