Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “And if I heard you correctly, O illustrious Sixth Pillar, who bear on your pedestal the signature of a son of Hephaistos, I would like to ask you if you could tell me what in your opinion was the secret purpose of the wife of Zeus in thus betraying her husband, the Ruler of the Upper Air, and through the air of the whole surface of the earth?”

  There was no need for the little shame-faced silky-winged Pyraust to prod her friend the fly to listen to this dialogue whose reverberation shook the corridor. Indeed the fly’s big eyes had begun to bulge to such an extent that the anxious moth-girl feared they might fall out of his head leaving two bloody apertures through which she would be staring into her friend’s “frontal lobe”, the last thing she wished to do.

  “In my opinion,” the two insects now heard the Sixth Pillar say, “the goddess Hera must have welcomed the return, completely unknown to her husband, of the Messenger she sent, namely the seven-coloured Iris, to find Pallas Athene among the blameless Ethiopians. In my opinion Pallas Athene must have assured her that if they worked together now and got the help, both of Persephone from Hades, and of Thetis from the Sea, they would be able to take the domination of the world out of the possession of men and hand it over into the possession of women where it ought to have been from the beginning.”

  After this there was dead silence in the corridor; until the shame-faced moth took upon herself to fling a question upon that wine-scented air towards the lusty olive-sprout that had dared to grow up between a couple of flagstones.

  “Can you tell me, Olive-Branch, whether it will be the lady Okyrhöe or the lady Nausikaa who will win the love of Odysseus?’’ There was such a long silence after this dramatic question that the fly came near to spreading its gauzy wings and taking upon itself the role of Messenger from the Insects to the Olympians.

  Well did the moth know what was in her friend’s mind; and she couldn’t help wondering what she herself would feel if she accompanied the fly through the flashes of light that wavered down from the hall above, and with rainbow colours flashing from point to point in his wings and mysterious gleams glorifying the lustrous brown of her wings, they were both to flicker up those stone steps and confront the revellers with the startling and momentous news that henceforth the world was to be ruled by women.

  But the olive-shoot’s wise answer brought back everybody’s wits to the practical situation with which they were now faced. “The king will choose neither of those two women,” announced the sagacious olive-shoot. “But you may be sure,” he added with sturdy cynicism, “the King will use all the power he may have over both these ladies to be in a position to hoist sail without delay and explore the unknown West beyond Lost Atlantis.”

  Once more the boldness and rashness of the turn their talk so soon took brought down upon them all the same uneasy silence. But this time it was not from among any of them in the corridor that the interruption to their colloquy came; and it was Zeuks who was the first to be aware of it.

  Zeuks was still standing against the wall clutching his formidable double-edged dagger in one hand and his sandals in the other; but he now imperceptibly moved his head so that his right ear might be directed towards the stairs that led down into the corridor from the dining-hall.

  Zeuks heard steps descending those stairs, very, very slow and cautious steps, and very light steps, but with no vacillation or hesitation about their purpose. Somebody—a light-footed boy or girl—was coming as a spy or anyway as a scout. Zeuks listened intently to the faintest sound made by this explorer and he soon heard the hurried gasping breaths that the light-footed young person in his excitement was unable to suppress.

  Listening with the divining rod, as you might call it, of his auditory intelligence Zeuks was soon rewarded for his concentrated attention by recognizing a particular click between two of these irrepressible gasps that identified the prowler without further question. He was Nisos Naubolides.

  And then there occurred one of those curious moments, or rather seconds, in the experience of persons suddenly encountering each other in this particular dimension of our multiverse, persons familiar to each other and yet on the alert in regard to each other’s immediate intentions. At such a second of time there is liable to happen an electric explosion between the life energy of the one and the life energy of the other, an explosion over which and upon which the consciousness of neither of the persons has the slightest influence or effect. What you might call the two kinds of life-levin or of life-lightning in these persons, thus confronting each other, must be far more different than the persons themselves are different and far more antagonistic.

  Nisos, for instance, had always felt for Zeuks a friendly attraction and Zeuks had certainly felt for Nisos a protective affection. And yet no sooner did the lad descending those steps in the twilight catch sight of the familiar figure of Zeuks than he performed, or the life-lightning that was using him performed, some surprising acts. In the first place he put his fingers to his lips in the universal sign which means: “Hush! This little business is entirely between ourselves!” Then, though he was some seven or eight steps above the corridor, he made a wild leap like a young lion and landed on the corridor floor at least a yard beyond the Sixth Pillar; and then with a second and still more leonine leap he grasped Zeuks by the throat.

  It was lucky for him that the impersonal life-lightning which seized upon Zeuks at that same instant confined itself, as if Zeuks had really been an animal, to physical contact. What Zeuks actually did was to thrust back, with a blind instinctive jerk, deep into the thick wool of the under-shirt out of which he’d drawn it, that dangerous two-edged dagger; and then with the whole strength of both his arms he tore one of Nisos’ hands from his throat and treating this captured hand as a hawk might treat a butcher-bird he squeezed it into his capacious mouth and pressed his teeth against it, not really hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to give Nisos the feeling that those doglike teeth were drawing blood.

  Thus had the situation between these two resolved itself into one of those purely physical encounters which carry with them so large a current of earth-life that they seem to satisfy both the creatures involved with a sort of absolute satisfaction. And what happened then was so much what we can imagine any benevolent fate would have intended to happen that it is hard to believe that it was brought about by pure chance.

  Feeling through every throb the one hand which was still on Zeuks’ throat that he had only to press these fleshy sinews with a viciously increasing purpose to stop the man’s breath for ever, Nisos suddenly thought: “But I am going to be a prophet; and all Prophets have the power of an absolute control over their rage. I shall therefore show this funny fellow Zeuks that I am letting him live when I could easily kill him and being a good friend to him when I could easily be the deadliest enemy.”

  And on his side Zeuks was now saying to himself, as he kept his dog-like teeth firmly pressed against his antagonist’s hand: “What is the use of being the great-grandson of the ever-youthful Nymph Maia, even if in the end, for all the gods in my blood, I have to sleep the perpetual sleep of death, what, I ask you, is the use of it all if I can’t detach my consciousness from my body far enough to be able to put up with a leaping, scrabbling, jumping, skipping, dancing kid like this without wanting to bite his head off?”

  “Come up quietly with me, Zeuks, old friend,” gasped Nisos. “The old man will be damned glad to see you. But, for the sake of all we both love best in the world, what has happened to Ajax?”

  “Surely I’ll come with you, my dear boy,” replied Zeuks. “Ajax, did you say? Why, Ajax is wholly, entirely, absolutely, and altogether out of it. Ajax is in fact not only dead but buried. I found him dead and I buried him myself. But let us go now and let us go quietly as you and I know well how to go. But tell me this before we start and tell it me in your lowest and least heraldic voice. How are things with the old man over his wine? Have either of those ladies got him yet in her toils?”

  Nisos gave him as wel
l as he could a lively but rather a school-boyish description of what he had seen; and as the older man listened he nodded many times and muttered varying rather cynical commentaries. Then did the two of them thread their way between the first, second, third and fourth Pillars, Zeuks leaning on the arm of Nisos as if he had been much older than he actually was.

  “No, my dear friend,” Zeuks said with a rapid downward glance towards the base of the Sixth Pillar as they passed that philosophic interpreter of elemental vibrations, “no! my impression from all you’ve told me about our old man’s behaviour with those two women is that the Princess Nausikaa is shocked at the physical change in him. I don’t want to mislead you. Sonny, for your impressions are vivid and you have described them mighty well; but my own feeling about it is that Nausikaa finds it hard to recognise in our old king the handsome hero with whom she fell in love when he suddenly appeared from out of the shadows of the rocks while she and her maidens were playing ball by the sea-shore. I don’t think myself he is in the faintest danger of being seduced by the Okyrhöe woman. My idea is that the kind of flattery he uses in her case, you know the sort of thing I mean, that exaggerated praise of everything about her, is due to a mounting and intensifying irritation with the way she treats him.”

  “Yes! yes! yes!” murmured Nisos in a still lower voice as they drew near to the thick oaken brazen-barred door at the top of the steps, “yes! yes! I’ve noticed that about him too! He gets rid of his bottled-up rage just as some old people do of their bottled-up misery by the simple process of inventing exaggerated and fantastical fables. But I tell you, Zeuks, my friend, things are about as ticklish up there as they can possibly be. It’s like balancing yourself on a tight-rope—no! not like balancing yourself, like watching them balance themselves! No! I haven’t got it quite right even yet! It’s like watching them dancing upon thin ice dangerously slippery and liable to break and let them into the water!”

  “Well, Son, we’ll soon be”—but Nisos couldn’t catch the dying out of that sentence; for they were now standing before the massive brazen-fitted time-darkened door, the other side of which was that palace dining-hall which had already been for numberless generations, and would be for many more to come, a centre of intrigue and plotting, not only for Ithaca, but for the whole of Hellas.

  This black-oak door with its four panels and bronze frame opened to them now at the first pressure of Zeuks’ hand. It would have needed one of the minutest of all the dust-motes that danced so solemnly in that spear-shaft of a torch-ray across the head of the lady Okyrhöe, across the head of the lady Nausikaa, across the head of Odysseus himself, to thread that twisted path, beyond the cunning of the tiniest mite of sea-spray left by the sun in his descent, the twisted path to the heart of the old king.

  It was clear at once to both Zeuks and Nisos that Odysseus was not so much drunk from the fumes of wine as drunk from the opposing sorceries of those two formidable women.

  “You’d have thought,” said Nisos to himself, “that Circe and Calypso between them would have made him harder to beguile; but of course—Nausikaa——”

  He closed the brazen-framed door behind Zeuks and himself and made a hurried obeisance to the old bearded figure on the throne-seat at the table, but although the king looked searchingly into each of their faces as they came forward it struck them both that he understood nothing of what he saw save only that some terrible crisis of a fatal choice was upon him.

  As to this choice it was abundantly clear to both Nisos and Zeuks that until some unexpected ray of light penetrated that bearded head the old king was simply incapable of choosing between his new temptress and his ancient flame. There was indeed to each of them something almost sickeningly painful in the sight of this tremendous hero of the greatest war ever experienced by the human race being lured to this unseemly turnstile of sexual cross-purpose.

  Nisos and Zeuks were able to approach the table in whispered colloquy with each other, were able indeed to receive a wine-glass from Eurycleia and have it filled by Arsinöe, and finally were able to enter into an extremely punctilious argument with the Herald without attracting more notice from Odysseus than a vague, obscure, and taking-everything-for-granted nod.

  “Yes, you will be interested to hear,” said the Herald, “that your humble servant has been permitted to approach your King of Kings and Lord of Lords with a request for permission to visit in person the Royal Treasury and to see with my own eyes and touch with my own hands certain pieces of golden armour that actually belonged to Achilles the son of Peleus and which your King of Kings and Lord of Lords won from Ajax in a public competition presided over by the Olympians. This permission I hope presently to take advantage of, but this beautiful lady-in-waiting, who tells me she will escort me to the Treasury, begs me to await the moment when her lovely duty of dispensing wine to the King’s visitors is over for tonight.”

  Zeuks looked at Nisos with a cold shiver of apprehension when Ajax was mentioned; and Arsinöe hastened to fill up the young man’s glass the moment he had allowed himself in his embarrassment to empty it at one gulp.

  “You haven’t yet made it quite clear to me, sweet lady,” they heard Okyrhöe say to Nausikaa, “what exactly is the change you are so struck by in my darling hero here, since you beheld him, after his escape from that accurst Bitch-Nymph, washed up naked on your shores. O what a shock to your chaste and virginal feelings that occasion must have been! A naked man coming forth out of the wild waves and advancing straight towards you! No wonder this romantic and bewitching story had already become a sailor’s ditty in the docks of every port when I was a little girl!

  “Little did I dream it would ever be my lot to be allowed by fate to succeed you in the affections of our little-girl-loving hero! O you must satisfy my childish curiosity, sweet Auntie Nausikaa; for my parents, you know, never allowed me to forget that I was descended from Nausithoos the father of Alkinoos who wedded your dear mother, Arete.

  “O yes! it is indeed as if one of those impossible dreams in a young girl’s life had come true that the very same hero of my childhood should actually have become now that I’m grown up and can realize all it means, yes, should actually have become, in spite of his old age, my lover and my beloved!

  “O sweet Auntie Nausikaa, you must forgive my emotion in meeting you; for you must realize how the sight of you calls up every glimpse and feature of my earliest visions of life, now so wonderfully satisfied, with him as my lover”—At this point Okyrhöe actually leant across the table and touched the stem of the wine-glass out of which Odysseus was drinking. “Yes,” she told him, “your little girl is confessing all our happiness to her Auntie Nausikaa!”

  It was at this point that Zeuks looked at Nisos, and Nisos looked at Zeuks; and never, in all the history of love has such savage derision been excited by such palpable humbug.

  “We Phaiakians,” began the Herald, his natural ritualistic assurance evidently emphasized by the long unnatural suppression which he had endured while his Phaiakian princess struggled to ward off without losing her temper the diabolical jibes of the weird woman from Thebes.

  “We Phaiakians are more ready to enter into technical arguments on matters of science and on the navigation of oceangoing ships than any other race, and we find it very hard to argue on these important subjects with barbarians. That is one of the reasons why it is such a deep satisfaction to us to have the privilege of talking with real Hellenic gentlemen like yourselves.”

  “My own feeling is,” said Nisos, trying to make himself a little more comfortable by leaning sideways against the table, “my own feeling is that it is better to work out our own personal system of philosophy as well as our system of navigation in private meditation than to offer them both for public discussion.”

  “Heaven and earth!” cried Zeuks. “What about impulsive fellows like me? I couldn’t tell you by day or by night what I was going to do next!” Thus speaking, the great-grandson of the Nymph Maia hesitated not to take to himself a curious c
hair that stood empty, with its back to one of the richly carved alcoves of that stately hall, a chair that was actually formed out of the figure of a monstrously swollen dwarf from whose head a stag’s antlers protruded and whose feet were elongated into tree-roots.

  There was something about this chair so perfectly adapted to the personality of Zeuks that Odysseus seemed to accept him and the chair as if they had been one thing and not two things. In fact whenever Odysseus glanced in their direction he gave to this fantastical flesh-turned-into-wood man in a chair a half-humorous nod, a nod that seemed to say: “We are all in the same box; and if we don’t grow horns and roots we grow fins and scales.”

  The easy way in which Zeuks was now enjoying life in that horned and rooted man-chair with which he had identified himself gave our friend Nisos an opportunity to take in more of the general situation than he had as yet had leisure to grasp. He noticed that more than half the seats round the table were empty but that the plates of their recent occupiers were still half full of untouched nuts and fruits and that their wine-glasses too were still only half empty.

  It soon began to be clear to the young man that the cause of this desertion of the table was the simple fact that the three chief officers of Nausikaa’s crew had been persuaded by Eurycleia, along with the half-a-dozen sailors who had navigated their ship, to join our old friend Tis and the Trojan captive Arsinöe in a wine-drinking revel parallel with the one that was now ebbing feebly to its close in this dilatory teasing of Nausikaa by the crafty Okyrhöe. Gay and lively were the cries and the laughter that kept reaching that quiet hall from the echoing passage leading down to the underground kitchen and wash-house.

  As Nisos watched all that was going on he soon was made to feel decidedly uncomfortable by the absence of the familiar form of the beautiful Leipephile, who, quite naturally, was away somewhere with her betrothed, the elder son of Krateros Naubolides. Little physical things, too, as so often happens on such drastic occasions, were worrying Nisos now, and these were the more annoying and irritating because of Zeuks’ excessive and exaggerated delight in identifying himself with that grotesque chair and its horns and roots.