Here the laurels were threaded by a slender path, surely the one made by Eëtíon’s feet coming to her. She knelt down and kissed it. The Greeks were lovers of the earth and not seldom did they kiss it for their love. Oh, gods, if she could but hide herself completely! Then Eëtíon would never know her sins and would continue to love her. She tried to make haste, but her whole body ached with weariness as though she were very old. The repeated fastings had told even on her strong body. She won past the higher terraces of hill and found the so-called Kaka Skala, “bad stairs” indeed, steps partly hewn out of the rock and winding up Parnassos Mountain until they were lost in cloud. These she began to climb. No thought was hers to see the glory about her, the crags ghost-like in the moon, the abyss of glens black with fir and cedar, the heights which soared and melted into infinity, the starry sky—a grandeur hardly to be borne. Theria only knew that she was very lonely, that the grandeur was terrible. She seemed very small and childlike in that vastness, stumbling along ever slower, stopping sometimes with labouring breath, then pushing on again higher, higher. In an upland meadow she passed a herd of cows, small wild things which fled trampling at her approach. She thought vaguely of the cattle of Apollo, which he kept on Parnassos and which of yore the baby Hermes had stolen. Of course, these could be no other cows. She shuddered at the supernatural creatures. Now she came to a fir wood, black like a cloak. The mottled moonlight sifted in at the edge pricking out fern-brake and rock, but within it was ebony. In such a place might the Bacchantes well go mad in worship of their god. With a sob she entered it. For the fear of being found was greater than her fear of the haunted place. Theria lay down to rest among the mosses. Even her double terror could not contend against her utter exhaustion. At once she fell asleep. She awoke in the dawn shivering with cold, hungry beyond telling. The fear with which she had gone to sleep, the fear of being found, met her at the door of waking. It made her get up and, though she ached in every bone, to push onward, upward into safer hiding. Sometimes she came to a bare stretch across which she stumbled in haste. For surely in such a place they would see her, and would catch her and drag her back and doubtless bury her alive. In this thought she forgot even her old grief for the loss of her god. Indeed she half believed that this present fate of hers was Apollo’s punishment which he had delayed so long.