Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  But what, beneath that dazzling sky and burning sun did he make out of the face of the Priest of Orpheus? Well! The dominant features of it were its eyes and mouth. Nisos felt as if the visage into which he was now looking lacked forehead, ears, cheeks, and nose, lacked everything in fact but eyes and mouth; eyes to seek out its prey, and mouth to swallow it when found.

  In that blazing noon and because of something demoniacal about the whirlpool-like suction of that mouth, Nisos felt as if this appalling Being had no forehead or nose, or ears, or chin, or even neck! Enorches was, he felt, literally all eyes and mouth, like certain fish, certain serpents, certain birds, and certain insects.

  As he gazed in fascinated horror at this Priest of the Mysteries the creature moved—the boy could hardly think of the man as a human person—a few steps nearer to the old king. In making this move Enorches naturally came nearer to Nisos also, who felt such a shiver of terror, that, lugging his great sack along the ground, for having once faced that visage he couldn’t take his eyes off it, even to lift up his bundle, he found himself in a position whence his magnetized stare of terror inevitably included Odysseus also.

  And then to his astonishment the old king, taking no more notice of Enorches than if he’d been an over-officious retainer in a crowded court, turned to him himself. “Don’t you think, Nisos Naubolides,” the old man said, “that it might be a good idea when we come back with the daughter of Teiresias to make use of this level expanse in place of the traditional “agora”? Do you get what I mean, my lad?

  “It strikes me somehow as a freer and less formal place, and being further from the city and further away from the city-walls it seems to me to be less under the influence of conventional rules, and more likely to be friendly to new and daring schemes, such as my wish to sail Westward, beyond the Pillars of Herakles and the Atlas Mountains, over the unknown waves that now, as we hear, hide the sunken continent of Atlantis. What are you staring at, boy? What’s come over you? This is only the Orpheus fellow, you know, come to beg me no doubt not to begin giving away my treasures until he has had his share for the Mysteries.

  “How did he find out, the rogue, about this madman Zeuks having ensorcerized Pegasos and Arion? Well—we needn’t ask that. These Priests find out everything. The winds and waves themselves whisper to them, and the babies in arms babble to them, of the intentions of destiny.

  “But isn’t this an agreeable spot for a grand assembly? Isn’t this just the very sort of place where orators are moved to speak freely and where true shepherds of the people can naturally draw inspiration out of the air? I was a fool, Nisos Naubolides, not to think of this place. I warrant it was the old associations of our “agora” up there stopped me from thinking sooner of a real grand appeal to our people. This will be the exactly right place for Teiresias’ daughter to invoke the Olympians and propitiate the Fates.

  “I feel like speaking to them now, only there aren’t enough of them at the moment; and these, as you see, dear lad, are just the farmers’ families round here. But what a place to inspire anyone! Look at these men and women, so lusty and well-fed! And what handsome-coloured cloth they’re wearing! Do they weave these garments themselves nowadays do you suppose? How interested Penelope would be could she see how richly purplish in this noon-sun and under this cloudless sky gleams that excellent mingling of sepia and violet!

  “And do you see how that noble Fir-tree up there stretches a horizontal branch from its very heart towards that other tree—I can’t quite make out what tree it is—down there against the blue water of the bay? O yes! And when I come to address the assembly here—I tell you, my boy, it’ll be like that very first assembly ever held in Ithaca, about which I used to hear from my mother before I was your age.

  “Heavens! I’ll make them sit up. Hermes! But I’ll make them acclaim you, my dear lad, above your stupid brother, to rule in my place when I have hoisted sail. By Olympos yes! you shall look down past all these farmers in their richly-dyed cloth at that divine tree yearning to exchange its sap with that great pine; and as you see the sails of those fishing-boats on those blue waves you’ll think of your old king looking down through the water of an unknown sea at the sunken palaces of Atlantis!

  “Yes! By the ‘aegis’ of the Son of Kronos which is now the ‘aegis’ of Pallas Athene! when once, with the help of Pegasos and Arion, we’ve got Teiresias’ daughter here, we will drag enough sail-cloth out of them to carry me to the shores of the unknown West! By the Olympians, yes! Why should this rustic father of yours, why should this stupid brother of yours, not be forced to give up their place to you, my dear boy? It worked before in this island, that sort of change; and it can be brought about again. O! if I could only get all the men of Ithaca assembled here I would know how to persuade them! Haven’t I seen——”

  He was interrupted by a wild rush of all the crowd round them towards the sheds and barns of the homestead “whose name”, as they had heard so often that day, “was Agdos”. Enorches himself followed the crowd, passing both Odysseus and Nisos without a word: and there, before them all, walking, each of them on his four legs, quietly, obediently, tamely, patiently, came the winged dark-skinned horse, Pegasos, and the much smaller whitish-grey horse, with a sweeping black mane, known far less widely through Argos and all the mainland, but known well in the islands nearest to Ithaca, under the name of Arion.

  Yes, quietly, gently, obediently, those two imperishable and immortal creatures walked forth from their stable towards Odysseus; while Nisos, who soon had his great sack of treasures, heavy as a king’s ransom as they were, hoisted on his shoulders, opened his mouth and breathed in gasps while he awaited what would happen. And there, sometimes behind his immortal captives, and sometimes beside them, and sometimes even before them, was Zeuks himself!

  Zeuks was a man of middle height according to ordinary human measurement; but among his other peculiarities he possessed an astonishingly natural power of appearing to be taller or shorter according to the convenience, as you might put it, of the particular occasion. It was as if the occasion itself became a sorcerer who called up, out of the abyss of the uncreated, exactly the right puppet-homunculus that the trick required.

  Evidently what was required at this moment by the inevitable situation was to get these unusual creatures safely, quietly, and in docile subjection, into the immediate presence of the king of Ithaca. Meanwhile within that unclosable, unhealable, impenetrable, almost invisible crack, that extended down the whole length of the Club of Herakles, an intense argument was going on between Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth.

  They had not been caught asleep, these two members of the royal household of Ithaca. In fact they had both been awakened by the stir in every inhabited portion of the palace, even before Odysseus had to end his emotional talk with the old Dryad which was the chief cause of his being where he was now.

  Tis had been the first to disturb them. He had gone earlier than usual to milk Babba, for he wanted to get the pail of fresh milk safely into the palace before he drove the cow to a fresh strip of pasture, well the other side of the haunted Arima, upon whose devilish soil nothing would have induced him to tread. Then Arsinöe had flicked and flapped with one of the last scraps of a particular Pelasgian veil that she had surreptitiously extracted from Eurycleia’s private treasure-box but took care to use before the old lady got up.

  It was only after this event that she used a piece of the common stuff which the old nurse was wont to dole out for dealing with the dust which in both corridor and hall gathered with special heaviness owing to the nature of the rocky substances out of which Ithaca’s royal cave had been originally and primevally dug.

  It was indeed of dust that the two insects were arguing in their accustomed hiding-place within that warm perambulating retreat. Dust played as large a part in their life as wind and rain played in the life of the king of Ithaca; and so, while Enorches was striving to cast whatever devilish spell he fancied would be most effective against the creations o
f the blood of Medusa and the horse-play of Poseidon, the fly Myos was explaining to the moth Pyraust that every grain of dust was an actual world and that it was foolish to philosophize about the universe until you stopped talking about Etna being flung upon Typhon and talked about Arsinöe disturbing worlds with her duster.

  Meanwhile Nisos also, like his newly-made student-pal or Kasi-kid, was philosophizing after his fashion. What struck him, as this dancing Zeuks led his magnetized captives towards them, was the smooth-sliding manner in which each separate event or incident or occurrence, whether it was of cosmogonic importance, or was of the faintest and most attenuated significance, a mere ripple, you might say, crossing the surface of the oceanic time-mirror of life, was accepted by Odysseus with the same unalterable equanimity.

  Here was the winged horse Pegasos, born of the blood of the Gorgon, and here was the black-maned Arion, born of Demeter herself when she took the form of a mare to escape Poseidon; and dancing round these Divine Abortions was the queer individual who had the power of hypnotizing any equivocal creation who crossed his path and yet was no Bellerephon or Perseus or cast at all in the heroic mould; and here, beside them, surveying these lusty apparitions with the eye of an executioner was the Priest of the immemorial Mysteries who looked as if there were nothing in sight he would not gladly offer up to his chthonian divinities.

  And yet what was this amazing old king pointing out to him now—to him whom he had recently been considering as his successor in the kingship over the heads of a father and elder brother—but some casually noted aesthetic point about the contrasting beauty of a certain massive tower of greyish-yellow stone, to the North-East of where they stood and rising from a corner of the city wall, and a glittering roof of white marble to their North-West belonging to the Temple of Athene, pictorial elements that justified still further, the old man explained, the idea of this particular spot as a new assembly place.

  “Don’t let me ever forget,” the boy prayed in his heart, though to no particular deity, “the calm he shows at a moment like this!” And it really was, this time, without any thought of it being “clever” of him to notice such things that Nisos followed up his secret prayer by telling himself that though those weirdly startling wings rising from the shoulders of that submissive great horse, and that black mane sweeping the ground belonging to the other animal, were striking phenomena of creative nature’s power, it was really a more striking thing that a king who lived alone in his palace with his old nurse and a couple of maids should be so completely equal to occasions like this.

  Was it, Nisos asked himself, that that great massive skull possessed an imperviousness to shocks denied to other human craniums? Well, anyway that bowsprit-like and carefully trimmed beard accentuated the quality of the man’s self-possession. And Nisos decided that when once his beard began to grow he would treat it with exquisite care. “A prophet,” he told, himself, “can clearly hide a great many natural feelings behind a well-managed beard, and if he can hide them, cannot he rule them, cannot he force them to obey him, as this horse with wings and this other with a trailing black mane have been forced to obey this madman Zeuks?”

  CHAPTER V

  It was with the utmost interest that Nisos watched Zeuks and tried his best to weigh him up and get to the bottom of him. The impression he first got of this eccentric farm-labourer was that he was of middle height, of middle age, and of middle social estimation. He noted how essentially Achaean he was in every detail, in dress, in manner and in general appearance; not Pelasgian, or Dorian, or Ionian but an evenly balanced middle-of-the-road Achaean, moderate in all the imponderables, in tribal habits as well as personal reactions, and conveying, wherever he went, beneath the whole paraphernalia of his comic humours an impression of dispassionate calm; a calm that was not merely temperamental, like the coolness of Odysseus, but was the deliberately arrived-at attitude of a definite metaphysical philosophy.

  Watching Zeuks carefully Nisos decided that it was this unobtrusive mediocrity that enhanced to such a startling degree the peculiar features of his countenance, features for which it would be difficult to find a more accurate epithet than bulbous. Bulbous they were, and bulbous they remained, under all the contortions and distortions of his remarkable physiognomy.

  Every single one of the man’s features was so to say swollen by the inordinate pressure within it of the particular purpose for which the creativeness of nature had designed it. The forehead of Zeuks seemed bursting with its overpowering plethora of thought. His nose seemed bursting with its abounding zest for smelling. His mouth with its full lips, its strong white teeth, its grandly sensuous curves, seemed to have been created by the insatiable palate and indefatigable tongue within it, a couple that were united in conjugal understanding, the palate as the female to the tongue as the male, for the tasting and enjoying of almost everything that could possibly, conceivably, indeterminably be tasted and enjoyed.

  But his eyes,—“What is it in this man’s eyes,” thought Nisos, “that makes me feel so nice and warm?”—his eyes were surrounded by a thousand wrinkles and creases and rufflings of the ruddy skin round them, creases that seemed so infinitely tickled by what you had just said, or were just going to say, or simply by the way you were the self that could say such things, that merely to watch their response to you and your remarks gave you a delicious sense of having found your place in the world, a place which, the more you said, or the more entirely you put yourself behind what you said, would grow hourly, daily, monthly, yearly more agreeable to yourself, if not to all concerned!

  But it was the eyes themselves, apart from those friendly and rampageously benevolent wrinkles, that were made to encourage everybody they approached to enjoy the world and to enjoy being the person who was thus enjoying it.

  Zeuks’ eyes were in fact so deeply set in his bulbous head that Nisos got the feeling that they receded into a mass of substance which they themselves, in their immense zest for life, were everlastingly creating afresh behind that mediocre skull with its pair of eternally recessive holes.

  Nisos couldn’t then—he put it down at first to the glare of the noonday sun, but he changed his mind later on—catch the exact colour of Zeuks’ eyes; but for that very reason he decided they were probably hazel. It was indeed, all considered, an extremely complicated moment in our clever young friend’s life. He might be seventeen and he might be the one destined by fate to become the prophet to the strong rather than to the weak, but it began to invade his mind, as he stood there, leaning on his heavy sack, which in its turn rested on a lichen-covered rock, that because a hero had won in his time almost miraculous victories and had used incredible physical strength and still more incredible mental cunning to win the victories, it did not mean that to the end of his days such an one would inevitably be the centre of every dramatic human situation that could possibly arise.

  It was exactly noon on this desirable level expanse, with the homestead of Zeuks overlooking it to the East, and that high corner of the City-Wall and that gleam of the Temple’s marble roof out-topping it to the West, exactly noon on the very spot selected by the old king as the perfect site for an assembly of the people that would be swayed by his eloquence.

  Well! here was Zeuks, coming dancing out of his ramshackle shed and leading, yes, actually leading, the immortal creatures they had come to buy!

  The well-dressed crowd of prosperous farmer-families seemed puzzled as to where to turn to get some hint of the manner in which they ought to receive the thousand-years wonder of this smuggling into their home of these Divine Beasts. Were they to get it from Zeuks or from their king?

  Alas! from neither! The Personage who was destined to direct their feelings was none other than Enorches, the Priest of Orpheus! Yes, to the absolute amazement of the seventeen-year-old “prophet to the strong”, there was not a family there, not a man or a woman there, not even a child, who did not excitedly turn to greet Enorches.

  It is true there was one little toddler of about tw
o-and-a-half who stretched out a plump arm towards the Club of Herakles, no doubt being attracted by the roundly twisted curves of that formidable bosom, in the cracked interior of which Myos the Fly was still expounding to Pyraust the Moth the metaphysical philosophy of dust and how every grain of it was a world.

  But apart from the child who admired the Club and the two insects who were inside the Club, the whole of that excited assembly of well-to-do farmers with their wives and children instinctively divided itself into two parties, the largest of which gathered closely round Enorches and displayed evident hostility to Zeuks, while the other advanced with irresistible curiosity towards Zeuks and his Divine Beasts, constantly looking back, however, as they did so, the women glancing apprehensively over their shoulders, and the children alternately stumbling as they turned to stare at Enorches, or clinging to their mothers’ belts and pressing their faces against their garments.

  Not a soul among that whole company made any move towards or away from their old king, though Nisos did notice two of the men whispering together with furtive glances at himself and his great sack.

  “They’re saying to each other,” he thought with a faint shiver; “We’ll take that off him before they get away from here!”

  Meanwhile Odysseus, having gravely turned his pointed beard to the North, the West, the South and the East, and having instructed Nisos to remain close to his side—“No! no! my boy, much nearer than that! In fact you’d better put a finger into my belt, if you can balance that thing on your shoulder with one hand”—advanced slowly straight towards the swaying and dancing Zeuks.

  Neither the word “swaying” nor the word “dancing” accurately describes the sinuous movements with which this queer creature hypnotized those two animals. As in every other aspect of this singular person’s character, if you had never seen him before it was necessary for the understanding of his peculiar nature to catch not only the general expression of his face but at least a few of its special expressions; and among these it was especially important to note what his expression was when he experienced an access of respect and reverence for anyone or anything he suddenly encountered.