Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  Helena had left us. She came back with a sheet of parchment. The priest took black-tipped stick out of his pocket, which he used as a pencil. He covered the page with tightly-packed characters, reread it, signed it and handed it to me.

  At the top, imprinted in the paper, the sacerdotal arms and motto were inscribed. A worthy preamble flowed on the power of the gods, a good part of which they transmitted to their priests. After that he had written that a man had come on their behalf of the island, and that everyone should treat that emissary well. Those who had no regard for his mission and did not respect him were warned of a thousand torments in this world and the other.

  “That,” Katodipsa told me, “is a weapon more powerful than all the swords on earth. The believers will adore you; the miscreants will fear you. Now you’re a divine, sacred individual. As for the rest, don’t worry about it. Come and find me tomorrow evening; we’ll count the money collected. In the meantime, here’s some small change to keep you going between now and then. There you go!”

  So saying, he embraced me affectionately, recommended me not to lose the safe-conduct, and accompanied me as far as the road.

  I was surprised not to have seen Helena at the moment of my departure, but as I drew away, thinking about that, I put my hand in my pocket and found a note. The ardent young woman had written very sweet things therein. She told me, in addition, to come during the night to a place in the city where she had her private abode.

  IX. Thalantide

  It was midday, I had just quit the High Priest. From the top of the hill I could see the broad green triangle of the ocean. The sky seemed to be steeped in white cloud in the vague distance of the horizon. I saw ships dancing in the port. My gaze plunged into the multicolored streets. The houses of Thalantide, in fact, are built with materials of all hues, or painted in red, violet, green or orange. The action of the air, the rain, and also decrepitude, corrected the crudity of those tints and modified the appearance of the old dwellings harmoniously. Time slid its varnish slowly over the walls, and nuanced them with the warm colorations with which its coats the paintings of old masters delightfully.

  Canals divided the city into a multitude of artificial islands linked by bridges. The hovels and cabins of the poor people were huddled together to the west over a considerable area. Near the sea and on the hills rose the rich residences. Between the high city and the low city there had to exist, as there does everywhere, a perpetual and felonious war.

  There is no spectacle more superb or more gripping than that of a maritime city seen from above, like Antwerp contemplated from the belfry or Marseille from Notre-Dame de la Garde. Ports are the workshops in while human accomplish their most extraordinary labor. They advance their tentacles of cement into the sea and dare to hold the waves prisoner; and twice a day, profiting from the amorous assaults that the male ocean delivers to the female land, fragile vessels laden with men and riches sail without dread toward the high seas, mocking the most ferocious power of nature.

  As I wanted to visit Thalantide, I considered attentively the bird’s-eye map deployed before my eyes. I did not know where to go first, and devoted myself to learned reflections.

  The voyager with a profound mind, I said to myself, seeks to know the soul of cities. For cities have subtle individual souls. There are stupid ones and spiritual ones, vulgar ones and proud ones. Shall I go to see those palaces and temples with domes the color of gold? No. I shall only comprehend the monuments, the debris of the past, when the complexion of the people who built them has been revealed to me. This city is, above all, maritime; it’s to the quays that it’s necessary to go first.

  Satisfied with that reasoning, I went down the avenue slowly.

  At that moment I was perfectly happy. I had escaped death and anxieties. To that sentiment of liberty and security was added the consciousness of my future glory. Was I not an emulator of Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo? Would history not inscribe my name in a good place, among those of the greatest voyagers and the most astonishing navigators? I hoped firmly to see my homeland again. What consideration my fellow citizens would have for me then!

  Alas, my naïve soul forgot envy. It scarcely supposed that few people, on my return, would want to believe me, or that my creditors, indifferent to the grandeur of the fatherland, would pursue me with their inconsiderate rage. That is the destiny of great men. Columbus died in disgrace; I shall render my soul in the hospital. I am proud of that, but not satisfied. Let’s pass on.

  I followed long roads, quite different from ours, traced in circular, spiral or elliptical curves. In consequence, the facades are convex or concave. The windows are ordinarily round. The dwellings of prosperous people comprise several buildings parallel to the street, separated by courtyards. Each of them dominates by one floor the one in front of it. The flat roofs support gardens with trees, vegetables, flowers and cheerful arbors covered with God’s good vines. You can have no idea of the agreeable aspect of those houses, painted in pastel colors, only showing the summits of their five or six buildings, cliffs surmounted and crowned by fruits and foliage.

  Colonnettes of stone or sculpted wood sustain open galleries forming projections. Capitals receive the overlap of their arcades. On the entire edifice one senses a concern for and sentiment of proportion. Every dimension is regulated for the harmony of the ensemble, and the architect does not seem, as in some countries, to have composed his plans in order to excite stupefaction or hilarity.

  The curvature of the avenues seemed to me at first to be inconvenient for vehicles, dangerous for pedestrians and likely to prolong everyone’s journeys considerably. But I saw neither vehicles not riders. Special roads, in straight lines, serve chariots and carriages. An admirable disposition! Remember that more people die in Paris in a single year under the hooves of horses than in a murderous battle.

  The canals that I had seen from afar, infinitely subdivided, pass through the dependences of the majority of habitations. Butchers, bakers, merchants of wine, milk, vegetables, etc., bring in their goods on barges. That gave me a good opinion of the people.

  These people, I thought, are philosophers. They willingly reduce the intensity and convenience of transportation in order to increase their tranquility. The odious din of our cities is unknown to them. Their children play outside in all security. These sages esteem and respect life.

  Then I heard a monstrous clamor. I wondered where the racket was coming from, but could not see anything. Continuing my route, I perceived at a street corner a crowd of some three hundred people. Everyone was crying: “To death! Drown him! Flay him! Burn him! Break his bones! Death! Death!”

  I drew nearer. A man of about thirty was lying in the gutter. His face was bloody, his clothes torn, his body riddled with wounds. Struck by all the hands that could reach him, he raised himself up at intervals, moaning, as if to beg for mercy. The blows only rained down harder. The women, pitiless creatures, elbowed their neighbors aside in order to get to the unfortunate fellow, to scratch his face with their fingernails or stab him with needles.

  The spectacle made me feel ill. I asked someone: “What has he done?”

  “Oh, the wretch!” was the reply. “Oh, the wretch! He’s a filthy informer. He revealed to a husband the profligacy of his wife. The husband murdered his spouse. He’s now in prison, waiting to be hanged. As for him, we’re going to kill him. Look at the traitor’s face!”

  “In truth,” I said, “that’s a lot of bruises for something so trivial.”

  A pretty young woman arrived, armed with a hatchet for splitting wood. She cleaved a passage all the way to the poor devil and raised her arm. I turned away in order not to see. As I went, I heard the last cry of the victim. The crowd fell silent, without dispersing yet. I hastened my pace, sickened.

  That’s atrocious, I thought. What savagery! But is it necessary to feel sorry for informers? If only they were treated in that fashion at home. That species of sneaks would be near extinction. That death is a good examp
le.

  As the same instant I was jostled by a troop of people who were running and gesticulating, shouting: “Stop! Stop! It isn’t him!”

  “Alas,” I murmured, “the justice of the crowd is no better than our great legal justice. Poor young man!”

  And I continued to follow the streets.

  I finally arrived in the port, similar to all others. The ships, small, with sails and oars, resembled those of the Greeks and the Romans.

  Then I perceived numerous taverns.

  Truly, I said to myself, I’m stupid. I reflected maturely as to where I would find the reflection of the soul of this people. The soul of a people is in the tavern. That’s certain. It’s the popular microcosm. Between tables stained by lees, the spirit of the mass in concentrated and concretized. The will, the desires, the vices and the virtues of the plebeian is formed there, develops there, is exited there and blossoms there. That is where mobs are born, elections are trafficked and upheavals of humankind are prepared. In truth, it must be said that all elective power emanates from the tavern. Every democratic constitution leads to the reign of the wine-merchant. How many men, back home, having commenced their harangue standing on a barrel, have ended it on the tribune as dictators?

  Having said that, I went in and sat down.

  X. The Tavern

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Bring me wine.”

  My bizarre accent impressed the noisy clientele of the tavern, but I was still wearing my peasant garments, and my appearance reassured everyone.

  At the table where I had sat down, several sailors were chatting and drinking. The one nearest to me, a man with a white beard, greeted me politely.

  “You’re an old mariner,” I said to him, “And must have seen many lands.”

  “That’s true. In the forty years I’ve been a navigator, I’ve learn to know the coasts of the Archipelago. I’ve never surpassed the line of the king’s triremes that forbids access to unknown seas, though, as a few others have done. My longest voyage was one that I made for twelve entire months along the wretched littoral of the isle of the Mainomenes. A sad escapade. I lived miserably on bitter beverages and old potatoes. Nowhere have I seen people so heretical or so unpleasant. Nature is ingrate there, the soil miserly and the air so corrupt that I caught an afflicting malady that I can’t decently name.”

  At that moment several other drinkers started shouting so loudly that I could no longer hear anything else. I listened to what they were saying, therefore, and tried to grasp its meaning.

  “They’re mocking us,” howled a tall, thin fellow with a squint, whose voice dominated the racket. “What! Work like that for six drachmas a day! Can you live on that? Add it up. To slake your thirst you shell out a good four drachmas. That’s a necessary expense, without which you can’t work. Our profession gives us a perpetual thirst. Is it with two drachmas, then, that you can feed yourself, clothe yourself and lodge your family? I’m not talking about the small expenses of existence. Oh, indigent worker, perhaps one day you’ll know you strength and remember your rights. Get up and fight if you don’t want to perish from hunger.”

  “He’s right,” said the others.

  “Look as well,” the orator went on, “at the unjust manner in which we’re paid. Poor caulkers of ships like you and me barely scrape a living. Slaves are less unfortunate. We’re clad in dismal rags, poorly nourished, ill-considered, scarcely drunk once a week. In truth, it would be better to die than endure so much misery. Now look at those fat master pilots. They’re paid three times as much as us. Do they have larger stomachs, more delicate throats, costlier needs or greater desires than ours? Certainly not, that’s impossible. There’s only one price for bread and wine. We’re exactly similar men, equal by nature. Why are wages so different? Don’t tell me, as our adversaries do, that a master pilot knows more than us, that his job is more difficult, that it takes him years to learn it. So what? If there are men more knowledgeable, more skillful and more intelligent than us, it’s the fault of the gods, not ours.”

  “If you owned ships,” shouted my neighbor, the sailor, “you wouldn’t think like that.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said the caulker, “Who’s paid you to contradict me all the time? It’s traitors like you who are preventing us attaining our goal, which is to live well and work less.”

  “Don’t you see,” the mariner replied, laughing, “that on the day when your fellows are paid like pilots, no one will take the time any longer to serve an apprenticeship, or the trouble to study the sea and the currents. Caulkers would take the helm and run the ships on to the rocks of Sikus and the sands of Colocusthe. By Poseidon, I wouldn’t embark that morning!”

  “Look at that old man in infancy! He’s lost his teeth and still wants to bite me! Don’t bore us with your nonsense. You’re not of our epoch, you’re reasoning in the fashion of our grandfathers.”

  “And you,” said the old man, standing up, “are talking like a man who wants to become a senator like the filthy Ictis, who got himself elected by spouting the same stupidities.”

  The audience smiled. The caulker went pale, and drank in order to give himself countenance. He went on, forcefully:

  “You now, however, you old viper, that the welfare of my comrades is my sole ambition. And why, if you please, shouldn’t I be a senator? If that came about, believe that your affairs would go better. Earn twice as much, three hours’ work a day at the most, the founding of national free taverns where everyone could drink as much as they liked, and a thousand other admirable and necessary advantages: those, my friends, are the reforms of which I dream, reforms indispensable to the grandeur of the people, the felicity of the proletariat, the sublime and irrevocable Progress of laborious humanity. In the Senate, my voice would dominate all the others, for they’d tremble at the thought that democracy entire is standing behind me. And know well, old octopus, that I’d have the eyes put out of criminals of your species, paid by our masters to abuse us!”

  The assembly applauded, and showed its esteem for the orator by means of cries of joy. The refractory sailor, threatened and told to get out, made his escape as best he could.

  Then an individual sitting next to the caulker climbed on to a table and shouted: “Companions, have no doubt about it, Espinosos is a dozen times right. He alone is capable of rendering us justice. You know now what great projects he’s meditating. Permit him to accomplish them. Elect him in place of that renegade Ictis, who has us massacred by the hoplites when we dare to complain. That’s all he does for us. Punish him! We have three months to prepare for the triumph of the shipworkers. Down with Ictis! Long live Espinosos!”

  And the drinkers took up the refrain in chorus: “Long live Espinosos!”

  XI. The Great Archinatos

  There is, I said to myself as I went out, some appearance of truth in the proverb that the voice of the People is the voice of God, for that voice is identical everywhere.

  Continuing my peregrination through the city, I observed several strange things. The most marvelous appeared to me to be the abundance of gold and its vulgar employment. Vagabonds cooked their pittance in it; vessels were fashioned in it, pots of every species and household utensils for the usage of poor folk. I saw children playing quoits with ingots of the precious metal. Five or six saucepans from a hostelry frequented by the lower orders would easily have paid my debts in France.

  As gazed open-mouthed at a butcher’s table whose top was a long, broad a thick plate of gold, I saw a handsome priest in a long orange robe coming toward me. I accosted him and, showing him the cause of my astonishment, I said to him: “I come, Sire Priest, from a land where that substance is rare and venerated, an instrument of good fortune and limitless power. In my homeland it procures everything, honest and dishonest; and virtue in our countries is estimated in accordance with the quantity of gold that it requires to yield it. If you desire the amour of a virgin, if you covet an honorific title, if you want to be assured of the devotion of your friends, you take out
your purse, and if it is well-garnished with gold coins, you will be contented in all your enterprises.”

  “I don’t know what your nation is,” said the ecclesiastic, “but I recognize you as the envoy of the gods, the protégé of the High Priest—in sum, the man with whom the entire city is occupied this morning. Suffer that I adore you.”

  “No, no,” I said, “I won’t suffer it. Merely reply to my previous question.”

  “Well,” he said, “in our islands, for a long time, gold was as sovereign as in your homeland. Silver money has replaced the old, but mores are still the same.”

  “Undoubtedly,” I said, “this land abounds in newly discovered mines, or your rivers carry flakes, like the rivers of Chalcidice, where your forefathers the Greeks went to collect them?”

  “No, gold is naturally rare in the Archipelago, but one of our ancient scholars rendered it common by means of a memorable discovery.”

  “What!” I cried. “You manufacture gold?”

  “It’s true, and if you have the time to listen to me, you’ll know how it was done for the first time.”

  I accepted, and he commenced:

  “Eight centuries ago, the value of everything was, as you say, estimated as a certain quantity of the metal in question. Only noble lords, rich merchants, the heads of the Church and prostitutes of great renown possessed it. At that time, there lived an old and savant priest named Archinatos. His long, strange life was spent in arid secret studies. Nasty rumors ran around on his account. He was reputed to be affiliated to the subterranean powers, and, although his activities were unknown, everyone repeated that they were impious.

  “A high-ceilinged room, tiled and vaulted, served as his laboratory. On the floor and on shelves fixed to the walls, singular jars and bottles were arranged. By night, passers-by heard inexplicable noises and saw the high windows illuminated by rapid flashes of white light, as if lightning were enclosed behind the panes.