Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “This lady,” he explained to the latter, “is the betrothed of our young friend Nisos’ elder brother, who, quite naturally, takes the side of their father Krateros Naubolides in our little island-feud. The pleasantest thing for you, my dear child”—he was addressing Leipephile now—“will be to have a quiet supper by yourself tonight and to go to bed early; for in this way you’ll escape being torn between your loyalty to us and your affection for our opponents.”

  The tall simple girl didn’t appear to object in the very least to being thus lightly dismissed from so momentous a Council of War; and after a nod from Eurycleia had confirmed the king’s word, and after the kindly-natured Zeuks had muttered something about her being sure not to forget to have a good supper, she went off at once.

  Then at last the party round the old Nurse gathered closely together to plan, as Odysseus had declared it was essential they should do, the general outline of his appeal to the people. But Odysseus had still got at the back of his consciousness a rooted feeling that there was something in Eurycleia’s mind with regard to all that had happened and all that was happening which it was important for him to know.

  But it was not until he and Zeuks had mapped out pretty definitely their plan of campaign for to-morrow’s meeting in the “agora”, and had decided to send the heralds at early dawn round the whole island to announce it, that in a single hurriedly pronounced word the old Nurse revealed what it was. Telemachos! Yes, it was his son; his son, who like a wooden dagger, with a handle at one end and a point at the other end, had got himself caught fast in the consciousness of the old nurse. Yes, it was the “eidolon” of his son Telemachos she had in her mind, teasing and perplexing her with misgivings of every sort.

  It must have been approaching the hour for supper when Odysseus discovered what Eurycleia had in her mind. “One thing seems certain,” he said, “and that is that this appalling Enorches hasn’t made the faintest, no! not the very faintest impression on him! What does he think of that retreat of his, which this devil of a priest has certainly curtailed to pretty small quarters?”

  “Another thing seems certain too,” added the old Nurse; and going to the door at the back of her room she opened it and called down the passage. Then with the servant who answered her call she held a brief conversation, in the middle of which, telling the girl to wait a moment, she returned to Odysseus. “It seems certain to me,” she told him gravely, “that your son really must, for all his philosophizing, feel lonely sometimes and want to get a glimpse of his Dad. I know I want to get a glimpse of him; and I think the Lady Penelope would feel that old Nurse Eurycleia ought to have this wish gratified. Do you mind if I send somebody—Tis, if he’s about just now—to bid him come to supper tonight? There’ll be as it is two women-guests and only one man-guest, so he will make up the table; and you at the head and your own Nurse at the foot will behold the board complete. So may I send Tis or somebody to bid him to come?”

  Across Odysseus’ countenance flapped like the wings of a black crow a momentary shadow of serious discomfort; but he had the strength to blot it out so completely that it was as if it had never been there. He nodded with the crushing acceptance and finality of Zeus. “Send anyone you wish and tell them in the Kitchen to prepare supper for two men and two women in addition to thee and me.”

  The old lady went back to the waiting serving-girl with this message. “She says Tis is there and she will tell him to go,” she reported to the King on her return; and so it was settled, and that very evening Telemachos came. Nor among those sitting round the table in the throne-room at the end of the corridor of Pillars was there one who regretted this sudden resolve of the old Nurse to see her last Infant of the House as a noble-looking middle-aged man of fifty, sitting side by side with Zeuks, and opposite Okyrhöe and Pontopereia.

  And the best of it was that the routine of custom in that royal dwelling made the whole thing easy. For the people in the Kitchen were always wont to bring the dishes up to a table just behind the royal throne and leave them there: from which position Leipephile and Arsinöe and Tis himself carried them round and then stood behind the throne of Odysseus while all the guests ate and drank at their leisure.

  As might have been expected Okyrhöe was deeply impressed by the handsomeness and dignity of Telemachos; and as for Pontopereia she couldn’t resist permitting a passionate prayer to Athene to embody itself in words in her mind: a prayer that if she should be called upon to utter words of prophetic insight in the presence of this silent, austere, good-looking man, with such broad-shoulders and such an intensely abstracted look on his stern face, she might be true to herself, true to her inspiration, and true to the great goddess who would use her as a reed through which to pour forth the rhythmic waves of her message to the world.

  Their meal that night was indeed only half through when, constrained by a sudden urge whose origin was wholly obscure to her, Pontopereia asked Telemachos a plain direct unequivocal question.

  “What would you say, My Lord Telemachos, was the real heart of your teaching? I mean the sort of thing you would have to explain to any student of philosophy, whether a boy or a girl, who wished to be considered as your proper disciple?”

  Telemachos glanced quickly and a little uneasily at his father as if to assure himself that the old man would not mind his launching out upon such a topic at such a time; but as he received no warning against it, and, in place of that, saw something resembling the flicker of a benevolent smile cross his progenitor’s face, he addressed himself to Pontopereia with sincere pleasure.

  And the truth was that the longer she listened to him the more did Pontopereia feel drawn to the man and thankful she had risked her question. “He’s lonely;” she told herself, “he’s lonely and unhappy. He’s invented this philosophy of his to fill a void. His philosophy is his kingdom, his wife, his children, his weapons, his ships, his ploughs, his horses, his granaries.” And indeed his words, when he spoke, almost humorously fulfilled her prediction.

  “I would tell this imaginary disciple of mine, lady‚” he said, “to make philosophy a substitute for every kind of success he can possibly want—no! more than a substitute, a fulfilment! I would say: ‘What do you really want from life?’ You’ve probably never asked yourself! Few of us do when we’re young. But anyone who has watched you will know you’ve wanted the satisfaction of your hunger, your thirst, your lust, your hunting spirit, your fighting spirit, your collecting mania, your athletic mania, your building mania, your passion to be beautiful, to be a great artist, to be desired by many. Well, and what have you already attained in regard to this desire of yours? You’ve got the rudiments, the embryonic beginnings of all of them. You’ve got a body and a soul. You are a human being. You are living on the earth with the ocean around the earth, and the sun and the moon above the earth, and the stars above the sun and the moon, and the eternal ether above the stars.

  “Well! consider your situation. You are a separate individual. You are a lonely individual. And though you may have got parents and brothers and sisters your happiness depends upon your own feelings for life, not upon their feelings for life nor upon their feelings for you. Well! you are surrounded by things that are made of the four elements, made of earth, made of fire, made of water, made of air. Very good. You have the power of embracing these things: of seizing upon them and embracing them so closely that you become one with each one of them.

  “But these things, although like yourself they are separate and individual, are made up, just as you are yourself, of the four elements. Very well then! It is clear that when you, a human being, embrace the earth, you are embracing something made of the same material that you are made of. That is to say that a person made of air, water, earth, fire, is embracing other objects or entities or beings, also made of earth, fire, water, air. Thus with your mind and all your senses, thus with your body and all your soul you become one with the whole earth and with the ocean that surrounds the earth, one with the sun and moon, and one with th
e stars, and one with the immeasurable divine ether that surrounds the stars. Your body and your soul by this embrace become one with the body and the soul of the divine ether and with all that it surrounds. Earth, ocean, sun, moon, stars, ether, they are now one living thing; and to this one living thing, you, a separate living thing, are now joined in an inseparable embrace.

  “You, and these things, now become one, have now become a larger one, an immeasurable one, but you still have the power in yourself, the terrific inexhaustible power in yourself, to work upon; to influence, to direct, to drive, to move this New Enormity, this vast new world, this world which you have created by embracing what you have embraced. In one sense therefore you have thus created a new world by joining the old world. Yes, you have created a new earth and ocean and sun and moon and a new immeasurable divine ether.

  “Nor do you stop with this; for you go on working upon, and driving, and forcing, and moving, and directing, and re-creating, this immeasurable earth-ocean-sun-moon-ether, moulding it nearer and nearer to the secret desire of your heart; that is to say moulding this newly created earth-ocean-sun-moon-ether, and compelling it to obey your will.

  “Now you may naturally say that you are only one of the innumerable separate individual lives who are working and willing and re-creating and re-moulding this existent one or super-one made of earth-ocean-sun-moon-stars and immeasurable depths of divine ether; and you will be perfectly right in saying this. You are only one of the many wills who are driving this earth-ocean-sun-moon-stars and immeasurable depths of ether forward upon its way. Its way whither?

  “Ah! that is the impenetrable secret of which you are yourself a living part and a partial creator. You, a secret agent, have an obscure purpose in your mind; and so have your innumerable fellow-agents driving the universe on its way; but on its way to what—ah! that remains an impenetrable secret!”

  Having completed his discourse Telemachos gave Pontopereia a hurried smile and a friendly but rather stiff little bow and once again, as at the beginning of his words, turned his head and glanced hurriedly and a little apprehensively at his father. Pontopereia missed nothing of these two motions; and from the nature of his smile, and from the quality of that respectful little obeisance addressed to herself, she clearly took in, as it can be believed the sharp-witted Okyrhöe did also, more of the man’s own essential character than was revealed in the vague and obscure method of philosophizing he had been at such pains to advocate.

  Telemachos had his father’s massive, clear-cut, majestic, and severe cast of features. Where the general outline of their faces differed, apart from the fact that the old hero had a beard while his son was clean-shaved, was that Odysseus’s features were rugged and rock-like while Telemachos’s were like smoothly polished marble. Of the two of them, the son was the handsomer, the father the more easy-going, humorous and informal.

  As you looked at the two of them you could see the effect of the fact that the father’s life had been passed, and was still being passed, in a constant and lively stream of contact with friends and enemies, while the son’s was now being divided between solitary walks along the edge of the sea and meditations in a small chamber surrounded by deep recesses full of parchment-rolls, either inscribed by the careful fingers and the exquisitely prepared pigments of ancient Sumeria, or by the less careful and much more daring imagination of the artists of Crete.

  Telemachos could have devoted the closing periods of his discourse to an eloquent analysis of the nature of the cosmos, and of the part played in that nature by the four elements, as well as by the souls of the living entities, who are, as he explained, urging and driving and steering forward the whole body of life, and he probably would have done so, had he not suddenly felt in the depths of his being an inexpressible longing to escape from the whole business; not only from the urging and driving and stirring, not only from the desperate willing and the heroic share, if only an infinitesimal share, in the creation of the future, but from the things in themselves; yes! from the ancient earth herself, mother of us all, from the sun and the moon and the stars and from the divine ether;—from it all, from it all, from it all!

  Yes, at that moment with everything that was deepest in his nature he wanted to escape from the whole struggle of life. Life from the start had been to him more of an effort than a pleasure. The fact of his childhood and boyhood having been passed in the absence of his father and in the invasion of their rock-palace by those insolent suitors had inflicted a bruise, a discoloration, upon his whole nature from which it had never entirely recovered.

  Something about the gesture with which he now put both his elbows on the table and rested his forehead on his hands was in no wise missed by Okyrhöe, who was not at all anxious that this meal, so luckily, dexterously, and crucially arranged, if only by pure chance, should break up without certain definite advantages for herself having been established.

  “What,” she enquired suddenly of Telemachos, “is your feeling about this curious ride of Eione with Arcadian Pan on the backs of Pegasos and Arion, and carrying with them Echidna and Eurybia? The whole idea of it, they tell me, was of the old Dryad’s urging and it seems that she and her oak-tree have together paid the penalty. But why Zeus should have been angry if the object of the ride was to intercept Typhon I fail to see. Your father has explained—haven’t you, my King?—what an event in the history of Ithaca it is, this departure from Arima, well! from our whole island, of these two strange Beings.

  “But what, I confess, puzzles me still, my Lord Telemachos, is this; and upon this I would like to hear your opinion. Are we to assume from the fact that Arcadian Pan and the girl Eione have gone off together that between this sweet-natured young creature and the goat-foot god there is, from now on, an authentic love-affair?

  “Under ordinary conditions I am not inquisitive; and I know your father, our venerated King here, would not wish any of us to ask impertinent questions in these personal matters; but this is a most extraordinary and unusual expedition including not only Arcadian Pan but two powerful goddesses, one of them Eurybia, daughter of Gaia and Pontos and sister of Phorkys and of Nereus, and the other Echidna, who is said to have given birth to the Hydra of Lerna by this very same Typhon whom they are intending to waylay.

  “In the first place, my Lord Telemachos, what puzzles me is that the ancient Dame of whom I caught a glimpse just now, and with whom I had the honour of a brief conversation when your revered Father took me into her presence, I am speaking of course of your old family-nurse, should have allowed a girl as young as Eione to go off on this wild adventure alone with Arcadian Pan and those two terrifying Goddesses who no doubt ruled over Ithaca and Achaea and Argos and Boeotia and Lakedaimon in the primeval far-away times before our mother the Earth gave birth to the Gods or the Titans or even to the mortal or immortal nymphs.

  “In Thebes where my youth was spent a girl as young as Eione would still be in the care of her parents. Are your customs in this Island of Ithaca completely different from those on the mainland?”

  There was a general silence. With what was quite clearly the faintest possible flickering of a smile at the left corner of his crafty mouth and with what was a definite movement of his beard in the direction of the Corridor of the Pillars, Odysseus saved his son, whom these significant questions had obviously embarrassed a good deal, from having to be the interpreter of local custom, by making use of the most primitive and also the most royal of all forms of summons.

  Loudly, vigorously, and several times, he clapped his hands. Had he been a King in Jerusalem, or a Pharaoh in Egypt, he could not have clapped his hands with quicker effect. All the four guests present at that table, Telemachos, Zeuks, Okyrhöe, Pontopereia; not to speak of the attendants, including Arsinöe, who were holding wine-jugs and water-bottles and bread-platters behind the backs of these four persons, became as alert as if they expected this startling and oriental summons to result in the appearance of a troop of Harpies.

  But, after a deep silence,
the husky, hoarse voice of the old Nurse Eurycleia was heard from the end of the long dark passage leading to the kitchen. “What do you want?” were the direct and downright words that reached their ears.

  “Send up Tis,” was the king’s imperative answer; and when Tis arrived, clearly somewhat disturbed and uncomfortable, Odysseus told him with a rough, humorous, blunt emphasis upon the word maid, to explain to the Lady Okyrhöe from Thebes how it was that he allowed a maid as young as Eione to go off on such an adventurous excursion alone with Arcadian Pan and two such formidable goddesses as Eurybia and Echidna.

  Tis came forward to the left of the king’s chair upon the arm of which he boldly rested his hand as he spoke. It was as clear to Okyrhöe and Pontopereia as it was to Zeuks that he was accustomed to doing this, and although feeling awkward and uncomfortable was so thoroughly used to speaking his mind before Odysseus that he was by no means tonguetied in the king’s presence or in the presence of any guests.

  “My little sister,” he said, “like the rest of us, has been brought up to take care of herself. We have never been people to be afraid of the gods and where there are a lot of sheep-folds there have always been occasional visits from the great god Pan who likes the company of mortal girls as much as he likes the company of mortal or immortal Nymphs. My little sister Eione has always looked after her maidenhead shrewdly enough as well as briskly and boldly among the lads of the farms round us. So at our end of the island, if you understand, we would never be worried or scared if a sister of ours made friends with Arcadian Pan. Us all do know, ye must understand, that ’tis natural for Arcadian Pan to want a maid like she, and us all do know too that if Arcadian Pan did take she’s maidenhead, and she did bear a child to he, that child would be, whether it were a he-child or a she-child, half a god and half of an ordinary person; and what we do feel at our end of this dumb little island is that when once a girl has got through her labour-pains and has laid her baby, whether that baby be a man-child or a god-child, a mortal child or an immortal child, safe on the steps of the altar, she’s done pretty well for herself and has got a very nice start in life.