The Last Song of Orpheus Read Online Free PDF Page B

attempt at the darkness below. I went without food or drink, and my lyre lay before me, untouched, like a dead thing. When finally I picked it up again the first sounds that came from it were hellish jangling ones, a dissonant cacophony, which I could not master for several days more. When finally I could play again I was able to sing only a single bitter complaining song, over and over, until the rocks about me themselves seemed bored with my constant
repetitive lament. 
    In time some vestige of life entered me again and I rose and moved on. To Egypt then I went, where I hoped to escape the agony of my grief over the second death of my beloved under the scorching sun of that ancient land. I had never known such despair before, because I had never known the loss of love, since I had never known love itself. All that was new to me, I who had never experienced anything for the first time, for my love for Eurydice was an aspect of the mortal part of myself, which does not see things the way the divine part does. The pain of her double death wrapped itself about me like a cloak of ice. I could not free myself from it, not even with my own songs, that were able to charm the trees and the rivers and the inanimate rocks; but it seemed to me that if I ran far enough and quickly enough, I might be able to escape even the inescapable and leave that great sadness behind. 
    And so, Egypt. At Pharaoh’s court I dwelled, and there, under that cloudless sky, beside that broad reeking river, in that land of nightmare gods and many-columned temples as big as cities, I learned the magic of their priests and was initiated into the secrets of their beliefs and slowly, very slowly, began to enclose the running sore that was my great grief within an insulating shell of stone within my heart. 
    The strangeness of Egypt! How astounded I was by it! 
    As I have already told you, I was never young, as the world understands the ordinary meaning of that word. I came into the world ten thousand years old, and there is nothing that I can say I have seen for the first time, but, even so, though always I look backward and forward along the river of time, there was much that was new and strange to me in Egypt. Do I seem to contradict myself? Yes, I do; but I embody in myself all the contradictory things that men have believed of me. I confirm nothing; I deny nothing. I am Orpheus the demigod, and you must be a demigod to comprehend what that is like to be. I will help you as much as I can; but it will not be enough. 
    Egypt, then. 
    That blazing sun, that all-seeing fiery eye filling the heavens. The scent of unknown spices and the heavy reek of the enormous river. The carvings on the walls, the gods with the heads of hawks and vultures and lions; the snakes with legs; the beetles that spoke. The vast temples that were like forests of stone columns. The people with sly faces, moving busily but silently through the city streets, smiling, covertly staring at one another. Here and there I saw a swarthy bearded man who plainly was of Crete or Mycenae, or one from Babylon, or a little knot of black-skinned folk in robes as bright as the sun, for this was the great cosmopolitan center of the world. No one took notice of me. Why should they? I was cloaked in my grief and it made me invisible. 
    I went to the stone palace of their king and sang myself past its myriad guards into its airy halls. 
    Their king is called Pharaoh. So it has been for thousands of years. This Pharaoh was a small slender hawk-faced man, dark as ivory that has spent a century in the sun and almost fleshless, who wore a white cotton wrap around his loins and a lofty double crown, one part of it red and the other white, and a jewelled pendant on his bare breast, a heavy thing of gold and emeralds and rubies, that was so bright it hurt one’s eyes to look upon it. He held a golden scepter in each hand, one that had the shape of a flail and one that had the shape of a crook, and he wore