The Fates slept.
What can I say? They are old women after all, and old women have a right to doze off. I know, I know, they’ve always been old so what difference did it make on this particular day?
Who knows? The spinning, measuring, and cutting must get pretty old after a while, and if it gets to be a little too rhythmic and monotonous, then who can blame them if, on one hot afternoon in the underworld,they just kind of nodded off.
The point is, they weren’t watching when Sisyphus suddenly heaved that boulder over the top of the mountain.
Well. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Sysyphus blinked.
It took a second to take it all in. He looked down and watched that great boulder, that he had worn smooth and stained over the years with his old blood and sweat, tumble and bounce down, down, DOWN that incline which he had referred to once, in his silent thoughts, as “the dark side of the mountain.” By that he meant that he had never seen that side before--like the dark side of the moon--the unknown, mysterious land that had offered such promise if that damn stone ever made it over the peak.
He watched its clumsy descent for what seemed like forever until he could see that boulder no longer but could only hear its great thunderous crashes echoing throughout the vales of Hades’ domain. Then it was silent.
A great smile cracked across his face, and soon his voice ripped the air with a great howl of triumph such as had never been heard before in all the universe so that it reached even up to Olympus.
It did not, however, wake the Fates; and the great resonance of his voice altered nothing there in them as they slept.
Still, the joy born of thousands upon thousands of years of persistence and pain tarried in him a little while as Winged Victory swooped in and kissed him.
Then as quickly as she came, Victory left him in sober silence on the mountain top.
Haunting thoughts wanted to bubble up from the depths of Sisyphus’ mind. He tried to suppress them--shove them back down again with all the strength of shoving boulders, but it couldn’t be helped; they bubbled up anyway, and they bubbled up grotesquely, like hundreds of dead bodies, muddy, stinky and rotten, surfacing almost instantly in the Stygian River--too many they came, and too fast to shove back down. The thoughts shaped themselves in an almost visual smell, a kind of a great stench blending itself of all rotten things, and they all somehow began to murmur together as they formed into one, single terrible thought, a whisper, it was, and then a hiss like a demon:
“Now what?”
Unable to answer the question, Sisyphus sat down on the precipice of that mountain and spent a long time thinking. The clouds of the underworld swirled past him. Overhead a chill wind circled down around him and pushed his hair from his face. His brow was deeply furrowed, and his mighty, calloused hands stroked his beard. Then he stood quickly and resolutely, and he hiked down that “dark side of the mountain”--a journey of many days.
He found his boulder.
He stood beneath it.
He gave a great heave and started rolling the boulder up the mountain.
When the Fates woke, they looked down and thought it odd that Sisyphus was on the wrong side of the mountain, but they were satisfied, after some deliberations among themselves, that nothing had changed at all in the Underworld.
