smoke would change to a great roaring fire from the beacons of a
beleaguered island town; the fire would blaze on the masts of the ships
of the besiegers, and show blood-red on their sails, and glitter on the
gilded shields that lined the bulwarks of their ships. But the Sidonians
sped on till, one night, they anchored off a little isle that lies over
against the mouth of the Nile. Beneath this isle they moored the ship,
and slept, most of them, ashore.

Then the Wanderer began to plot a way to escape, though the enterprise
seemed desperate enough. He was lying in the darkness of the hold,
sleepless and sore with his bonds, while his guard watched under an
awning in the moonlight on the deck. They dreamed so little of his
escaping that they visited him only by watches, now and again; and,
as it chanced, the man whose turn it was to see that all was well fell
asleep. Many a thought went through the prisoner's mind, and now it
seemed to him that the vision of the Goddess was only a vision of sleep,
which came, as they said, through the false Gates of Ivory, and not
through the Gates of Horn. So he was to live in slavery after all, a
king no longer, but a captive, toiling in the Egyptian mines of Sinai,
or a soldier at a palace gate, till he died. Thus he brooded, till out
of the stillness came a thin, faint, thrilling sound from the bow that
hung against the mast over his head, the bow that he never thought
to string again. There was a noise of a singing of the bow and of the
string, and the wordless song shaped itself thus in the heart of the
Wanderer:

Lo! the hour is nigh
And the time to smite,
When the foe shall fly
From the arrow's flight!
Let the bronze bite deep!
Let the war-birds fly
Upon them that sleep
And are ripe to die!
Shrill and low
Do the grey shafts sing
The Song of the Bow,
The sound of the string!

Then the low music died into the silence, and the Wanderer knew that the
next sun would not set on the day of slavery, and that his revenge was
near. His bonds would be no barrier to his vengeance; they would break
like burnt tow, he knew, in the fire of his anger. Long since, in his
old days of wandering, Calypso, his love, had taught him in the summer
leisure of her sea-girt isle how to tie the knots that no man could
untie, and to undo all the knots that men can bind. He remembered this
lesson in the night when the bow