Symposium of the Gorgon
Clark Ashton Smith
I do not remember where or with whom the evening had begun. Nor can I recall what vintages, brews and distillations I had mingled by the way. In those nights of an alcoholically flaming youth I was likely to start anywhere, drink anything and end up anywhere else than at the port of embarkation.
It was therefore with interest but with little surprise that I found myself among the guests at the symposium in the Gorgon’s hall. Do not ask me how I got there: I am still vague about it myself. It would be useless to tell you even if I could, unless you are one of the rare few elected for similar adventures. And if you are one of these, the telling would be needless.
Liquor brings oblivion to most; but to certain others, enfranchisement from time and space, the awareness of Tao, of all that is or has ever been or will ever be. By liquor I mean of course the true essence poured from the Dive Bouteille. But, on occasion, any bottle can be divine.
Just why, at that particular time, after what must have been a round of mundane bar-rooms, I should have entered the mythologic palace of Medusa, is a matter hardly apparent but determined, no doubt, by the arcanic and inflexible logic of alcohol. The night had been foggy, not to say wet; and on such nights one is prone to stray into the unlikeliest places. It was not the first time I bad gotten a little mixed up in regard to the Einsteinian continuum.
Having read Bullfinch and other mythologists, I had small difficulty in orienting myself to the situation. At the moment of my entrance into the spacious early Grecian hall, I was stopped by a slave-girl attired only in three garlands of roses arranged to display and enhance her charms. This girl presented me with a bright-ly polished silver mirror, the rim and handle of which were twined appropriately with graven serpents. She al-so gave me a capacious wine-cup of unglazed clay. In a low voice, in the purest Greek of pre-Euripidean drama, she told me, the mirror’s purpose. The cup I could fill as often as I pleased, or was able, at a fountain of yellow wine in the foreground, rilling from the open mouth of a marble sea nymph that rose from amidst its bubbling ripples.
Thus forewarned, I kept my eyes on the mirror which reflected the room before me with admirable -clearness. I saw that my fellow-guests — at least any who possessed hands-had also been considerately equipped with mirrors, in which they could look with safety at their hostess whenever politeness required.
Medusa sat in a high-armed chair at the hall’s cen-ter, weeping constant tears that could not dim the ter-rible brightness of her eyes. Her tonsure of curling serpents writhed and lifted incessantly. On each arm of the chair perched a woman-headed, woman-breasted fowl that I recognized as a harpy. In other chairs, the two sisters of Medusa sat immobile with lowered eyes.
All three were draining frequent cups served with averted eyes by the slave-girls, but showed no sign of intoxication.
There seemed to be a lot of statuary about the place: men, women, dogs, goats, and other animals as well as birds-. These, the first slave-girl whispered as she passed me, consisted of the various unwary victims turned to stone by the Gorgon’s glance. In a whisper lower still, she added that the fatal visit of Perseus, coming to behead Medusa, was momentarily expected.
I felt that it was high time for a drink, and moved forward to the verge of the vinous pool. A number of ducks and swans, standing unsteadily about it with wine-splashed plumage, dipped their beaks in the fluid and tilted their heads back. with obvious relish. They hissed at me viciously as I stepped among them. I slipped on their wet droppings and plunged hastily into the pool, but still retained the cup and the mirror as well as my footing. The fluid was quite shallow. Amid the loud quacking of the startled birds and the giggling of several golden-tressed sirens and russet-haired Nereids who sat on the farther edge, stirring the pool to luminous ripples with their cod-like tails, I stepped forward, splashing ankle-deep, to the marble sea-girl and lifted my cup to the yellow stream that issued from her grinning mouth. The cup filled instant-ly and slopped over, drenching my shirt-front. I drained it at a gulp. The wine was strong and good, though tast-ing heavily of resin like other antique vintages.
Before I could raise the cup for a second draft, it seemed that a flash of lightning, together with a violent wind, leapt horizontally across the hall from the open doorway. My face was fanned as if by the pass-ing of a god. Forgetting the danger, I raised my eyes toward Medusa, over whom the lightning hovered and swung back with the movement of a weapon about to strike.
I remember my mythology. It was indeed the sword of Perseus, who wore Mercury’s winged shoes and the helmet loaned by Hades which made him invisible. (Why the sword alone should be perceptible to sight, no myth-maker has explained.) The sword fell, and the head of Medusa sprang from her seated body and rolled in a spatter of blood across the floor and into the, pool where I stood petrified. It was a moment of pandemonium. The ducks and geese scattered, quacking, honking madly, and the sirens and Nereids fled shriek-ing. They dropped their mirrors as they went. The head sank with a great splash, then rose to the surface. I caught a sidelong flick of one dreadful agonized eye — -the left — as the head rolled over and soared from the water, its snaky locks caught in an unseen armored grip by the pursuing demigod. Then, Perseus and his victim were gone, with a last lightning flash of the sword, through the doorway where the nymphs had vanished.
I climbed from the reddening pool, too dazed to wonder why I still retained power of movement after meeting the Gorgon’s eye. The slave-girls had disappeared. The trunk of Medusa had fallen forward from its chair, upon which the harpies still perched.
Beside Medusa stood a beautiful winged white horse, dabbled from hoofs to mane with the blood that still ran from the fallen monster’s neck. I knew that it must be Pegasus, born of her decapitation according to myth.
Pegasus pranced lightly toward me, neighing in excellent Greek:
“We must go. The decrees of the gods have been fulfilled. I see that you are a stranger from another time and space. I will take you wherever you wish to go, or as near to it as possible.”
Pegasus kneeled and I mounted him bareback, since he had been born without saddle or reins.
“Cling tightly to my mane. I will not unhorse you,” he promised, “whatever the speed or altitude of our journey.”
He trotted out through the doorway, spread his shin-ing wings on an orient dawn, and took off toward the reddening cirrus clouds. I turned my head a little later. An ocean lay behind us, far down, with raging bil-lows turned to mere ripples by distance. The lands of morning gleamed before us.
“To what period of time, and what region?” asked Pegasus above the rhythmic drumming of his wings.
“I came from a country known as America, in the 20th century,” I replied, raising my voice to reach his ears through the thunder.
Pegasus bridled and almost stopped in mid-flight. –
“My prophetic insight forbids me to oblige you. I cannot visit the century, and, in particular, the country, that you name. Any poets who are born there must do without me, must hoist themselves to inspiration by their own bootstraps, rather than by the steed of the Muses. If I ventured to land there, I should be impounded at once and my wings clipped. Later they would sell me for horse meat.”
“You underrate their commercial acumen,” I said. “They’d put you in a side-show and charge a stiff en-trance fee. You’re well known, in a way. Your name and picture are on sideboards at many gas-stations. A synonym for speed if nothing else.
“Anyway, there is little inducement for me to return. I have been trying to drink myself out of it for years and decades. Why end up, as I will sooner or later, at the highly expensive mercy of doctors, hospitals and undertakers?”
“You are certainly sensible, will you indicate a place and period more to your liking?”
I mused awhile, reviewing all I could remember of both history and geography.
“Well,” I decided at last, “some South Sea island might do, before the discovery by Captain Cook and the coming of the missionaries.”
Pegasus began to accelerate his flight. Day and dark-ness shuttled by, sun, moon and stars were streaks above, and the regions below were blurred by incon-ceivable speed, so that I could not distinguish fertile from desert, land from water. We must have circled the earth innumerable times, through the birth and death of millenniums.