The Double Tongue by William Golding Read Free Book Online Page A

had withdrawn and opened all the shutters so that the cool light of a Delphi late afternoon lay over all. It was a refreshing air, and now I realized that up here among the hills and mountains, even though my new home lay next to the bed of a river so could not at all be described as ‘up the mountain’, nevertheless the air was distinctly fresher. I saw that in winter it might indeed be cold and that made me aware of the metal bowls in each room which I had not really noticed. They were braziers. Even the servant of the Junior Pythia would be cherished and kept warm. I actually ran back to the entrance hall. Ionides laughed.
    ‘You will soon be accustomed to it. Tell me how delighted you are!’
    ‘I am! I am indeed!’
    ‘Now, if you are at liberty – I think you are, for your official mistress sleeps at this hour – and if the truth be told a good many other hours, too – if, as I say, you are at liberty, there is another room I want to show you. Come.’
    We went back into the great hall but turned through a side door which was set in the wall behind Apollo. Steps led down, rather dark steps. Then there was another door and we went through it into the mingled brightness and shade of the colonnade which ran along the side of the building. Then we climbed some steps to a separate building. There were wide doors, open, and then an entrance hall: then more doors. We went through. I supposed it to be a temple.
    The room was huge. There was no statue at the other end but open windows. Indeed, at the tops of the walls all round there were openings in which pigeons strutted and cooed. Below them the walls were criss-crossed with wooden boards which left square holes like nesting boxes. But the pigeons had deceived me. They were not nesting boxes.
    ‘Here we are then, Young Lady. Didn’t you know? Goats give milk. Kings give gold. What are poets to do? We call it the bookroom. You can use it when you like, since you read. Yes we knew that too. Ever since heaven knows when, and now of course, it’s the custom for every author to send a copy to the Foundation. Some of them are – well we have the script of all the plays that have been produced here. I wonder what we should start with?’
    Now I had ceased looking at the walls with their rows of what were not nesting boxes I could see that there were rows of sitting places and also large chests lifted on legs. There was not much room between them. Ionides sidled towards the middle one, right in the centre of the great hall.
    ‘Homer, I think.’
    He opened the two flaps of the lid. There was a roll on the wooden surface inside, a roll partly opened.
    ‘Could you read the first words to me?’
    ‘I – “The anger sing, O Muse – ”’
    ‘Yes. Very good. No. Of course it’s not Homer’s copy! He very probably couldn’t write, at least not with the alphabet. But I tell you what though. This actual copy was sent to us here, generations ago, by my ancestor Peisistratus. You won’t have heard of him, you being an Aetolian. But he was chief man of Athens and he decided what version of Homer was the best one, then sent us this copy. Of course you can’t say it’s his handwriting. A clerk probably did it or perhaps as many as ten or twenty clerks, to make what we call an edition. But you see the little note written at the side? That’s what we call a scholiast and I think, indeed I’m very nearly sure, that it was jotted down by Peisistratus’ brother – the one who did all those forgeries of our oracles! He was very naughty, but clever. Here, as you can see, he’s noted a misspelling. Well so much for the Iliad. Now this is your particular favourite, one of the twenty-four books of the Odyssey. There’s a lot of reading for you in that, isn’t there? Then Arctinus – what we call the Little Iliad. Personally I don’t think it’s called that because it’s shorter than Homer’s work but because it’s inferior. You’ll read that too I expect. Euripides.