Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 12 August 1886.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, p. 40).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: RK himself had returned from a month in Simla in early August, no doubt with those feelings of hopeless dreariness assigned here to Ixion. The route from Simla to Lahore runs downhill to the river Gugger (‘the Styx’), crossing at Kalka, and thence to the railway at Umballa. The mountain road was travelled by the two-wheeled tonga; the plains route by dak gharry.

RK sent a copy of the article to his old teacher, W. C. Crofts, with the comment that ‘the Mythology of “Ixion” is a trifle mixed but one can't combine Olympus and the East without some sort of sacrifice’ (14 September 1886: Letters, i, 138). The title is treated as a quotation; I know no source for it.

Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, ii, 1078–80.

Whether Ixion had kissed a married goddess, and so drawn on his presumptuous head the wrath of the Insulted Gods, does not in the least concern us. It is enough to know that they returned him to his Wheel; despatching him downhill at the heels of the terrible horses of Dis, who are changed every five miles and live upon human flesh – when they can get it.

The sun was high in the heavens above the silver-roofed palaces of the gods when Phaeton yoked the chargers to the instrument of torture arranged for the conveyance of Ixion –the Car of the Two Square Wheels, to be succeeded later on by the Bed of Procrustes. And Ixion, watching drearily the tortuous downhill path which led from the gates of Olympus to the Abode of the Damned below, wept on the hillside; while Phaeton swore at the horses of Dis.

Far overhead among the asphodels passed Venus, in her chariot drawn by four dusky Cupids; and she looked down at Ixion and smiled. But the smile brought him no comfort, for he knew that as soon as he had passed beyond her sight, she would turn to Mars – offensive Mars, who dwelt in a suburb of Olympus – and bestow no further thought upon him.