Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  When “Government by Discussion”, as you might call the flexible and casual manner in which the Ithacan natives had settled their affairs half a century ago, was working well, the population of the island was much smaller, and the half-circle of stone-seats for listeners had a much less extended circumference.

  The result of this increase in numbers was that many of the most eloquent speakers took care to avoid the grotesquely elevated wooden erection on the speaking-rock and made their speeches from the ground, which meant that they often had to stand a good deal too near their antagonists, who frequently were a closely-packed crowd of angry and excited spearmen.

  There had been no political meeting in this Ithacan “agora” for several years, nor had it been observed by any official person, or indeed by anybody, official or otherwise, before this meeting began that a couple of rungs in the wooden steps ascending the speaking-rock were missing. This gap in the ascent to the platform of oratory had been treated as negligible by Krateros. The old King too in his introductory talk, where he had briefly and succinctly suggested the possibility of every householder on the Island delivering a certain quantity of “othonia”, had totally disregarded the shaky rostrum.

  On this particular occasion it was before the handsome Father of our friend Nisos had reached the middle of his blunt and rude speech that the bulk of those who were listening to him became aware of the presence of the Priest of the Orphic Mysteries among the elders who stood at the foot of that dilapidated old-fashioned wooden erection on the summit of the speaking-rock.

  The moment he was caught sight of, especially by the women, who were freely sprinkled among the men throughout the whole assembly, it was clear to the shrewd weather-eye of the watchful Odysseus that there was a palpable quickening of pulses. These manifestations of feeling in crowds are very queer phenomena. But of course this man possessed psychic powers of an unusually rare kind and he was insatiable in his quest for human converts of every age up and down the island; and, while a bogey-man to some, he was a redeeming angel to others.

  Thus there now appeared over that whole assembly of men and women something resembling a many-coloured wind-blown ripple moving rapidly over a wide expanse of water, a ripple that was grey when it reached our horizon but had been a deep blue-green when it left the shore.

  Had Nisos Naubolides arrived at the “agora” just then, he would have plunged at once into a veritable vortex of bewildering psychic problems, the chief of which would have been the extremely complicated question as to just what constituted an important enough crisis in the general stream of events, whether a waterfall, a cataract, a tributary, a marsh, a lake, or a “delta” of several river-estuaries, to justify an interference in the situation by the little old lady he had known as Atropos, and by what subtle understandings of the forces of earth and air and water and fire messages were duly despatched to the said little old lady, so that she could draw certain hints indicating in detail the issues involved and not failing to make clear at what exact point, if care was not taken, the wanton Goddess of pure Chance, whose name is Tyche, might snatch the occasion out of wiser hands.

  But queerly enough it was neither blind Chance nor the oldest of the Fates who was now the disturber of the normal stream of natural events—this stream that flowed and eddied and circled and delayed and hastened across that old “agora”. It was none other than the young girl, Pontopereia.

  It was some while before Enorches fully realized that his most formidable opponent at this crucial pause in events was the awkward and ungainly damsel who was now shuffling so absent-mindedly up and down between Odysseus, who was leaning on his club, and Okyrhöe, who had accompanied them to this confused scene for some mysterious purpose of her own. As she shuffled back and forth in this odd manner Pontopereia couldn’t help noticing a great many things that she had no wish to notice.

  This business of “noticing” was the very last thing she wanted to be engaged in at that particular juncture. Her entire purpose as she shuffled to and fro was indeed the extreme opposite of noticing anything. What she desired just then was to make her mind as near a blank as she possibly could so as to offer it as a pure, clean, unfurnished sanctuary, of which, free from every distraction, encumbrance, or rival, her father’s prophetic spirit might take complete possession.

  But so astonishing were the forms and colours forced upon her senses by the spectacle before her that she struggled in vain to defend her attention from them. The sun just then was in mid-sky and was blazing down with such tremendous noon-day glare upon land and sea that it was difficult for her not to feel that she must yield up her whole being to the dazzling white opacity of Athene’s Temple on the one hand, and to the dazzling blue opacity of the gleaming salt water on the other.

  She had never seen bluer salt water in all her life. It seemed at one moment to lift her up to a yet bluer sky-zenith in the air above, and at another moment, just as if it were some vast, hard, smooth, magnetic precious stone, to draw her down to a petrifying abyss of demonic blueness in some enchanting but dangerous dimension of existence below Tartaros itself.

  It was indeed, though nobody but herself knew it, a real crisis in the life of the daughter of Teiresias, this appearance of hers before the Ithacan assembly of which Odysseus made so much. Her real antagonist in the whole thing was not the father of her new friend Nisos but the Priest of the Mysteries who was even now preparing to take a terrific advantage of the old King’s calm and unruffled assurance.

  “How absolutely alone,” she said to herself, “we all are! That old hero with his projecting chin and his sharp beard sticking out from it like the horn of a fabulous beast, what is he thinking and feeling now? I shall never know. Nobody will ever know. And that red and green gnat over there, sunning itself on that half-budded greenish-yellow willow-leaf, I would bet anything it is now, at this very moment of time, wondering whether its fate is destined to come by the violence of another insect not much bigger than itself, or by the sudden downfall of a rotten branch dislodged by a gust of wind, or by being snapped up between the upper half and the lower half of the beak of a bird.

  “And has it perhaps just decided,” the girl thought, “that it would be pleasanter to be trampled out of existence while it was asleep under a leaf than to perish in the disgustingly foul air of the crop of a feathery glutton? It’s gone anyway; and wherever it’s gone it’s just as absolutely alone, in a multitudinous world without end in any direction, as I am, or as this old king is, or as Mummy Okyrhöe is, or any one of these men waving their spears and whispering to their wives and to the wives of their friends! Alone, alone, alone!

  “And the same applies,” thought Pontopereia, “to whatever grub that little hole contains!” And she struck with the side of her sandal a decaying fragment of tree-root that was half-covered by dark-green moss but had blotches of grey lichen on it here and there, and it was between two of these grey patches that the daughter of Teiresias detected a small orifice that was obviously the entrance to the dwelling of some grub-like creature.

  “Are you at home, master?” she muttered; and then, digging her heel into the rubble beside that piece of decayed wood, she swung her whole body round, smiling to herself with a muttered exclamation. “Why,” she told herself, “I am doing just what I said a minute ago I mustn’t do! I’m noticing things! Only these things aren’t exactly what I meant. I meant marble roofs and dazzling waves! But I must, I must get into the right mood for father’s spirit!”

  She straightened herself, clasped her hands behind her, stared at her sandals, and tried to imagine she was walking upon empty air. “If I can’t make my mind a blank,” she said to herself, “I must anyway get myself into the mood of being angry with this confounded Krateros who wants to make a fool of the old king by not letting him sail. I know exactly what the old man feels. He doesn’t want to slide into an ordinary, conventional, tiresome, commonplace old age. I can follow that like a map!

  “Heaven and earth! If I had a chance to sai
l in a ship over the drowned cities of Atlantis, wouldn’t I snatch at it!”

  She shuffled on, after that, with her head bent, repeating the word “Atlantis” over and over again. What she obscurely felt in her deepest consciousness was that, since this word contained the concentrated desire of the old hero who had appealed to her for aid at this crisis of his life, the best way of emptying her mind so as to make it a medium for the spirit of the dead prophet was to dissolve this actual word into a sacred mist, or even, and her eyes grew larger when she thought of this, into a sort of nectar such as would help to banish every emotion from her mind save the will to prophesy.

  “Atlantis! Atlantis.” Atlantis! And from the lovely head balanced on the ungainly little body, all the whole teeming mass of that portentous gathering, with its hosts of sullen-sultry spearmen and its agitated mothers and excited children in their blood-bright gaily-coloured clothes, and beneath them those blue waters that drew her down, and above them those white walls that lifted her up, were wholly and absolutely banished.

  And it was at that very moment, for at such times strange vibrations can pass between the oldest and the youngest among us, that Odysseus beckoned Pontopereia to his side.

  Leaning with his right hand on his club, from the crack in whose breast both the moth and the fly were now gazing with absorbed interest at everything within the circuit of their vision, Odysseus told the daughter of Teiresias to use his left hand in place of the broken rung of that rotten ladder; “and make the devils, my brave girl,” he muttered, “give me a good pile of sound ‘othonia’ instead of all this false flattery about ‘wise old rulers’.”

  With this physical help and moral stimulus Pontopereia did manage in spite of her awkward legs and heavy thighs to get to her feet on that absurd wooden erection. But, once mounted there, a tragedy took place that was completely unknown to every consciousness in the whole world except the girl’s own, a tragedy the mere existence of which justified up to the hilt what she had been feeling all that morning about the abysmal loneliness of every creature born into what we call “life”.

  For Pontopereia, as she gazed at those shining spears, and at that blue sea-pavement, that kept drawing her down, and at those white walls that kept lifting her up, was suddenly seized by a fit of appalling shyness. This convulsion of shyness paralysed her mouth as if with a ghost-fish’s monstrous fins. It pressed against her throat as if with a bilge-smelling flattened-out whale-bone snout.

  And finally it brought the thousand-times despairing ship-wrecked eye of a girl’s frustrated life-hope to fix itself upon her! Yes, it brought it closer and closer and closer to the self within the self, to the Pontopereia within Pontopereia, to the living, shrinking soul inside the innermost sheath of her calyx-like identity, so that nothing less than what was all she was should be exposed to this searching, reducing, unsympathetic, sardonic eye, the eye of a shyness that at that moment had gone stark mad.

  The poor girl was helpless. What had suddenly come over her could no more be struggled against than she could have regained her right arm if somebody had cut it off. And now quite independently of that fit of grotesque sub-human shyness, as if she had been a sparrow imagining itself a swan, she felt a natural, normal, overpowering human shame. She wanted nothing but to be allowed to hide her head and cry piteously. She could not even remember now, with the tears running down her cheeks and tasting salt on her lips and blotting out her sight, how she managed to slide down from that ridiculous wooden platform. But she did remember how the beard of Odysseus tickled her chin as the old king bent over her and tried to comfort her as she wept on the ground.

  It was at that moment that the Priest of the Mysteries, who, like a holy and consecrated wolf, had been waiting for his chance to spring, snatched at his opportunity. And such was the power of this man’s demonic personality that although the collapse of Teiresias’ daughter had been followed by quite a lot of shouting and rushing hither and thither, accompanied by the angry brandishing of many spears in male hands and much high-pitched expostulation from female throats, the moment it was realized who it was who was now pulling himself up to the top of that shaky erection and using such obstinate determination in treading upon each broken rung and in clinging to each wretched bit of balustrade there was another of those queer gasps of mass-attention where the actual crowd itself seems to create for itself a unified Being with ears and eyes that can take things in, and get shocks of feeling from taking things in, just as ordinary personalities can.

  Quite a considerable crowd of these islanders with spears, whose number had so impressed the moth that she had whispered the startling syllables “a thousand”, were close enough to the speech-rock to see what a teasing thing it was to mount that platform. Pontopereia had only managed it by the help of the old king.

  It was the complete absence of anything traditional or romantic about that wholly silly erection that took the heart out of its ascent and may even have been the cause of the girl’s collapse when she had ascended it. One of the prices that had to be paid for the Trojan War by the Island of Ithaca was that there was neither time nor money to obliterate the finger-prints of the flagrant bad taste left by the rich citizens of that particular epoch.

  It was lucky that most of the work of that bad time was not done in materials that by their own nature were especially lasting. It should also be noted that since then, the general taste of the islanders had improved so much that had any of the younger men, even the eldest son of Krateros Naubolides for instance, been called upon to speak they would have certainly spoken from among the old traditional stone-seats and not approached that fatal erection of ill-chosen wood. It was just because these preposterous platforms had already become laughing-stocks, that, when the Priest of the Mysteries in his struggle to ascend was observed to be hanging by one arm from the balustrade with his “chlaines”, or professional philosophic cloak, flapping in the wind about his rump, till the wood-work broke and deposited him on his back on the ground, quite a number of the men in the crowd gave a vent to a rude burst of laughter.

  The sound of this must have reached the priest’s ears for he leapt to his feet in one of his fits of blind rage, fits that always endowed him with superhuman strength and were therefore an advantage to him rather than anything else. At this moment what he did was to seize the actual main floor of the platform with both his hands and to shake it for a while, as if he were a besotted giant capable of shaking a king’s palace to dust and ashes.

  Then with one grand shattering, heaving spasm what he did was to bring the whole erection crashing to the ground in pieces. This done the astonishing man completely regained his self-control, in fact more than his self-control, for he became a supernaturally competent commander with all the resources of an exceptionally brilliant orator at the absolute disposal of a perfect strategist.

  He coolly kicked aside the relics of the dilapidated platform he had demolished, and advancing to the front of the marble eminence on which the thing had been erected, he made just the right gesture and uttered just the right appeal to the crowd to command total attention. Indeed he did much more: for he allowed no second to pass, no pulse-beat to intervene, between this beginning of things and the torrential flow of burning words that followed it.

  “Let no wind,” he cried, “O people of sacred Ithaca, fill any ship’s sail that leaves your consecrated coasts! Keep this feeble, doting, maudlin, crazy, despotic, degenerate old man on his throne till old age makes him drop from it like a rotten apple and drop straight into his grave! Meanwhile let him stay where he is! Let him keep the throne warm for your brave Krateros who is a strong, sensible, natural man like any other man, and all the better for not being an herald-trumpeted, bard-celebrated, minstrel-sung, lick-spittle old legend-maker who doesn’t think his cup of glory is full enough in just being accepted by you islanders as your king, doesn’t in fact think that to be king at all over a crew of miserly farmers and poor fishermen, such as he considers you to be, is worthy of a deat
hless, immortal hero, like himself!

  “What he wants to do by this mad voyage of his over the drowned cities of Atlantis is to win for himself a name beyond that of any of our famous men, a name beyond the name of Agamemnon, beyond the name of Achilles, beyond the name of Diomed, and of course far beyond the names of any of your most glorious Trojan enemies, such as Priam or Hector or Aeneas or Paris!

  “O my friends, my friends, it is only yesterday we all heard, through the mediumship of earth and air and fire and water of the drowning of Atlantis. These murderous gods always like their news to reach us drop by drop, as it suits their god-almightynesses’ cunning craftiness, and not for our interest really at all! But there’s one little, obvious, simple, human interpretation of their trick of revealing their own murderous behaviour in connection with these hints from earth and air and water and fire that may not yet have occurred to you—I mean the double-dyed craftiness of suggesting that what they have done purely and solely to protect themselves was done in the interest of a faithful steering of human history, as it takes place on this old earth, and in the interest of progress on this old earth, or anywhere else in space.

  “And now I would like to say something to you about this drowning of Atlantis of which we hear so much. I would like at this moment, my dear friends, humbly, patiently, submissively, and with all due respect where respect is due, to suggest to you that these curst Olympian rulers of ours recently made a great discovery. They discovered, never mind how, perhaps through earth or air or water or fire, or perhaps through some treacherous group of Atlanteans themselves, for there are traitors in every country, that some great Atlantean philosopher, who may now at this moment, for all we know, be wandering over the earth under a completely different name, anyway my suggestion is that somehow or other they found out that an Atlantic philosopher had got the secret of some new magnetic stone that can influence unborn embryos and that is probably called the ‘Embryo Stone’, and whose power—I am only humbly suggesting this to you, though, I confess, in my own philosophical researches I have discovered some very peculiar and very powerful magnetic stones that can change the sex of an embryo.