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Updated: June 12, 2025
So the wide world heard of Maya, the Child of the Kingdom, and from land to land men carried the stinging arrows of her wit, or signalled the beacon-fires of her scorn, while seas and shores unknown echoed her mad and rapt music, or answered the veiled agony that derided itself with choruses of laughter, from every mystic whisper of the wave, or roar of falling headlands.
Sentinels were stationed in the church belfries to ring the bells, and beacon-fires were made ready for lighting on the surrounding hilltops. Tuesday, December 16, dawned. It was a critical day. If the tea should remain in the harbor until the morrow the twentieth day after arrival the revenue officer would be empowered by law to land it forcibly.
The description which Clytemnestra gives of the progress of these beacon-fires from Troy to Argos is, for its picturesque animation, one of the most celebrated in Aeschylus. The following lines will convey to the general reader a very inadequate reflection, though not an unfaithful paraphrase, of this splendid passage . Clytemnestra has announced to the chorus the capture of Troy.
The king offered a thousand ounces of gold to any one who would make her laugh; whereupon his chief minister suggested that the beacon-fires should be lighted to summon the feudal nobles with their armies, as though the royal house were in danger. The trick succeeded; for in the hurry-skurry that ensued the impassive girl positively laughed outright.
Men's minds were drawn into this special channel; and it remained for Christopher Columbus first to form a sound theory out of the conflicting views of the cosmographers, and finally to carry out that theory with the boldness and resolution which have made his name one of those beacon-fires which carry on from period to period the tidings of the world's great history through successive ages.
"This Welch hell hath broke loose." "And you are their beacon-fires? Then the whole land is upon us!" "Prate less," quoth Sexwolf; "those are the hills now held by the warders of Harold: our spies gave them notice, and the watch-fires prepared us ere the fiends came in sight, otherwise we had been lying here limbless or headless. Now, men, draw up, and march forth."
There is every reason to believe, that the gigantic figure known as the Colossus of Rhodes formed one of the most celebrated beacon-fires of antiquity. About three hundred years before the Christian era, Charles the disciple of Lysippus constructed this brazen statue, the dimensions of which were so vast that a vessel could sail into the harbour between its legs, which spanned the entrance.
And as when a smoke issueth from a city and riseth up into the upper air, from an island afar off that foes beleaguer, while the others from their city fight all day in hateful war, but with the going down of the sun blaze out the beacon-fires in line, and high aloft rusheth up the glare for dwellers round about to behold, if haply they may come with ships to help in need thus from the head of Achilles soared that blaze toward the heavens.
In fact, the doors of the kingdom were closed against all of foreign birth, the coasts carefully patrolled, and beacon-fires kindled on the hill-tops to warn the capital whenever any strange vessel came within sight. All foreigners wrecked on the coast were to be held as prisoners until death.
Thus these lighthouse-towers were invested with a sacred character: their beacon-fires were said to be inextinguishable; their priests performed the rites and practised the arts of divination, inquiring into the success of a proposed voyage, and making votive offerings for past deliverances.
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