Again Apollo paid no attention to the words—he was enchanted with the voice alone and whispered to Hermes:
"This one or none!"
But Maya's son suddenly covered the house, the apparition disappeared, and it seemed to the Radiant Apollo that with it disappeared the stars, that the moon became black, and the whole world was covered with the darkness of Chimera.
"When shall we decide the wager?" asked Hermes.
"Immediately. To-day!"
"During her husband's absence she sleeps in the store. You can stand in the street before the door. If she raises the curtain and opens the gate, I have lost my wager."
"You have lost it already!" exclaimed the Far-darting Apollo.
The summer lightning does not pass from the East to the West as quickly as he rushed over the salt waves of the Archipelago. There he asked Amphitrite for an empty turtle-shell, put around it the rays of the sun, and returned to Athens with a ready formiga.
In the city everything was already quiet. The lights were out, and only the houses and temples shone white in the light of the moon, which had risen high in the sky.
The store was dark, and in it, behind a gate and a curtain, the beautiful Eryfile was asleep. Apollo the Radiant began to touch the strings of his lyre. Wishing to awake softly his beloved, he played at first as gently as swarms of mosquitoes singing on a summer evening on Illis. But the song became gradually stronger like a brook in the mountain after a rain; then more powerful, sweeter, more intoxicating, and it filled the air voluptuously.