The ash, on the other hand, though abundant on many Greek mountains, no longer waves along the ridgy heights of Pelion. Yet it was here that the ashen shaft of the great Pelidean spear was cut by the Centaur Chiron. For in the Homeric account of the arming of Patroclus, after we have been told of his equipment with the shield, cuirass, and formidably nodding helmet of Achilles, it is recounted: Then seized he two strong lances that fitted his grasp, only he took not the spear of the noble son of Aiakos, heavy, and huge, and stalwart, that none other of the Achaians could wield, but Achilles alone availed to wield it: even the ashen Pelian spear that Chiron gave to his father dear, from the crown of Pelion, to be the bane of heroes.[196] The shaft in question could certainly have been hewn nowhere else; the fact of the Centaur’s residence being attested, to this day, by the visibility of the cavern inhabited by him, dilapidated, it is true, but undeniable.[197] Here, surely, is evidence to convince the most sceptical. Its conclusive force is scarcely inferior to that of the testimony borne by the graves of Hamlet and Ophelia at Elsinore to the reality of the tragic endings of those distraught personages. Footnote 196: _Iliad_, xvi. 139-44. Footnote 197: Tozer, _Researches_, vol. ii. p. 126. The Homeric epithet, ‘quivering with leaves,’ is fully justified, Mr. Tozer informs us,[198] by the dense clothing of all the heights and hollows of Chiron’s mountain with beech and oak, chestnut and plane-trees, besides evergreen _under-garments_ of myrtle, arbutus, and laurel-bushes. Yet the ash, as we have said, is missing, nor have the pines felled to build the good ship ‘Argo’[199] left, it would seem, any representatives. Footnote 198: _Ib._ p. 122. Footnote 199: _Medea_, 3. In the Iliad and Odyssey, too, pine-wood is the approved material for nautical constructions. It was probably derived from the mountain-loving silver-fir, some grand specimens of which grew nevertheless conveniently near the sea-shore in remote Ogygia, and provided ‘old Laertes’ son’ with material for his rapidly and skilfully built raft. Homer distinguishes, in a loose way, at least two species of pine, but their identification in particular cases is to a great extent arbitrary. The trees, for instance, employed in conjunction with ‘high-crested’ oaks, to fence round the court-yard of Polyphemus, may have been the picturesque stonepines of South Italy, but they may just as well, or better, have been maritime pines, such as spring up everywhere along the sandy flats of modern Greece.[200] The stone-pine was sacred to Cybele.[201] Her husband, Atys, was transformed into one, with the result of bringing her as near the verge of madness as might be consistent with her venerable dignity; for actually bereft of reason a goddess presumably cannot be. This, however, was a post-Homeric legend, and a post-Homeric association. Footnote 200: