Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  While absorbed in his contemplation of these two monsters, who were now hovering round and round the Lykophos-Mound, Nisos had not yet noticed the most important person of all in this cosmic-comic burlesque show, namely the Being whom these two monsters were preparing to attack. She, he found out later, was none other than Atropos, the smallest, but at the same time the wisest and the oldest, of the three Fates, or the “Moirai”, those who can, when so they wish, decide the Destiny of every man and every woman born into the world.

  Young Nisos Naubolides must have had something in him of the spirit of Odysseus, though, in place of being related to the king, his father Krateros and his brother Agelaos were the only living rivals of the old hero as claimants for the kingship. But the boy certainly displayed something beyond his boasted “cleverness” when, in order to find out what really was the object of this mad attack by the Erinys and the Gorgon, he made a run to another small fir-tree-trunk and clung tightly to it.

  Yes! There she was, Atropos herself, the unturning, unbending, unwavering, unrelenting, implacable Decider of mortal destinies! As Nisos saw her, she saw him, and for an incredible moment this “clever” boy who had just made up his mind to be the prophet to the strong, looked into the eyes of Fate, into the eyes of her who could decide the Destiny of any man and any woman born into this world. Yes, they looked each other full in the face.

  Atropos was under a spruce-fir just as Nisos was; but she was seated beneath hers, while he was clinging to his. As he looked at her now Nisos realized that the flesh and blood of which she was made was neither the normal flesh and blood of mortals nor what he had always been taught to believe was the immortal flesh of the gods with its veins full of ichor, that divine liquid more like the sap of imperishable vegetation than the raw red stomach-turning juice that mortals call blood.

  No, the boy realized as he gazed at her that the mystery of her being was far deeper than anything he had been taught to attribute to her or to her sisters. In fact the aura that hovered round her and the spirit that emanated from her were so transporting to him that the frightful noise kept up above his head by the barking and bellowing of the Fury and the still more terrifying sound, resembling a series of viscous and glutinous thunder-claps following one another like a procession of sea-blown bubbles and finally bursting as they broke into the air, made by the Gorgon, became no more than hens cackling in a yard.

  Yes, the material out of which Atropos was made was clearly as different from the ichor-nourished substance of the Olympians as it was from the horn-like material of the bodies of the Erinys and Gorgon. Nor was it made of that vaporous stuff, only a little thicker than mist or spray such as composed those phantom-like forms who eternally harangued each other in Arima. No; the truth is that the longer Nisos Naubolides looked into the eyes of Fate and the longer Fate looked into the eyes of Nisos Naubolides the more clearly did the latter realize that the imperishable frame of Atropos, this “one who could not be turned”, was made of a substance drawn from a level of existence outside both time and space, though cunningly adapted to play its part in each of them.

  But the boy proved how “clever” he was by imbibing like an inexhaustible draught of timeless experience much more at that moment than the mere physical nature of the oldest of the Fates; for there came over him in a trance that was more than a trance the surprising knowledge—and this, though again and again he blundered hopelessly in trying to describe it in words, was really with him to the day of his death—that Atropos helps us in the creation of our individual fate by an infinitely long series of what some would call nothing but blind, stupid, dull, dreamy, moon-struck “brown studies”, many of which take place inside the walls of houses, and others when we are moving about on our ordinary errands outside.

  In these interruptions of our ordinary consciousness we fall into a brainless, idea-less moment of dull abstraction in which we cease to think of anything in particular but just stare blindly and dully at some particular physical object, no matter what, that happens to be there at the moment. This object, in itself of no particular interest, and never selected for its real purpose is merely an object to stare at, lean upon, rest against and use as a trance-background, or brown-study foreground, or, if you like, like a shoal beneath a stranded consciousness, or a reef of brainless abstraction, wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all.

  Nisos showed how born he was to be an interpreter if not a prophet by his complete acceptance—as from the trunk of his spruce-fir he faced the Mistress of Fate as she leaned against the trunk of her spruce-fir—of the revelation that our individual destiny is made up of an accumulation of brainless, uninspired, brown-study moments of abstraction wherein we cease to be organic living creatures and almost become inanimates, almost become things of wood and stone and clay and dust and earth, almost become what we were before we were intelligent or instinctive creatures: almost—but not quite!

  For, as our young friend looked Atropos in the face, there was permitted to him what is permitted to few among us mortals during our lifetime, namely the realization of what actually happens to us when we fall, as we all do, into these day-dreams. At that moment, as Nisos Naubolides now knew well, all over the surface of the earth there were living creatures, many of them men, women, and children, many of them horses, cattle, lions, wolves, foxes, wild asses and tame pigs, sheep and goats, rats and mice, who were standing or crouching, lying or sitting in one of these brooding trances when dazed and dreaming, we are asleep and yet not asleep.

  For Nisos at this moment almost all the inhabitants of the earth, at least such as were not included in his school-geography-books, were “blameless Ethiopians”; and what he conjured up at that instant over the entire face of the earth’s surface were millions of men no different from those he knew so well, no different from the king and the king’s son, no different from his own father, Krateros Naubolides, or from the old man, Damnos Geraios, or from his own familiar bosom-crony, Tis, the herdsman from the other end of Ithaca, all of whom, as they went about their affairs, fell now and again into these day dreams of fate where, asleep and yet not asleep, they created without knowing it their future destiny.

  And as he looked into the eyes of Atropos he seemed to become the blood-brother, the “Kasi”, or school-camerado, of all these day-dreamers, till their dream was his dream, and without any “pomposizing,” or processioning in the manner of Hermes, he became aware that with this whole great multitude, including not only his fellow-men but all creatures upon the earth, he was, without knowing it, living a double life, in fact two quite separate lives, one in this world and one in some other world.

  “Why it’s just as if,” he said to himself, “I was in one of those dreams when I know I’m dreaming, and could, if I wanted to, wake up, quite naturally, easily, and without any particular effort, rather than go on dreaming.”

  He was beginning to feel almost reassured, when suddenly he received an extremely unpleasant and thoroughly disconcerting shock. He beheld those two hovering Horrors make a downward swoop towards the Spruce-Fir against which Atropos was leaning. It was a shock that gave him a very disagreeable sensation, a sensation as if his heart-beats, his pulses, his quick-drawn breaths had been pounded into one single blood-dripping welter, and that this welter of automatic physical functionings might at any moment absorb the attention of his whole conscious being.

  “What on earth can be going on in her head,” he thought, “to give me such a feeling?” And then without warning, and still under the power of her eyes his entire mind became concentrated upon the old Odysseus. “I’m not going to endure,” he thought, “no! not one day longer, this wretched plot that father and Agelaos and the rest of them are working up against the old man. Arsinöe’s with them of course. That’s only natural since she’s a Trojan. But none of the rest of us are Trojans! What’s come into us, what’s come over us, that we’re so against the old man?”

  The unpleasant sensation he
had just been through of feeling as if the beating of his heart, the flicker of his eyelids, the throb of his pulses, the breath of his lungs, had got mixed together in one raw palpitating bubble of blood-streaked eruption, now began, as Nisos disentangled himself from this reeking blood-sweating mass, to take its due proportion in his mind as he connected it with the drowsy passivity of his body, and not only of his body, but of all the bodies of all the human and sub-human creatures as they pause in their work or in their play, in their hunting or in their fighting, to forget themselves in day-dreams and trances.

  And it was then that Nisos realized that not only heroes and kings and prophets and soothsayers but all living things are subject to an unseen, unfelt, unrecognized fate, and that it is this fate whose current flows, above or below, it matters not which, the heart-beats and pulse-beats of the lives of us all.

  And the boy finally realized that there are points in our lives that we ourselves think of as turning points, but which, under the eyes of Atropos, the one with whom is no turning, are in reality only the fulfilment of our inherent destiny.

  The boy had hardly reached this conclusion when the threatened attack began. The Erinys and the Gorgon descended with a sickening stench from their foul throats, with a horrible hissing from their bosom serpents, with an excremental vapour from their festering flesh and putrid scales, and with a screaming and a barking that silenced every bird and every wind.

  It had nothing to do with the eyes of Atropos, for they had left him perforce—the instinctive impulse with which the boy now flung himself into the midst of that terrible struggle. The final issue may not have been in doubt; but Nisos was too young, and, just then too wild with desperate courage and too dazed by supernatural shocks to think of anything but his physical contact with that pair of Horrors and with their serpents and their stench and the sounds they made and with their appalling strength.

  One comfort he had as he fought on, gasping and sweating, to free that oldest of all the beneficent powers in the world from those two demons, and that was nothing less than her own faint though very clear voice, encouraging him.

  Another comfort he had was the uninterrupted humming of small insects round the Lykophos-Mound. These little creatures seemed quite oblivious of what was going on. Up and down across the surface of the rock they flew, dodging one another with quivering antennae and hovering wings; while first one, and then another, snatched a sip of Nectar from between petals of flowers so delicate that from their disturbed rims rose no sounds audible to human ears; though to lesser insects no doubt they sounded with the rain-drop clarity of tiny bells.

  But what gave the boy a strength beyond his years was not only the fact that the oldest of all the goddesses was calling upon him to aid her, but that, although her voice was as faint as the remote sound of the sea-wind in a sea-shell, it was a voice with the most far-reaching echo he had ever heard.

  For the echo of the voice of Atropos was no ordinary echo. It was a special and peculiar one, and it responded to every syllable that the old creature uttered; for through the substances of all the material elements of which the Island of Ithaca was composed this small faint echo of the oldest of the Fates could pass. Through substances that seemed bent on resisting its passing this echo easily and naturally passed. The old Fate’s voice went forth first; and then the echo followed it like a faithful disciple doing the will of its master. Passing through everything that resisted them they went on; till they reached the yawning void where all echoes cease.

  And the echo of the voice of Atropos had the peculiarity of entering into all the substances that carried it forward, as well as using them to help it on its way towards the ultimate void. The echo entered now into the fluttering insects who were sucking the Nectar from those tiny flowers. It entered into the burning sun above those three immortals and above this one mortal just as it entered into the heart of the Lykophos-Mound.

  The curious thing was that the boy accompanied his final terrific effort with his human hands and feet against the two monsters by a low-murmured, very rapidly enunciated, rational argument, defending his own and his mother’s friendly attitude towards the old king of Ithaca compared with the hostile one of his father Krateros and his brother Agelaos.

  It was indeed only when he reached the culmination of this rapidly murmured, rational, and almost legal argument, with which he was punctuating, so to speak, his violent physical struggles, that he suddenly discovered that the battle had been won and that the Fury and the Gorgon had vanished. In his relief at this consummation, just when the throes of the struggle had become more than he could bear, the boy lost consciousness.

  When he recovered he found that Atropos also was gone and that it required so much effort to leave the Lykophos-Mound and to drag himself up the rest of the hill that all that had passed grew steadily more blurred and more indistinct. One thing alone limned itself clearly on his mind, like a reflected image in water amid a crowd of globular bubbles, and that was some reference made, either by himself or by the oldest of the Fates, to a certain woven stuff.

  This stuff he kept visualizing; but the shock to his nerves of what he had been through had made him completely forget its name. He remembered that the whole matter of this stuff had to do with some difficulty in procuring it and some difficulty with regard to its fabrication. He could see its colour. He could sense the feel of its substance, but its name and its use, though both of these had been familiar to him from his infancy, he had completely forgotten.

  The shock he had received from the sight of those two monstrous creatures had left a queer blackness, a gaping, yawning, bleeding chasm in the compact body of his natural and orderly memories.

  “I am myself,” he kept repeating as he climbed the hill. “Nisos is Nisos; and Nisos is clever; and Nisos is going to be the prophet of those who are strong and healthy but who have been hit in some way—hit as I am now!—and who need a prophet rather different from former prophets.”

  And then in a flash it all came back to him and the gap in his memory was filled. “Othonia” was the word; and sail-cloth was the stuff. Atropos had told him—so he had had it from the Mouth of Necessity Itself—that Zeus, alone on the summit of Mount Gargaros, deprived of his thunder-bolts and separated from Hera his Queen, had decided to unite all the will-power and wisdom he possessed with the will-power and wisdom possessed by Themis, the goddess of what was orderly and seemly, and with whatever Atropos herself, the oldest of the Fates, she who was Fate Itself, decided might be for the best.

  And what was “for the best”, here and now in Ithaca, was that Odysseus their lord and king should hoist sail again and depart for the Isles of the Blessed whither Menelaos, the brother of Agamemnon, had already sailed.

  So that was it! And the little black spot in his rattled brain was no more than “othonia”, a rag of sail-cloth, a woven wisp of crumpled weed, which had been completely obliterated, swept forth, cast away, blotted out from his terrestrial brain by the stench of those loathsome immortals! Othonia! Othonia! Othonia! Sails! Sails! Sails! Sails for whatever ship Odysseus can build, Sails for whatever crew Odysseus can find, to carry him on his last voyage across the sea!

  It was in this first blush of his relief at the recovery of his memory that Nisos Naubolides suddenly felt himself seized by the wrist. He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not noticed the man approaching him; but there at his side was the mysterious Priest of Orpheus. “COME!” was all the man said.

  Nisos, who felt that if he could only avoid looking at the fellow’s face he could cope with him perfectly, tried to pull his arm away. But this he found he couldn’t do. And how queer it was that he couldn’t look at him! Only an hour ago he had looked into the face of Euryale, the Gorgon, without being turned to stone. In the eyes of Fate Itself he had been finding comfort; but not with a secretive, intrusive wretch who wasn’t even a priest of Dionysus, or of Demeter, or of Persephone or of the authentic Mysteries of Eleusis, but only of these newfangled, sanctim
onious, priest-invented, fabulous Mysteries, of an Orpheus who himself was more of a fantastic poet than a hero or demigod, he felt entirely paralysed.

  So here was he, Nisos Naubolides, the favoured one of the oldest of the Fates, one who was fated to use his cleverness, when he became a man, to grand prophetic effect, here was he, for some mad, mystical, demoniac reason, unable even to glance at the face of this crafty intruder! “Well,” the boy said to himself, “I know I heard old Damnos Geraios, Leipephile’s grand-dad, tell mother once that there were certain papyri which absorb certain pigments and others that cannot absorb them. So I suppose my particular kind of ‘cleverness’, though it may have Fate Itself on its side, would be entirely wasted on this man.”

  By this time the man in question had conducted him to a sinister-looking square building, “Go in there and learn reverence!” was all he said as he pushed him in and barred the door behind him.

  Nisos was so relieved at being liberated from the man’s touch, and from the nearness of a face he felt he couldn’t bring himself even to glance at, that the first thing he did was to clap his hands. “Well!” he said to himself, “as long as I don’t have that filthy sod hanging around, I don’t care what happens!”

  What had happened was indeed a curious experience for a young prince of the House of Naubolides. He found himself enclosed in an extremely small and absolutely square cell that was nakedly bare from the centre of its ceiling to the centre of its floor. Ceiling, walls, floor, were all of the same stone and this stone was of a most unusual colour. He tried in vain to think of any object he knew that was of this peculiar colour. The nearest he could get to it was a thunder-cloud he had once seen when he was very little reflected in a muddle of rain-water near the cow-sheds of his home.

  He stood on one leg for a second which was a custom of his when dumbfounded. But he soon brought his foot down again and remained with his heels together and his eyes fixed on things far beyond the queer-coloured walls that surrounded him.