ff blue hill of the giant
Atlas, but the sky was empty behind him, and the Gorgons he never saw
again. The mountain turned from blue to clear grey and red and gold,
with pencilled rifts and glens, and soon Perseus stood beside the giant
Atlas. 'You are welcome and blessed,' said the giant. 'Show me the head
that I may be at rest.'

Then Perseus took the bundle from the wallet, and carefully unbound the
goat-skin, and held up the head, looking away from it, and the Giant
was a great grey stone. Down sailed Perseus, and stood in the garden of
the gods, and laid the Cap of Darkness on the grass. The three Nymphs
who were sitting there, weaving garlands of flowers, leaped up, and came
round him, and kissed him, and crowned him with the flowery chaplets.
That night he rested with them, and in the morning they kissed and said
farewell.

'Do not forget us,' said Aegle, 'nor be too sorry for our loneliness.
To-day Hermes has been with us, and to-morrow he comes again with
Dionysus, the god of the vine, and all his merry company. Hermes left a
message for you, that you are to fly eastward, and south, to the place
where your wings shall guide you, and there, he said, you shall find
your happiness. When that is won, you shall turn north and west, to your
own country. We say, all three of us, that our love is with you always,
and we shall hear of your gladness, for Hermes will tell us; then we too
shall be glad. Farewell!'

So the three maidens embraced him with kind faces and smiling eyes, and
Perseus, too, smiled as well as he might, but in his eastward way he
often looked back, and was sad when he could no longer see the kindly
hill above the garden of the gods.

III

PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA

Perseus flew where the wings bore him, over great mountains, and over a
wilderness of sand. Below his feet the wind woke the sand storms, and
beneath him he saw nothing but a soft floor of yellow grey, and when
that cleared he saw islands of green trees round some well in the
waste, and long trains of camels, and brown men riding swift horses, at
which he wondered; for the Greeks in his time drove in chariots, and did
not ride. The red sun behind him fell, and all the land was purple, but,
in a moment, as it seemed, the stars rushed out, and he sped along in
the starlight till the sky was grey again, and rosy, and full of fiery
colours, green and gold and ruby and amethyst. Then the sun rose, and
Perseus looked down on a green