The Last Song of Orpheus Read Online Free PDF

shadowy minions of Hades came gliding out of the darkness to cluster about her and pluck at her with their talons. 
    “Oh, Orpheus—Orpheus—farewell forever!” she cried, in a faint, vanishing voice. Desperately she stretched her arms to me, and I toward her. But we could not so much as touch. And then, as they pulled her back from me, she became incorporeal and ghostly, a shadow of the woman that once had been, the merest of misty shades. I lunged for her and my arms closed on empty air. I beheld only a fleeting reproachful vision moving swiftly backward, fading from me like a wisp of smoke, and in another moment she had disappeared into the darkness and all I could hear was the eerie whistling sound as those merciless phantoms hurried her away from me to return her to Hades’ kingdom. 
    So Eurydice met her second death, and my soul was devastated as it had not been even at the time of her first death, and I stood there frozen, dazed, knowing beyond all doubt that I had lost her forever.

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    You ask me, then, why did I turn back to look at her, I who knew that Hades had explictly forbade it, I who can see all things past and future and who understood what the consequences of that single glance would be? 
    And I answer you that we are none of us allowed the option of deviating from the track that has been laid down for us by the gods. I had to turn back for that fatal glance, just as Oedipus had to slay the old man he encountered at the crossroads and thereby set in motion the relentless machinery that the gods had devised for him, and Agamemnon the lord of men had to bring his mistress Cassandra back from Troy with him and thus invite the wrath of his murderous wife Clytemnestra, and Jason of the Argo similarly to bring upon himself the bloody vengeance of the witch Medea, the mother of his sons, by spurning her for the Corinthian princess Creusa after his return from his great quest for the Fleece. The gods choose our destinies for us, and once we are set in our paths no foreknowledge of consequences can turn us for long from our dooms, not even I, who travel ceaselessly on the ever-repeating current that is my life. 
    And so I paused there at the brink of the upper world, with Eurydice’s freedom all but achieved, and, caught in the toils of my destiny, I glanced helplessly back despite everything I knew would ensue, to see if she still followed me. Thus I lost her for all time, until the next return of existence, when I am fated to win and then to lose her again. 
    Even then there was more to my torment, much more. One is tempered in the fires of the gods; and because they had much need of me, they saw to it that my tempering was a thorough one. 
    Though I had no shred of hope it was necessary all the same for me to descend once more into Hell and follow that dank winding path to the Styx to confront stern Charon at his ferry station. “Take me across once again,” I said to him, knowing what the reply would be. If there had been any laughter in his soul, I think he would have laughed at me, but all he did was stare in that icy way of his and shake his head. 
    It was pointless to try to charm him with my music, as I had done the last time. There was no music left in me then, and this time, even if there had been, he would have been armored against its powers. I asked, and he stared his refusal, and I asked again and he stared again, and once more I asked, and again he was silent. Then a pale shrouded wraith appeared, a new dead soul making his pilgrimage to the kingdom within, and he stepped through me as though I were not there and boarded Charon’s boat, and the two of them glided off into the darkness on the breast of that dread river, leaving me alone on the bank. 
    Charon did not return. After a time I set out yet again on the ascent to the land of the living. 
    Seven days and seven nights I lingered despondent at Tainaron gate, unable either to go forward into the light or to make yet another