The story of the recent
Cretan crisis, as told in the A.
"I am by birth a
Cretan; my father was a well to do man, who had many sons born in marriage, whereas I was the son of a slave whom he had purchased for a concubine; nevertheless, my father Castor son of Hylax (whose lineage I claim, and who was held in the highest honour among the
Cretans for his wealth, prosperity, and the valour of his sons) put me on the same level with my brothers who had been born in wedlock.
The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable
Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade --owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times --this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one's admiration for him: the
Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice.
After the punishment of Telphusa for her deceit in giving him no warning of the dragoness at Pytho, Apollo, in the form of a dolphin, brings certain
Cretan shipmen to Delphi to be his priests; and the hymn ends with a charge to these men to behave orderly and righteously.
Between his ribs and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a remarkable involved
Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood.
My nerves were somewhat calmer, but in my excited brain I saw over again all my existence on board the Nautilus; every incident, either happy or unfortunate, which had happened since my disappearance from the Abraham Lincoln--the submarine hunt, the Torres Straits, the savages of Papua, the running ashore, the coral cemetery, the passage of Suez, the Island of Santorin, the
Cretan diver, Vigo Bay, Atlantis, the iceberg, the South Pole, the imprisonment in the ice, the fight among the poulps, the storm in the Gulf Stream, the Avenger, and the horrible scene of the vessel sunk with all her crew.
In it was a shallow pool--a glimmering green sheet of water on whose banks nymphs might dance as blithely as ever they did on Argive hill or in
Cretan dale.
No victories of the
Cretans are allowed to be printed.
So, again, of Dolon: 'ill-favoured indeed he was to look upon.' It is not meant that his body was ill-shaped, but that his face was ugly; for the
Cretans use the word {epsilon upsilon epsilon iota delta epsilon sigma}, 'well-favoured,' to denote a fair face.
"That," answered Helen, "is huge Ajax, bulwark of the Achaeans, and on the other side of him, among the
Cretans, stands Idomeneus looking like a god, and with the captains of the
Cretans round him.
If the people yield, well and good; but if they resist him, as he began by beating his own father and mother, so now, if he has the power, he beats them, and will keep his dear old fatherland or motherland, as the
Cretans say, in subjection to his young retainers whom he has introduced to be their rulers and masters.