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THE ENGLISH REVIEW
was drawn by an invisible hand towards the ruddy pool in the
west. But athwart our path lay a craggy islet, black and
menacing against the background of crimson conflagration.
Soon it came upon us in swarthy confusion of rock and cloven
ravine, a few gleams of emerald in its sheltered recesses. Here,
if anywhere, methought, Sirens might still dwell unmolested.
The curly-pated rascal steered with cunning hand towards a
lilliputian inlet; like a true Greek, he appreciated curiosity in
every form. But he resolutely refused to set foot on shore.
I began my explorations alone, concluding that he had visited
the place before.
It was no Siren-islet. It was an islet of fleas. I picked
them off my clothes in tens, in hundreds, in handfuls. Never
was mortal nearer jumping out of his skin. Janko was surprised
and shocked.
Now, whether these fleas had inhabited the island from time
immemorial, being degenerate descendants of certain Heroic
creatures that sailed thither in company of Jason and his Argonauts,
or had been left there by shipwrecked mariners of
modern days ; how it came about that they multiplied to the
exclusion of every other living thing ; what manner of food
was theirs—whether, anthropophagous-wise, they preyed upon
one another or had learned to content themselves with the
silvery dews of morning, like Anacreon's cicada, or else had
acquired the faculty of long fasting between rare orgies such
as they enjoyed on that afternoon : these and other questions
have since occurred to me as not wholly unworthy of consideration.
Mr. Hudson, in his " La Plata "—when are we to have
a new edition of it ?—has vexed himself with similar problems.
But at that moment I was far too busy to give any thought to
such matters.
Ay, they have deserted Greece, the Sirens. It was never
more than a half-way house to them. But they stayed there
long enough to don new clothes and habits. Nothing, indeed,
ever entered that little country but came out rejuvenated and
clarified. A thousand turbid streams, pouring into Hellas
from every side, issued thence grandly, in a calm and transparent
river, to fertilise the world. So it was with the Sirens. Like
many things, they were only an importation, one of the new ideas
that, following the trade-routes, crept in to feed the artistic
imagination of the Greeks. Now that we know a little something
of the ancient civilisations of countries like Egypt and
Phoenicia that traded with Greece, we can appreciate the
wonderful Hellenic genius for borrowing and adapting. Hermes,
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