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Time passes slowly – the heavy scents of incense and oils within the tent flood your nose and mouth, but this is not unpleasant. From outside the tent, you hear activity, and the singers raise their voices in a pleasing crescendo. Their voices cut out at Anios' direction, and in perfect silence, seven pairs of Athenian youths, boys and girls of thirteen or fourteen summers, wearing simple white robes enter the tent. They step with stately precision, mature beyond their years, and behind them, is Menestheus bearing a large wicker basket – within, are golden cornstalks and sheaves of corn-ears of Hyperborean origin. The ears of corn are gigantic and rich - you've never seen their like previously, and seem just as fresh the day they must have been picked in Hyperborea. The basket itself is festooned with larkspur, laurel and cypress twigs.
King Anios moves to the center of the tent, and beckons the Athenians forward - the hymnal singers raise their voices once more in holy praise of Apollo, and once the procession from Athens passes through the second tent entrance by the swan pond, the hymnal singers guide each of you competitors through the tent’s second passage as well.
The morning outside is bright, and the air is charged with power – before you, is the Altar of Horns. It is enormous – a gleaming, ivory construction, composed of animal horns of all types and kinds. Apollo was said to have constructed the Altar from horn and ivory provided to him by his sister, Artemis Αγροτερη, and at once, you see that this is the truth – there is no obvious mechanism of binding, or bracing, to keep the horns of the altar together. It is solid, immutable, and the anchor of the island itself. Perhaps ten strides away, you see a cypress tree of medium-size and awe dawns on you when you realize that is it <span class="mu-i">the</span> cypress tree – the once that Leto braced against whilst Artemis and Eileithyia delivered Apollo himself.
The Hyperborean gifts are laid upon the Altar by Menestheus and King Anios, and the boys of the Athenian delegation are ritually shorn by their female companions– the young men collecting their long boyhood hair into bundles, wrapped with larkspur stems, and placed securely in smaller baskets, carrying them up to the Altar. The boys of each Athenian pair join each group of hymnal singers, with one left before the Altar in kneeling supplication. Once accomplished, the singers file into the beginning arrangements of the crane dance. Standing many strides away from the Altar, six single-file lines are formed, each led by one of the Lesser Delia competitors. The final member of each line is another competitor – once each dancing line has reached the Altar, the dancers will reverse trajectory, and the final dancer in line will become the new dancing leader, guiding the procession away from the Altar once more.
For yourself, you are placed at the rear of the line led by Palamedes – and the dance begins!
