Echo and Narcissus

Number 40. Echo and Narcissus. Long ago, before the world was mapped by roads and cities, there lived a forest nymph whose voice was like a river of silver bells. Her name was Echo, and she loved nothing in the wide green world so much as the sound of a story. This is a tale from ancient Greece, a land of high rocky mountains, deep blue seas, and forests so thick and quiet that they seemed to be holding their breath. The people of that time believed that every grove of trees, every bubbling spring, and every mountain cave was home to a spirit of nature, a nymph or a dryad who cared for the wild places. Echo was one of these spirits, a mountain nymph who lived among the high sunlit cliffs of Mount Cytheron. Echo was not a creature of silence. She was a chatterbox, a weaver of words, a girl who could talk the birds out of the sky and keep the mountain streams listening to her tall tales. If you walked through her forest in those days, you would hear her voice floating on the breeze, telling stories of the ancient giants, of the stars that chased each other across the night sky, or of the simple funny things the field mice did in the tall grass. She spoke so beautifully and with such endless energy that no one ever thought to tell her to be quiet. Her voice was her joy, her identity, and her greatest gift. But Echo had one great flaw. She did not always know when to stop talking, and she did not always use her voice for wise things. In the high halls of Mount Olympus, where the gods lived, there was a great goddess named Hera. Hera was the queen of the gods, a majestic and powerful figure who kept a watchful eye over the earth. Often, Hera would look down from her golden throne to see what the other gods were doing in the forests below. The king of the gods, Zeus, was fond of visiting the earth in secret, slipping away to play games and talk with the wood nymphs, leaving his duties behind. Hera, suspicious and clever, would descend from the clouds to catch him. But the wood nymphs did not want to be found by the angry queen. They knew that Hera's temper was as sharp as a lightning bolt, and so they turned to Echo for help. Whenever Echo saw the shadow of Hera's golden chariot falling over the tree canopy, she would run to meet the queen. She would bow low, her eyes bright with mischief, and immediately begin to speak. "Oh, great queen," Echo would say, her voice wrapping around Hera like a warm cloak of silk. "Have you heard what the swallows told the pine trees this morning? It is the most remarkable story. It begins with a golden leaf that fell into the river, and how the river king thought it was a crown." Hera, despite her anger, would find herself pausing to listen. Echo would spin one tale into another, weaving a tapestry of words so thick and bright that the queen would forget her search for an hour, then two hours, then a whole afternoon. While Echo talked, the other nymphs would quietly slip away into the deep caves, and Zeus would return to Olympus unnoticed. For a long time, this trick worked, but you cannot deceive the queen of the gods forever. One afternoon, as Echo was in the middle of a particularly long story about a badger who tried to build a ladder to the moon, Hera noticed a rustle of green skirts in the bushes nearby. She saw a nymph escaping into the shadows, and in that instant, she understood. She looked down at Echo, whose mouth was still open, ready with the next sentence. Hera's eyes flashed like dark storms. "You have used your voice to deceive me," Hera said, her voice quiet but heavy as iron. "You have taken the grandest gift you possess, your beautiful flowing speech, and turned it into a trap to hold my attention. Therefore, your tongue shall lose its…

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