Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  Nisos interrupted her. “It was her sister, the midwife, Granny dear, who brought her to Odysseus, not I. I can’t remember ever seeing her. But I daresay I may have seen her when I was little, and before she went to Italy. She lived with the Nymph in the Cave, Granny. You know about that Nymph in the Cave in Italy, don’t you?”

  But the old lady’s contradictory mood wasn’t soothed away by this. “I’ve known too many caves and too many Nymphs already!” she cried. “You and your Nymphs! What I would like to see, Nisos Naubolides, would be no more nymphs and no more caves but a well-built Palace in a well-built City with a well-trained army to protect it from pirates and murderers and thieves, and with well-trained servants to send on the King’s business, without having to have recourse to—— But what am I doing, chattering here with a baby like you when an old woman’s proper work’s up yonder? Here! give me my cloak, girl; and you were best come with me too, foreigner though you be, for us can never tell with these cave-nymphs! This wench may be dropping a monster with horns and tail before we’ve got her to bed!”

  As may be conjectured these words were addressed to the alert Arsinöe, who with a quick glance at Nisos helped the old woman into the garment she required and assisted her up the passage to the hall. Before he followed them thither, however, our young friend couldn’t resist a word with his old comrade Tis whom he found naked to the waist working furiously between oven and wash-trough on his left and red ashes under a great cauldron on his right.

  Dragging about with them across the floor their own foreign blankets, which they had brought up from the ship lest they should be stolen, were half-a-dozen sailors who had been so freely and hilariously partaking of the old nurse’s hospitality that, now the feast was over, they found it hard to keep awake.

  Nisos persuaded Tis to put on his tunic again and leave his wash-tub. Then in a voice too low for those of the foreigners who were not asleep to catch his words he tried to make clear to his friend the pressing necessity for cutting off the beard of Odysseus so that Nausikaa should see him as he was when she first set eyes on him. To his surprise he found that this daring stroke met with obstinate and determined resistance from Tis.

  “I don’t like it: I don’t like it: I don’t like it,” he kept repeating. “It’s an insult to the old man—an insult that I’d never consent to see practised on my old grand-dad Moros, an insult that you’ll never persuade me to help you to carry through.”

  “But don’t you see, old friend,” pleaded Nisos, considerably disturbed by this unexpected opposition, “don’t you see it’s essential that Princess Nausikaa should recognize in our king the man she loved the moment she saw him coming out of the sea?”

  But Tis shook his head. “You young folk always exaggerate and overrate the effect of any mortal thing that strikes you as romantic. How do you know that cutting off our king’s beard will make him look young again? There are other signs of old age than the greyness or the whiteness of our hair. Odysseus had nothing like those deep lines at the side of his mouth, for instance, or those other lines, deeper still, in the centre of his forehead when he first met his princess. No, no! You know very well he hadn’t! He couldn’t have had.

  “No, you’re making a great mistake if you think our old hero’s beard has anything to do with it! In fact, if anybody tried to meddle with our king’s beard when his servant Tis was around that person had better take care! It wouldn’t be that man’s beard that would come off. It would be his head!”

  “But don’t you see, Tis, old friend, it will only be in the interest of our king, and for the sake of the happiness of our king, and in order that our king may have all the honour and glory he wants, that his beard will be cut off. Better lose a beard, than a kingdom! Better lose a beard than the enchanting Love of your proud youth! O Tis, Tis, don’t be an obstinate Tis, a reactionary Tis, an antiquarian Tis! The world has to move on. Life has to move on. Customs have to change. Habits have to change. There was a time for beards. That time is past. Beards have to be——”

  But Nisos stopped suddenly. He was shocked at the expression he saw on Tis’s face. He felt in the marrow of his bones a lively shudder of fear. “Then it is really and truly possible,” he told himself, “for old Tis to give me such a clap across the ear-hole that my head will roll from my neck and go bouncing into——”

  But his thoughts were interrupted, and Tis’s attention was turned by a sudden loud uproar which descended the passage from the hall above; and they both became aware of shrill cries and resounding tramplings and even of the sound of bronze striking against bronze and iron striking against iron.

  The foreign sailors leapt to their feet and drew from their belts their double-edged knives; while Nisos couldn’t help noticing, even in the distraction of that uproar, how carefully these men folded up the blankets on which they’d been lying and tucked them under their arms.

  Both Tis and he were out of the kitchen and up the passage and forcing their way into the hall before either of them had time even to imagine what had happened. But it was soon plain enough to them both. There, confronting the king who was leaning forward across the back of the throne on which he had been seated, was Nisos’ brother Agelaos, the eldest son of Krateros and Pandea, and close to him was none other than Leipephile the young man’s betrothed, while, facing the pair of them, on one side of Odysseus was Nausikaa and on the other were Okyrhöe and Pontopereia.

  The uproar that had reached the kitchen came from two opposing groups of angry armed men, one of whom was shouting abuse of the House of Odysseus and the other abuse of the House of Naubolides. Matters might have got worse at any minute and serious blood-shed might doubtless have ensued, if an event had not occurred so unexpected by both parties that they turned, as if by mutual consent, from their furious confrontation of each other; and both sides gazed with awe-struck amazement at what they saw.

  And what they saw was indeed a sufficient wonder to quell the wildest altercation. Walking quite gently, slowly, carefully and quietly, his wounded wing evidently grown again, and its roots completely healed, while the long feathery tips of both wings were folded against the animal’s sides like those of a colossal moth, there came up through the crowd, from the corridor of the pillars, the winged horse Pegasos. On his back, seated there with the utmost ease, and evidently in a mood of radiant high spirits, was the young girl Eione, Tis’s little sister, who the moment she caught sight of her brother by the side of Nisos kissed one of her hands to them both while with the other she waved in the air an extraordinary-looking object which she was clasping in triumph.

  Pegasos bore her straight up to the old king, the two contending groups of people automatically separating to let them pass. When they reached the throne, across the back of which Odysseus, with great practical shrewdness, was already leaning forward above its empty seat, his body wedged between the chair’s back, across which he leaned, and the massive table which protected his rear, Pegasos stopped, and lowering his head, consented to enjoy the natural equine satisfaction of munching a couple of large lettuce-leaves which the old King lost no time in snatching from the table behind him and placing on the seat of the throne for the god-like creature’s special delectation.

  At that moment all the uproar ceased and so eager and anxious were both parties to catch every word of the dialogue between Eione and the king that in the silence which fell upon the whole company the sound of Pegasos munching the lettuce-leaves was audible from the door of the steps to the corridor to the door of the passage to the kitchen.

  But everybody in the place was soon conscious of an absolutely different sound, a sound that closely accompanied the winged horse’s munching of lettuce-leaves. This came from the mysterious object which Eione was now showing to Odysseus across the horse’s bowed head. It was a sound like the sound of the wind. And the sound in this object was not limited to the sound of the North Wind or of the South Wind or of the East Wind or the West Wind. It was just the wind. It was all the winds together. An
d it was so powerful that it made many people at the back of the hall, who were unable to see that the sound was caused by what the girl was showing to the king, look up at the windows beneath the roof at one of which Pontopereia had been recently sitting and through which they supposed this wild rush of wind must be entering the hall.

  The real power of it could only have been appreciated at that moment however by some observer who could read human thoughts; for this roaring, sighing, crying, wailing, laughing, lamenting, groaning, shrieking sound was so startlingly an embodiment of the real wind that it produced upon those who were nearest to the object out of which it came the identical effect that the hearing of such a wind, had it been real, would naturally have evoked. It made Odysseus feel more strongly than he had ever felt before his absolute determination to sail over the waters into which Atlantis had gone down. It carried Nausikaa back to her girlhood upon an irresistible rush of the wings of memory.

  She had a hundred times recalled that day when she and her playmates were disporting themselves at their game of ball, in relaxation from washing their clothes, when the godlike stranger suddenly appeared among them and clasped her knees in a passionate appeal for help. O how well she remembered how he had followed up the impression he made upon her by uttering the hope that when she met her true mate, he and she together would soon find out how such a true union between lovers could be lucky to their friends and unlucky to their foes; and how they themselves would alone know what it really meant.

  It brought to Pontopereia the feeling that she was gloriously giving herself up to a thrilling and convincing rush of prophetic inspiration. It raced through the mind of Nisos with the impossible romantic wish that somehow, somewhere, he would be triumphantly justified in possessing both Eione and Pontopereia as his Loves!

  To Okyrhöe this sound of the wind, issuing forth from Eione’s gift to Odysseus, brought a sense of deep, abysmal, desolate loneliness. She found herself identifying her own inmost being with this mysterious wind that had suddenly appeared, only the river Styx knew from whence, and which was associated with this ghostly “Arima” that sooner or later she would have to face if she remained with Odysseus.

  While the wind of day and the wind of night were thus working upon various living creatures in various different ways, Eione was explaining in meticulous detail precisely how this extraordinary instrument worked; how it could be stopped, how intensified, how diminished, how directed, how reduced, and how expanded at the will of the wearer. Thus there was no special start or spasm of astonishment in that dining-hall when finally, just before Pegasos had lifted his head from the last lettuce-stalk left on the seat of the throne, Odysseus took the thing from the girl’s hands and raising it carefully in both his own fixed it on his head.

  Once on his head, though it had a certain vague resemblance to a brazen helmet from which hung long twisting snakes, it looked much more like a complicated, convoluted sea-shell, a sea-shell that might have been worn by the sea-god Triton, or even by some greater deity of the salt deep. After a few more less solemn directions from Eione as to its use, the old king removed it from his head and half-turning round placed it beside his wine-cup on the table. He then, in the face of the whole company, gratefully, respectfully, and devotedly kissed both Eione’s hands, caressed the head of Pegasos, and instructed Tis, who was staring awestruck at his sister, to take the bridle of the winged horse and lead him, if his girl-rider saw fit, to a more restful feast in the royal stable adjoining the cow-stall of Babba.

  When Tis had led away his sister and Pegasos the old king summoned Nisos, who had engaged Pontopereia in a whispered conversation behind the backs of Nausikaa and Okyrhöe, and told him to fetch Zeuks. This command he had no difficulty in obeying, for the son of Arcadian Pan had fallen into such a deep sleep in that queer-backed and queer-legged chair that it was easier to get him awake and to escort him, a bit dazed but no longer muttering in his sleep about “Ajax and the Lightning”, to where the king and his two ladies were once more seated at the table with their heads close together, than it would have been to explain to him all that had happened since he had fallen asleep.

  But if it had been difficult to arouse the great-grandson of “still youthful Maia” from his trance in a chair that had both roots and horns, Odysseus did not seem to have the least difficulty in seating him on the throne now calmly and resolutely vacated.

  “Fetch me, child,” he said to Nisos, laying a caressing hand on the boy’s head and drawing up for himself, to the acute vexation of Okyrhöe, an empty chair to the side of Nausikaa, “my club of Herakles, the weapon called ‘Dokeesis,’ from the entrance porch.”

  There wasn’t a person in that hall that night who didn’t hear these momentous words; nor was there one who didn’t catch their significance. This was in fact a declaration that, armed as he would be when Nisos brought “Dokeesis”, and possessed as he now was of the Helmet of the Winds, the oldest and weakest and frailest, but far, O far the wisest, of the Fates, Atropos herself, the great-aunt of all the heavenly powers, had decided in an uncontroverted decree that, whatever the issue, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, was to sail over the towers of Lost Atlantis before he perished after the manner of men.

  So intense had been the fascination and expectation throughout that great hall that when Nisos in a shorter time than seemed possible returned with the Club of Herakles and placed it in Odysseus’ hands there occurred once more that curious kind of hush that is in truth when it falls upon any mixed crowd of men and women the most mysterious force for the working of miracles that exists in this solar dimension of the multiverse.

  “Listen, wise Fly,” murmured the Moth, as they peered together out of the life-crack of their wheel-less conveyance, “I think the Sixth Pillar is talking to our All-in-All.”

  The Fly did listen: and it heard the Pillar tell the club that Poseidon and Aidoneus had decided to break the covenant they once made with Zeus over Atlantis when they allowed him to drown it under the western ocean as a punishment for its refusal to believe he existed. They promised him they would let it stay drowned and that no man should ever cross the place of its drowning. This solemn covenant they have now decided to tear to shreds; and, if it comes to a fight, they say that Two are stronger than One.

  “I am wondering,” murmured the Moth, “whether it isn’t my duty to leave you tonight and fly at my best speed to the Priest of Eros, lest, my duty neglected, some world-disaster may overtake us.”

  “If you feel like that, you’d better go to him,” hissed the Fly, in jealous rage. “And leave you alone in here?” “Where I am,” replied the Fly in his metaphysical pride, “there is always Eternity.”

  The moth groaned. “I must, but O! it’s so hard, learn to love Eternity;” and she stroked with her left antenna one of the fly’s wings.

  But the fly said to himself. “What shall I do if the King takes us down into Atlantis itself? There must be millions of dead flies down there.”

  Meanwhile Nisos was walking round and round the great table thinking out very carefully just what he would say to Eione to persuade her to go with them. In his heart he was so indescribably relieved at the disappearance not only of his own relations, such as his brother and his brother’s betrothed, together with Pandea, his mother, and Nosodea, along with Spartika and the midwife, but of almost all the disputants and contenders of the general public of Ithaca, that he could only listen with amused and sympathetic satisfaction while the King explained to Zeuks that he had decided to put him into full, absolute, and complete charge of the Palace, the Temple, the chief Harbour, the lesser harbours, and all the caves, shrines, sanctuaries, and sacred places of the Island of Ithaca to guard, to hold and to sustain intact, until he, its only lawful sovereign and ruler, should return from his Voyage across the drowned Atlantis; “and take from you again the rights and privileges he now makes over to you and leaves unchallenged in your possession”.

  At this point Odysseus laid his hand upon the strange object broug
ht to him by Eione. “The Princess Nausikaa, here present,” he went on, “has consented to accept my company and that of my armour-bearer and Hetairos, Nisos Naubolides, together with my friend Okyrhöe the Theban and together with Pontopereia the daughter of Teiresias. At the moment I cannot tell you whether Eione, the sister of my Herdsman Tis, will also come with us; but I have the Princess’s permission to invite her to do so, and my impression is she will do so. Just as I make thee, Zeuks, my vice-regent and sole representative among men, so, among women I leave my old Nurse Eurycleia in absolute and unchallenged control. I must add that there has just come into my possession the Helmet of Proteus, wearing which it will be possible for me to visit drowned Atlantis beneath the very waters that drowned her.”

  It was then that Nausikaa rose to her feet and said: “What my Lord Odysseus has told you is the truth.”

  CHAPTER X

  “Well,” said Nisos to Akron, the Master of the ship “Teras”, “she’s got through that anyway!”

  “O she’s a sly old bird, our good black ship, when matters get really serious,” replied Akron, “and there’s another thing about her which I wonder if you’ve noticed; I mean about her motion?”

  “I may have noticed it and again I may not. Different eyes notice different things.”

  “They sure do; and they are also blind to different things. I was blind myself just now when the Pillars of Herakles vanished over the Eastern Horizon.”

  “Why, so they have! And I’d been watching so steadily to see them go! It’s no use. You’ll never make a sailor of me.”

  “I used to say that very thing once myself! But it passes, Nisos, it passes!”

  Nisos looked at him gravely. “I take it you don’t feel the slightest sensation of nervousness, or strangeness, not to speak of simple terror, when from this old black ship of yours you can see no sign or hint or trace of land? Don’t you feel any fear, master, when with nothing between you and this black abyss but a few scrabbled bits of wood, if you don’t mind my saying so, and a few shaky planks blown by the wind and tossed on the wave, you give yourself up to whatever fate awaits you?”