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philosophy which is to live happily without helmet or breast-plate or greaves or shield or sword or spear or claws or teeth or sting or poison. But the human race refuses to let us stay quietly underground. It digs us up. It impales us on fish-hooks .
    “And this invasion of our right as individual souls to pursue truth in our own fashion began early in the history of this planet and is not confined to the cruel race of men. As serpents practise it upon toads, so do toads upon us. Contemptible little birds swallow us whole and we perish in their loathsome little stomachs.
    “Primeval saurians from the aboriginal swamps delight in swallowing us and love to feel us wriggling to death in the fearful stench of their foul entrails. Are you not ashamed to bring your blood-shedding absurdities, your ridiculous feuds, your childish armour, and your murderous weapons into Arima, so that a person cannot even hear the drift of the metaphysical argument between Eurybia and Echidna and hearing it judge calmly for himself whether what is happening is the long-expected revolt, so welcome to us worms, of women against men, or is a revival of the ancient struggle between Kronos of the Golden Age and his ‘Peace to all Beings’ and the reign of these accursed Olympians with their infantile motto: ‘The Devil take the Hindmost?’ Are you not ashamed of yourself, you carver of dead trees?’ Arsinöe touched carelessly with the tip of her right sandal Heirax’s squeezed-up corpse that had the appearance, after the way she had handled it, of a feathered tortoise.
    “Is it permitted,” she enquired sarcastically, “to a humble carver of images who has not yet learnt that the earth belongs to those beneath it, to ask the name of the person who is addressing me?”
    “I am the Worm of—” But the mysterious syllables “Arima” never reached her ears from the uplifted point of soft-wrinkled redness emerging from its crumpled collars of pink skin that diminished in tapering elasticity till they reached that prehensile projection: for she was off at a pace that was almost a run. “I must just go and see,” she told herself, “what that little devil Nisos is up to now.”
    As she hurried away she took care to adjust the “Palace- of-Priam ” fold neatly against her breast with the carving-tool wrapped tightly in the linen cloth she had used for the helmet. Not for one second had it occurred to her that, exquisitely as she had caught the curves of her hero’s skull, the way she had armed him would certainly have made Hector’s brother, the wanton Paris, smile; for that Trojan helmet by no means went well with the armour of Achilles while the absence of the famous Hephaistian shield hindered the separate pieces of the golden armour from producing their proper cumulative effect.
    “Have you got a mug or a cup of any kind with you, Tis?” she asked boldly as she passed the open door of the shed where Babba’s large, warm-blooded black-and-white body was being milked. “Come in, lady! Come in lady! Certainly I’ve got the best possible cup here for a beautiful maid like thy precious self!”
    Thus speaking, and squeezing the final drop of milk from Babba’s depleted udder, Tis gave the cow a friendly slap, followed by a vigorous propulsion towards the hay at the head of her stall, and without further delay proceeded to dip into the brimming pail between his knees a great battered silver ladle, which, as his only valuable possession in the world, he kept hidden in a secret place in that ramshackle shed.
    “Here ye be, lady,” he chuckled, “’Tain’t every day old Tis has a fair lass to entertain in’s own banquet-hall! ’Tisn’t wine, as dost know of thyself, being as ye too, like Babba, must suckle offspring when the man and the hour be come; and it aint spiced with nard or thicked out with Pramnian cheese. But right good milk it be, warm from Babba’s teats and properer for a maid like thee than any of the rosy!”
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