She retreated some steps, inclined her body forward, and advancing the left leg made a swift bounding movement, and shot the metal circle so high that it shone in the rising sun, and in falling struck the farthest pillar. It was like watching the motions of a statue by Phidias.
"That shot was the best," said a little twelve-year-old damsel, clad in a rich tunic and standing near the column.
"Myrrha, give me the disk," replied the player. "I can throw it higher than that, as you shall see. Meroë, get farther out of the way. I might hurt you, as Apollo hurt Hyacinthus."
Meroë, an old Egyptian, to judge by her multi-coloured vestments and tanned visage, was preparing in alabaster jars perfumes for a bath. Julian understood that the mute slave of the gate and the white-horsed chariot outside must belong to these two votaries of the Laconian games.
After the disk-throwing the young girl took from Myrrha a bow and a quiver, and drew thence a long arrow. She aimed at a black circle at the opposite end of the ephebeion; the string hummed, the arrow flew whistling and stuck in the target: then a second, then a third.
"O huntress Artemis!" sighed Publius.
Suddenly a sunbeam slipping between two columns shot into the face and youthful breast of the young girl. Throwing bow and arrows aside in sudden bedazzlement, she hid her face in her hands.
Swallows, uttering their faint fine chirpings, undulated about the exercise-ground, and pursuing each other vanished into the blue of the sky.
She uncovered her face and raised her arms above her head.
Its fair hair, golden at its ends as honey in the sun, at its roots was auburn; her lips half opened in a happy smile, she suffered the sun to bathe her body, gliding lower and lower yet, till she stood clothed, as in the loveliest raiment, in pure light and beauty.