Then Cadmos surveyed the house with roving gaze : that masterly work of Hephaistos, which the industrious god once built for Electra as a bride, and embellished it with many ornaments in the fine Myrinaian art of Lemnos The whole palace was: new. A brazen threshold well-wrought was before it. Double doors with lofty pillars opened into a vestibule richly carven, and a spanned the roof with a rounded head seen in the middle. The walls were faced with tessellated stones set in white cement from threshold to inner end. Before the house near the courtyard was an enclosure, widespread, four acres of trees heavy with fresh fruit. Male palm stretched “his leaves over female palm, pledging his love. Pear growing by pear, all of one age with glorious fruit, whispered in the morning breeze—and with its dangling clusters beat on the pollard growth of a luscious olive hard by. In the breezes of spring, the myrtle waved his leaves by the reluctant laurel, while the fragrant wind of morning fanned the foliage of the leafy cypress. On the fig-tree, mother of sweets, and the juicy pomegranate, red fruit grew rich over purple fruit beside it, and apple flourished near apple. On the learned leaves of Apollo’s mournful iris was embroidered many a plant-grown word ; and when Zephyros breathed through the flowery garden, Apollo turned a quick eye upon his young darling, his yearning never satisfied ; if he saw the plant beaten by the breezes, he remembered the quoit, and trembled for fear the wind, so jealous once about the boy, might hate him even in a leaf: if it is true that Apollo once wept with those eyes that never wept, to see that boy writhing in the dust, and the pattern there on the flower traced its own “alas!” on the iris, and so figured the tears of Phoibos,
Such was the shady garden. Hard by, a brook divided in two runnels ; from this the people drew their drinking, from that the gardener cut up the water into many curving channels and carried it from to plant : one stream chuckled at the root of a. as if Phoibos were singing a delicate tune to his Daphne.
Within, well wrought boys of gold stood on many pillars of stone, holding out torches before the banqueters to give them light for their dessert in the evening. Before the gates rows of dogs stood on this side and that, not real yet intelligent, all modelled alike, silent works of art, snarling with gaping throats; then if a man came by whom they knew, golden dog by silver dog would bark with swelling throat and fawn upon him. So as Cadmos passed, Echo sent forth a sound like a welcome for a guest, and wagged the friendly shape of an artificial tail. While Cadmos had been moving his face about and turning his eyes to survey the royal garden, and saw the sculptures, and all the beauty of the hall with its paintings and bright sparkling precious stones, Emathion had left the market-place and the disputes of his people, and sat splendid upon the back of a courser with arching neck. He was lord of Samothrace, the seat of Ares, having inherited the royal house of Electra his mother. At that time he was sole king, holding the reins of sovereignty which belonged to his brother Dardanos, who had left his native soil, and migrated to the soil of the continent opposite. There he had scored the dust of Ida with a plow-furrow, and marked the limits of Dardania, the fortified city which bore his name. So: he drank the water of Sevenstreams and the flood of Rhesos, leaving the inheritance and the sceptre of the Cabeiroi to his brother.
This Dardanos, Emathion’s brother, was one whom the bed of Zeus had begotten, whom Justice nursed and cared for at the time when the Seasons ran to the mansion of Queen Electra, bearing the sceptre of Zeus, and the robe of Time, and the staff of Olympos, to prophesy the indissoluble dominion of the Ausonian race. The Seasons brought up the baby ; and by an irrevocable oracle of Zeus, the lad oH just sprouting the flower of recrescent youth left Electra’s house, when for the third time a deluge of rain had flooded the world’s foundations with towering billows,
Ogygos made proof of the first roaring deluge, as he cut the air through the high-climbing waters, when all the earth was hidden under the flood, when the tops of the Thessalian rocks were covered, when the summit of the Pythian rock near the clouds on high was bathed in the snow-cooled flood. There was a second deluge, when tempestuous waters covered the circuit of the round earth in a furious flood, when all mortal men perished, and Deucalion alone with his mate Pyrrha in a hollow ark cutting the swirling flood of infinite deluge went on his eddying voyage through the air turned water.
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