Though it was still early in the day, the place was crowded. Lycon found entertainment in looking about him for, although only in miniature, this market-place was an image of the one in Athens.
Country people, standing in booths made of interwoven green branches, were selling fresh cheese, eggs, honey, oil, fruit, and green vegetables; one or two potters were loudly praising their painted jars; bakers’ wives were half concealed behind huge piles of bread and cakes, and young flower-girls sat among their bright-hued, fragrant wares, busily making wreaths. Freemen, as well as male and female slaves, wandered among the booths, bargaining here and there, while youths in light mantles, with embroidered fillets around their hair, jested with the prettiest saleswomen. But the most successful person was a neurospastes, the owner of a puppet-show, who had taken his stand on a spot generally used for a slave-mart. Unseen himself, he pulled the hidden strings which set the ugly puppets’ bodies in motion so that, to the delight of the children and their pedagogues, the figures made the most ridiculous gestures.
Lycon had stopped a moment to look at the busy puppets and the laughing children, when a strange, deafening noise was suddenly heard.
It seemed as though a countless number of chains were falling with a prolonged, rattling clash into a measureless depth, yet it was impossible to tell whence the sound came. It filled the earth and the air, and withal was so mighty, so startling, that all jest, all conversation ceased. Even the animals were roused from their usual repose, and the swallows which had been darting and twittering about the market-place and up and down the long Street of the Bakers, suddenly gathered into flocks and soared screaming into the air as if trying to escape some danger.
No one remembered having heard anything like it; no one knew what it was. But, from the people who came thronging up, it was soon learned that the noise had been just as loud inside the most closely shut rooms in the houses as in the open market-place and just as near and distinct in each remote part of the city, nay even on the ships in the port. The crews of the vessels declared that the sound came from the water.
Only one old smith, a man almost a hundred years of age, seemed to suspect the cause. He shook his head anxiously, but would not speak freely. “I may be wrong,” he said, “but take my advice. Keep out of the houses—that will perhaps save many a life.”
Lycon felt as though some misfortune was impending. Accompanied by Conops, without knowing where he was going, he had walked down to the harbor, where he had not been since his return to the city. The view here offered to his gaze was so magnificent and beautiful that it made the same impression as if he were beholding it for the first time. Ere long he felt his mind relieved and his former light-heartedness return.
“What should happen?” he said to himself. “Can a summer day be clearer or brighter than this?”
The sun rode high in the heavens. Not a cloud was visible far or near, and not a breath of air was stirring. About thirty boats and small vessels were lying at a quay built of large limestone-blocks—the ones whose masts were seen from the Street of the Bakers. On the right the gaze rested upon the highest part of the city, above which rose the distant mountains of Pherae; at the left the smiling, fertile coast extended almost as far as the eye could reach, towering upward into a spur of Pelion. Over the green water of the bay, that glittered like a mirror, fishing boats and pleasure craft glided past each other and beyond, like a broad dark-blue stripe, appeared the Pagasaean Gulf, which melted into the open sea, flashing like gold in the sunshine. On the opposite side of the gulf rose the promontory of Pyrrha, while through the mists of distance gleamed the coast-cities, and behind them the ridge of the Othrys mountains, over which led the road to Locris, Bœotia, and Attica.
Lycon stopped at the first of the little vessels, whose owner, an old sailor named Dorion, he had formerly known. The sight of this man vividly brought to mind what strangely different fates the same years may bring. While he himself had been in Athens, seeing and hearing so many new things that his memory could scarcely retain them, Dorion had daily sailed to and fro across the same corner of the bay to get and sell sand. Yet he seemed content, and when Lycon entered into conversation with him he told him with joyous satisfaction that his boat was new, that his sons had built it, and that it was large enough for him to make longer voyages.