With unearthly din, and ever the shattering limbs of them crash.[[195]]
[192]. Selby, History of British Forest Trees, pp. 309, 319.
[193]. Müller, Geographi Græci minores, t. i. p. 106.
[194]. Tozer, Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, vol. ii. pp. 122-23.
[195]. Way’s Iliad, xvi. 765-69.
The ash, on the other hand, though abundant on many Greek mountains, no longer waves along the ridgy heights of Pelion. Yet it was here that the ashen shaft of the great Pelidean spear was cut by the Centaur Chiron. For in the Homeric account of the arming of Patroclus, after we have been told of his equipment with the shield, cuirass, and formidably nodding helmet of Achilles, it is recounted:
Then seized he two strong lances that fitted his grasp, only he took not the spear of the noble son of Aiakos, heavy, and huge, and stalwart, that none other of the Achaians could wield, but Achilles alone availed to wield it: even the ashen Pelian spear that Chiron gave to his father dear, from the crown of Pelion, to be the bane of heroes.[[196]]
The shaft in question could certainly have been hewn nowhere else; the fact of the Centaur’s residence being attested, to this day, by the visibility of the cavern inhabited by him, dilapidated, it is true, but undeniable.[[197]] Here, surely, is evidence to convince the most sceptical. Its conclusive force is scarcely inferior to that of the testimony borne by the graves of Hamlet and Ophelia at Elsinore to the reality of the tragic endings of those distraught personages.
[196]. Iliad, xvi. 139-44.
[197]. Tozer, Researches, vol. ii. p. 126.