Page:A book of myths.djvu/107

 In a marsh they found their enemy, and all the reeds quivered as it heaved its vast bulk and hove aside the weed in which it had wallowed, and rooted with its tusks amongst the wounded water-lilies before it leapt with a snort to meet and to slay the men who had come against it. A filthy thing it was, as its pink snout rose above the green ooze of the marshes, and it looked up lustingly, defying the purity of the blue skies of heaven, to bring to those who came against it a cruel, shameful death.

Upon it, first of all, Jason cast his spear. But the sharp point only touched it, and unwounded, the boar rushed on, its gross, bristly head down, to disembowel, if it could, the gallant Nestor. In the branches of a tree Nestor found safety, and Telamon rushed on to destroy the filthy thing that would have made carrion of the sons of the gods. A straggling cypress root caught his fleeting foot and laid him prone, a helpless prey for the rooting brute. His hounds fell before it, but ere it could reach him, Atalanta, full of vengeful rage—the pure angered against the filthy and cruel—let draw her bow, with a prayer to Diana to guide her shaft aright. Into the boar's smoking flank sped the arrow.

"The sudden string

Rang, and sprang inward, and the waterish air

Hissed, and the moist plumes of the songless reeds

Moved as a wave which the wind moves no more.

But the boar heaved half out of ooze and slime.

His tense flank trembling round the barbed wound.

Hateful; and fiery with invasive eyes

And bristling with intolerable hair

Plunged, and the hounds clung, and green flowers and white

Reddened and broke all round them where they came.