The Gryphon Seal

I turned to the little box in an effort to distract my mind.  It was a solidly constructed wooden box with interior compartments stuffed with interesting objects.  There were some oddly, but beautifully, shaped cups, a clay model of a bull, some fragments of pottery with beautiful designs on them, and in a small compartment, what looked like a ring.  I lifted out the ring, which was the least breakable object that I could see.

It was of gold, with a design of some kind incised on it. It looked like a seal ring which my father had with the Marsden family crest on it: by pressing it into sealing wax, you could impress the design onto the wax.  But the design on this one was not a family crest, but a strange kind of animal.  At first I thought it was ugly, but looking more closely at it, I discovered a strange new kind of beauty.  It was an animal with a lion’s body, wings on its back, and the head of an eagle, except the head had what looked like ears, and riding on the back of the animal was a human figure.  A gryphon! That’s what it was: I had seen gryphons, or griffins, as some spelled it, on English coats of arms.

The figure on the back could have been a boy, but as I looked more closely, I saw that it was definitely a girl, and clad only in a short tunic, her legs and upper body unclothed.  There were definitely breasts I could see, looking at it closely.  My aunts would have called it indecent, but there was nothing indecent about it.  The girl looked proud and free and there was nothing sexual about the figure except the proudly flaunted breasts.  Moved by some impulse that seemed to come from deep within me, I slipped the ring onto my finger.

Suddenly, the light of the room seemed to  fail; it grew darker and darker.  I stood up and began to grope my way to the door, but in the darkness it seemed that I had come much farther than the door of the room could be, much farther than the whole space within the room, or even the house. I groped my way forward, and at last there was some light ahead of me.  I went towards the light and was suddenly blinded by a light like the noonday sun.  But it was the noonday sun, even though Margot had shown me the box after supper and I had looked at the chest by lamplight.

Suddenly I tripped over something and fell bruisingly to the floor.  But it wasn’t a floor, carpeted as most downstairs rooms in Margot’s house were, but bare wooden planks.  I looked around as my eyes adjusted to the sunlight and saw that I was on the deck of a ship, a strange old fashioned ship with a single sail and oarlocks at the sides of the ship.  The sun was bright, almost tropical, and what looked like the crew were wearing topless tunics like the girl on the ring.  All around me was the surging sea, nothing solid but this little sailing ship, and all around, a sparkling ocean, with no land in sight, a tropical, or at least Mediterranean ocean, an ocean which did not exist within hundreds of miles of Oxford!