UPON WHAT SUBJECTS DID Tiresias discourse during his and Gonzaga’s pedestrian journey from Rostrevor Village to Newry town and thence, south by west, to Slieve Gullion’s bonny braes, fabled in story and song?
The putative third and missing book of Aristotle; the art and science of goat husbandry; the doctrine of baptismal regeneration; the names and natures of ghosts; the nutritional and moral superiority of the vegetarian diet; the causes and consequences of the Wall Street Crash and its effect upon global commerce; the process of fermentation by which milk is converted to yogurt and its role in the lives of the great nomadic peoples of the Russian steppes; their Methuselan life spans; its role in the Imperial endeavours of Genghis Khan; the recent successes of Benito Mussolini in Italy and the potential threat of Adolf Hitler in the Weimar Republic; the virtue or otherwise of nutmeg in rice pudding; the genitive and subjunctive forms of the Irish language, with particular reference to the word guirin which, in its diverse inflections, means a dead crow; an excess of flatus; the act of persistently opening the bottom half of a half door, a slow puncture in a bicycle tyre; a bilious policeman; a carbuncle on the third toe; the quality of moonlight on Kiltrasna Strand on the last weekend in June; the act of floating out to sea on an inflated pig bladder; the licentiousness of student teachers; the disappointment of finding a glass of brandy empty before expected; a hare’s “twill”; a kind of Michaelmas pudding made from potatoes, pig’s blood, and mashed eels; an unpleasant situation which every effort to improve only succeeds in making worse; a scatological priest.
For what reason did Tiresias interrupt said discourse at approximately twenty past nine in the morning at a point some two miles and three furlongs outside Newry town on the road to the village of Bessbrook?
It had come to his attention that his travelling companion was not attending to his monologues with customary concentration. Indeed, Gonzaga was standing on a bank by the side of the road looking over the hedge in a generally southward inclination. Also, Gonzaga’s nostrils were somewhat flared and he seemed to be engaged in the general act of sniffing the air.
What was Tiresias’s reaction to these actions?
He realised that Gonzaga was in a state of considerable perturbation, which caused him (Tiresias) to question the root of Gonzaga’s disquiet.
What was Gonzaga’s reply?
(In flawless iambic pentameter) That there seemed to be some untoward disturbance in the mythlines far to the south of them; that it seemed to him as if some titanic force were twisting and snapping the mythlines and reforging them into new disturbing alignments. This was particularly alarming, occurring in an area they had already pacified of phagus activity and sealed off.
Describe Tiresias’s subsequent action.
The removal of his spectacles from his next-to-heart pocket; the placing of them over his eyes; the consequent sighting, after the customary moment’s orientation, of a great dark mass, akin to a thunderstorm, on the horizon, shot through with purple lightning and encircled by severed mythlines whipping many tens of miles into the atmosphere and shedding phaguses.
What word best describes Tiresias’s reaction to the revelation of his spectacles?
Consternation.
What, therefore, was their immediate and firm resolution of action with regard to this disturbing turn of events?
To abandon their current task in Slieve Gullion’s bonny braes, to head south straightaway without hindrance with the purpose of investigating the gyruses they had surveyed and constructed for the express purpose of containing and controlling such an upheaval of Mygmus energy.
What was Tiresias’s final comment upon the matter before setting off in the generally southward trend?
That he feared for the young lady.