Cloud Cuckoo Land Read Online Free PDF Page A

shadow, and in the rear the boy’s mother rides the mare, the baby blinking up from his bundle, watching the sky.
    By nightfall they are in a trackless ravine nine miles from the village. A creek winds between ice-capped boulders, and wayward clouds, as big as gods, drag through the crowns of the trees, whistling strangely, and spook the cattle. They camp beneath a limestone overhang inside which hominids painted cave bears and aurochs and flightless birds eons ago. The girls crowd their mother and Grandfather builds a fire and the goat whimpers and the dogs tremble and the baby’s eyes catch the firelight.
    â€œOmeir,” says his mother. “We will call him Omeir. One who lives long.”

Anna
    S he is eight and returning from the vintner’s with three jugs of Kalaphates’s dark, head-splitting wine, when she pauses to rest outside a rooming house. From a shuttered window she hears, in accented Greek:
Meanwhile Ulysses at the palace waits,
    There stops, and anxious with his soul debates,
    Fix’d in amaze before the royal gates.
    The front appear’d with radiant splendors gay,
    Bright as the lamp of night, or orb of day,
    The walls were massy brass: the cornice high
    Blue metals crown’d in colors of the sky,
    Rich plates of gold the folding doors incase;
    The pillars silver, on a brazen base;
    Silver the lintels deep-projecting o’er,
    And gold the ringlets that command the door.
    Two rows of stately dogs, on either hand,
    In sculptured gold and labor’d silver stand
    These Vulcan form’d with art divine, to wait
    Immortal guardians at Alcinous’s gate…
    Anna forgets the handcart, the wine, the hour—everything. The accent is strange but the voice is deep and liquid, and the meter catches hold of her like a rider galloping past. Now come the voices of boys, repeating the verses, and the first voice resumes:
Close to the gates a spacious garden lies,
    From storms defended and inclement skies.
    Four acres was the allotted space of ground,
    Fenced with a green enclosure all around.
    Tall thriving trees confess’d the fruitful mold:
    The reddening apple ripens here to gold.
    Here the blue fig with luscious juice o’erflows,
    With deeper red the full pomegranate glows;
    The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear,
    And verdant olives flourish round the year,
    The balmy spirit of the western gale
    Eternal breathes on fruits, unthought to fail:
    Each dropping pear a following pear supplies,
    On apples apples, figs on figs arise…
    What palace is this, where the doors gleam with gold and the pillars are silver and the trees never stop fruiting? As though hypnotized, she advances to the rooming house wall and scales the gate and peers through the shutter. Inside, four boys in doublets sit around an old man with a goiter ballooning from his throat. The boys repeat the verses in a bloodless monotone, and the man manipulates what looks like leaves of parchment in his lap, and Anna leans as close as she dares.
    She has seen books only twice before: a leather-bound Bible, winking with gems, conducted up the central aisle by elders at Saint Theophano; and a medical catalogue in the market that the herb seller snapped shut when Anna tried to peer inside. This one looks older and grimier: letters are packed onto its parchment like the tracks of a hundred shorebirds.
    The tutor resumes the verse, in which a goddess disguises the traveler in mist so that he can sneak inside the shining palace, and Anna bumps the shutter, and the boys look up. In a heartbeat a wide-shouldered housekeeper is waving Anna back through the gate as though chasing a bird off fruit.
    She retreats to her handcart and pushes it against the wall, butwagons rumble past and raindrops begin to strike the rooftops, and she can no longer hear. Who is Ulysses and who is the goddess who cloaks him in magical mist? Is the kingdom of brave Alcinous the same one that’s painted inside the