His brains after the cleansing bath grow calm, nor look behind to the splattered blood, nor in their cunning toils scheme how to save from zoning storms the dreadful head. Serenely his own eyes gaze on the starry eyes of night that from the mountains with her curly flocks descends and like a mist within his heart distills, till all his murderous work and whirr of arrows is slaked in peace, and his tiger heart in the soft darkness licks its lips. In the center Athena’s altar smoked, black, satiated, while in the long arcades in the cool night air there swung slowly the hanging slaves, their eyes and swollen tongues protruding. Swiftly he passed and silently stood on his wide threshold the burning sun in splendor sank and filled all corners and every vaulted cellar with shadows of rose and azure. His slaves in the shade were dazzled, the huge smoked beams of his ancestral home flashed with reflected light, and waiting by the throne, Penelope, pale and speechless, arched her numb head to look, her knees turning to stone: “This is not he whom I’ve awaited year after year, O gods, this dragon of forty ells stampeding throughout my house!” But the mind archer quickly divines the obscure dread of the wretched woman, and to his swelling breast replies: “O heart, she who so many years awaited you at home, she is that one you have longed for, battling the seven seas, the cruel gods and the deep voices of your undying mind.” He spoke, but his heart leapt not in his exalted breast still in his nostrils steams the blood of the newly slain, still sees his woman entangled amid their naked forms, and glancing at her obliquely, his grim eyes glaze almost in the bubbling wrath of slaughter he might have pierced her through. On golden-studded nails robes hung in a long row, woven by his faithful wife flash in the fragrant shadows, embroidered with gods and hurrying winds and swift triremes: and stretching forth a sunburnt hand he quickly chooses the one most flaming, throws it flat across his shoulder, and steaming still, unbars the door and strides across the threshold. Then softly sweet with aromatic oils he smoothes his long coarse hair, his body hardened by black brine, till youthfulness within his wintry flesh awakes in flowers. For hours he laved himself in lukewarm water, his veins spread out like rivers in his body, his kidneys cooled, and that great mind was in the waters cleansed and full reposed. The much-wandering one smiled sweetly in his twisted beard and with his eyebrows signaled the frightened girls to go. Two slaves poured forth the waters, but when they saw their lord they shrieked in terror, for his curly loins and belly steamed and thick black blood dripped down from both his murderous palms their copper jugs rolled clanging on the marble tiles. And when in his spacious courtyards Odysseus had cut down the insolent youths, lie hung on high his satiated bow and strode to the warm bath to cleanse his brawny body.
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