Second Draft, Arriving at Ilium

There might be forests, rivers, mountains, deserts, pastures full of cattle, plains studded with horses, stone cities, wooden towns, grass-thatched villages, towers, caverns, springs. If there are, I don’t see them. Ilium might be complicated or bare, ugly or beautiful, but I’m only looking along the shore as it slides by, for the landing place I am assigned.

There! There are the grape-dotted flags of Argos driven into the sand, then a broad gap, then the banners of Athens with black bulls on white. Teucer sees this at the same time I do, whips around and shouts. The pilots behind us repeat his shout. On each ship, one side lifts its oars out of the water, then digs them in and shoves forward. Like a chain of trained horses, the ships raise their heads and squat, turn on their haunches, then drive through the low breakers and up onto the sand side by side. The sails drop one by one and our men race around tying off the lines.

Alone in all the activity, I walk up the deck to the beak of this ship, then swing off and down.

Finally I can look up.

The hard, dark sand rises flatly, breaks into small rough humps spotted with bunches of familiar tough grass, then coarse bushes, then – I climb away from the ships – rolls roughly away, hardly rising until familiar-looking coarse treed hills in the distance.

Who would put a city there, between sterile sea and sharp, miserable hills, on a plain with – I kick at it to be sure – too much sand in the soil to be kindly fertile? But there it is, far out there, on a modest piece of risen ground: a high wall with a thousand or more low roofs trickling away all around it.

Smoke is rising from those roofs in scores of skinny threads, streaming away from us in the continuing breeze, but I still can smell the stink from here.

I turn and look right, then left, as ship and ship and ship and ship drives up onto the beach and stops, and men scramble and work purposefully, sturdily, now that we have come to Ilium.