Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “Well! just as we were coming out of those stables and sheds of yours, that this Tis looks after so well—and only, as far as I can see, for the advantage of that one solitary old cow—lo! and behold! there came rushing up to us this egregious fellow who calls himself a priest of Orpheus and who sure is the most treacherous and teasing and tantalizing and tricky human being I have ever encountered in the whole of my life. Ye gods! and if he didn’t go so far as to demand permission to sit alongside of us on Pegasos’ back!

  “For the moment, my lord, I can assure you I was flabbergasted by this request. I only knew the fellow as your enemy, and the enemy of my young friend Nisos here, and the enemy of your son Telemachos. Why then, you naturally ask, did I allow this arch-liar, this dangerous and tricky traitor, to have a seat with us on the back of Pegasos? I’ll tell you exactly why, O my King, and you must decide for yourself whether I was right or wrong. This Priest-fellow, this Enorches-man, fell on his knees before me and tapped the earth with his forehead seven successive times! As he did so he swore an oath; and he even went so far as to presume to add to this oath certain terrible and dreadful words after the manner of the immortal gods: for the words he added had to do with the River Styx.

  “It was this oath of his, this oath by the Styx that he was planning no harm to you, my King, that caused me to hesitate. And then I suddenly decided to put my dilemma—as to whether to refuse his request or to allow him to join us—before your herdsman Tis and allow him to decide. And, when I put the matter to him, shall I tell you how he answered me, O great King?

  “He said quite quietly: ‘Set him before me, my lord Zeuks, and let me ask him something.’

  “So I did, and set the man before him. And your herdsman Tis said to Enorches: ‘May I ask you one question, O great Master of the Mysteries?’ And when Enorches nodded, for I could see he regarded Tis as not grand enough, nor famous enough, nor learned enough, nor royal enough, to have any part or lot in these high matters, this was the question Tis put to him:

  “‘If your will, Master, was done about Eros and Dionysos, it would mean, wouldn’t it, that your will would also be done about the Mysteries?’

  “You should have seen the look the priest gave him. But he answered quick enough; and not sharply or angrily either: ‘It would also be done about the Mysteries.’ And it was then that the extraordinary thing happened that led to the Priest of the Mysteries to be marching up and down the deck of this ship as he is doing now in the eyes of all! Your herdsman Tis called upon the cow Babba.

  “At the sound of his voice the cow Babba came straight from her stall and advanced among us, thrusting her cool wet nose into our bosoms, till we had, each one of us, pressed our lips against her upper lip with a noisy kiss.

  “‘Drop your token now, Babbawatty, my Holy of Holies,’ said Tis in a low voice but a voice of the greatest authority I’ve ever heard since the day when I heard my grandfather addressing my father, and neither of them was an animal like Babba or a man like Tis; for indeed they both were and are immortal gods.

  “At this command the cow turned towards us again as if she were going to repeat her recent nuzzling of us one by one. She did indeed move from one to another of us as before, but did no more nuzzling; and at that moment, O great King, there was one of those perceptible arrests, pauses, hushes, and sudden silences, as when the wing of a bird of omen touches the place where we are destined to rest in our final sleep. And it was after that weird pause that Babba stopped in front of Enorches, lifted her tail, straddled her legs and dropped on the ground the largest black-green cow-turd I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “And, in the same pulse of time at which that huge dropping fell, Tis strode up to Enorches and said to him:

  “‘Master, you arc holding something back from us. What is it?’

  “And for answer the Priest of the Mysteries cried aloud in the hearing of them all: ‘What I am holding back can only be revealed when, once more, as formerly they confronted each other in Arima, Eurybia confronts Echidna above the sunken City of Gom!’

  “Having uttered these words he begged to be helped up upon the back of Pegasos and there was none among us who found it in him to refuse.”

  Zeuks was silent: while Nisos, watching Odysseus with the closest interest felt as if the old warrior’s attitude to all these upheavals was not so much abysmally super-human as it was fathomlessly sub-human. Odysseus by this time had seated himself on a coil of ropes at the foot of the mast where the brothers Pontos and Proros, as they turned from the “protonoi” or “forestays” to the “kaloi” or “halliards,” were clearly obeying a sequence of silent signs from Akron, the Teras’ master, who with one hand against the mast was staring at the moon-lit horizon in front of the ship.

  From the expression upon his face Akron might have been saying to himself: “The chief thing when you are master of a ship is to keep your ship afloat and your eye on the water in front of her. And there is great danger you may forget both these objectives if you listen for a single second to the song of a siren outside the ship or to the voice of a Prophet inside the ship.”

  And it now suddenly struck Nisos, as he moved as near as he dared to the King’s extemporized throne, that the way the old man was now watching the objects and persons round him was exactly the way the winged horse watched the objects and persons round him before he proceeded to obey Spartika and carry her back to Ithaca.

  Yes, the old king had at this very moment the same expression as the winged horse before he rose into the air. And Nisos told himself that a sea-lion, setting off, or a whale setting off, or even a sea-serpent starting to cross the ocean would have a look not very different from this aged adventurer’s as he contemplated the universe from that heap of ropes.

  Nisos was too honest with himself not to admit to himself that along with this sub-human look in Odysseus’ eyes there was a distinctly normal human look there also. It annoyed our young friend to have to admit this but he was simply forced to do so.

  “It must be,” he thought, “that in the look of a normal man there is something parallel to the expression in the face of a sea-lion or a sea-serpent.” It annoyed him to have to confess this; but he held rigidly to the idea that a prophet had to be honest with himself and he was resolved that when he reached mature years he would be a prophet: yes! a prophet of something, though he could not yet say in any clear terms, or indeed in any terms at all, of exactly what. And it was obvious to him that whatever elements of heroic endurance Odysseus possessed, they were in a really absolute sense human ones and normal ones.

  The time taken by our future prophet to reach the conclusion that Odysseus was absolutely human had been so lengthy that most of the crowd, including the deck-hands, had entirely scattered, and there was nobody left but a small group of ordinary human beings, who were anything but professional, and Nisos’ friend Zeuks, whose personal obliquities were human enough in spite of his ancestry.

  Nisos meanwhile moved nearer and nearer to Odysseus. What he felt at that moment he would have been extremely puzzled to put into words. There was in his feeling, mixed with many very different emotions, a definite protective instinct towards Odysseus. Watching him seated there with that absurd Helmet of Proteus on his head, and holding his Club of Herakles propped up between his knees, more like the staff of an aged beggar than the most formidable weapon in the whole Grecian hemisphere, that hemisphere out of which the ship Teras was now swiftly moving as she advanced into the unknown West, Nisos felt as if the old hero were some precious relic, being carried, for the purpose of using it as a charm, into some completely different universe.

  Nisos himself was vividly conscious, as if it had been a magnetic hand laid upon his shoulder, of the intense pressure of the presence of Akron, the Sea-Captain, as the man with his hand on the mast stared with what might have been called a cool and competent stare, but with what at the same time was a desperate and frantic stare, at the moonlit water in front of them.

  Pontopereia an
d Eione had evidently found some way of smoothing out their rather intricate knot of contrariety; for the two girls were now pacing arm-in-arm from one end of the deck to the other, talking eagerly and rapidly. Nausikaa and Okyrhöe also had discovered a way, perhaps the best of all possible ways, of bringing to an end, at least for a time, their convoluted rivalry: for Nausikaa had stretched herself out upon the arching back of the ship’s tremendous figure-head, with her arms round the lower part of its scaly neck, and from this point of vantage she was watching with dreamy fascination the churned-up flakes of white and yellow-brown foam which followed one another to left and right as the proudly-cleaving neck, below the cosmogonic countenance of that sublime Being who had neither the face of a beast nor of a man nor of a god, cut its way through the water.

  As for Okyrhöe, she had bent down gracefully in front of Odysseus and had snatched at a piece of sail-cloth that in some way had got itself entangled with the coil of ropes upon which the old man was seated. Spreading this piece of sail-cloth under the mast Okyrhöe plunged into the particular activity which had, since she was first grown up, been the ecstasy of her life, that is to say the arranging of her limbs in a manner to provoke intolerable desire.

  Meanwhile the Club of Herakles, one of whose personal names was “Dokeesis”, or “That which Seems”, and another was Prosdokia or “Expectation” and who had the power of thinking and feeling not only with what it called its “life-crack”, within which the Moth and the Fly had taken sanctuary but with every portion of its polished surface, contemplated Okyrhöe who now lay at the feet of Akron, the Master of the ship, though he took no more notice of her than if she had been a captive from some island-citadel, a captive whom Odysseus, the Sacker of Cities, had carelessly carried off as they sailed West. But it was not Akron’s attention Okyrhöe wished to catch, as, lightly and gracefully—but O so deliberately!—she threw back her head upon her soft white arm and drew up her limbs beneath her. And it was then, and not till then, that Odysseus heard, as long ago, in that dark Nemaean Forest, he had heard it, the voice of his Club of Herakles. The Club was in the midst of a hurried and agitated dialogue with the Sixth Pillar of that Corridor in Ithaca so well known to most of them there.

  It was not Odysseus’ nature, nor was it a habit of his in accordance with his nature, to enter lightly, casually, carelessly, easily, into a conversation with his most powerful weapon. Ever since he first heard that voice in the Nemaean Forest there had come moments when it was impossible not to hear the voice of the Club without a certain awe; and equally impossible not to reply to the voice without an inward submission to the burden of its utterance.

  At this particular moment, seated on that coil of rope and turning his gaze first to the wide path of the moon on the water and then to a strange and shadowy Enormity that had suddenly appeared in front of them and that Nisos took to be a foreign ship with two colossal masts, but which might well have been a portion of the vast cranium of the Titan-Giant, Atlas, Odysseus was careful not to glance at Okyrhöe’s seductive pose of slumber, nor at Nausikaa’s slender limbs and passionate arms entwined about the scaly neck of the mysterious Ruler of Atlantis.

  Okyrhöe’s closed eyes above her rounded elbow might rest forever in sleepless provocation: Nausikaa’s open eyes might be down-turned to the reflection of the moon and down-turned to depths below the reflection of the moon, and down-turned to depths below all reflection: it remained that Odysseus, the son of Laertes, calmly awaited what seemed like the imminent destruction of the ship “Teras” or “Prodigy” by her collison with an island, or with a monster of the deep, or with the head of the Giant Atlas, or with another and much larger vessel.

  Odysseus and Nisos, as well as Akron, became aware at this crucial moment of agitated and extremely jerky words being exchanged between Pontos and Proros as they tugged at the outstretched sail of the “Teras”. And, simultaneously with this dialogue between Pontos and Proros, Akron, the ship’s master, gave expression to a long deep-drawn weirdly hopeless whistle and clapt his other hand upon the mast, to which he now seemed to be clinging, as if expectant of some terrific shock.

  Meanwhile the Club of Herakles whose private and personal name was either “Dokeesis”, “Seeming”, or “Prosdokia”, “Expectation”, translated the startling news he was getting from the Sixth Pillar for the benefit of the aged but absolutely normal human brain that now bent low above it. And the words from the Sixth Pillar that the Club of Herakles now repeated for the benefit of his King were terribly simple.

  “The ship ‘Teras’ at this moment is running into extreme danger. The moon is full. And as she shines upon the water and as the water reflects her, the spirit of the Being at the ship’s bow is stirred within that Being as it remembers all the long nights it watched from the summit of the mountain Kunthorax the moon as a crescent, sharpening her horns of inversion, and rounding her horns of reversion, in creating and uncreating herself as the orb she is; and this stirring of whatever it may be of the spirit of this Being that still clings to its image is full of peril for the ship ‘Teras’, and indeed in a moment or two she may be shattered to pieces upon the Island of Wone.”

  It was naturally only a weird murmuring that Nisos caught of all this; but there was something about the reverberation of the syllable “Wone” that struck his imagination as well as his ear; nor could he help being interested as well as faintly amused as he watched that familiar crack, in the very throat, as it were, of the great weapon the king was clutching, to see a beautiful moth flutter forth and fly straight to the troubled forehead of Enorches, who was now squatting on the deck, and, apparently absorbed in thought, was tearing into pieces a considerable handful of the particular kind of seaweed that has so many of those slippery little bladders growing out of it, which look as if they might explode at a touch.

  Arrived at the forehead of Enorches which was such a prominent feature that it seemed to overhang the rest of the man’s face like a menacing avalanche, the moth fluttered restlessly up and down as if asking for permission to enter this recondite citadel of metaphysical mystery. Getting no apparent response it flew straight back to the club of Herakles.

  And now at last our young would-be prophet was rewarded for the trouble he had taken on first catching the finger-nails of the Harpies at work on the Image of the Goddess of Order, the trouble to memorize a few words of the language of Insects.

  “Moan for the Island of Wone!” was what Nisos heard. But the Fly heard more. So much did it hear that it straightway flew to the ear of Nisos to inform him and to force him to understand. This took some time. But when he did understand Nisos felt it to be his duty as a loyal adherent of the House of Odysseus to let that hero, who was already on his feet with one hand upon the shoulder of Akron and the other on the broad head of “Dokeesis”, know what he had learnt.

  “When he sees,” the Fly had buzzed: and Nisos knew that it was of Enorches he was speaking, “that terrible pair from Arima, facing each other and arguing about the drowned city of Gom, he will reveal his secret.”

  But it now came to pass that both Okyrhöe and Nausikaa sprang to their feet, while Akron, the master of the ship, uttering his commands to the brothers Pontos and Proros as if a great wave were at that moment hanging above their heads, joined with them to pull down the body of the sail, till it slapped the deck, as though it were slapping the back of some martial “hetairos”, or comrade-in-arms, at the start of a dangerous crisis.

  It can be imagined how the brown moth awaited in their moving citadel within the “life-crack” of the club of Herakles the return of her friend the Fly. She had slipped out of his clutches to flutter to the help of Enorches so swiftly and unexpectedly, that he hadn’t been able to stop her. On his return therefore she greeted him with a protesting cry; pointing out how unfair it was that after scolding her for supporting the Priest of the Mysteries he yet should hasten to display just the same sort of partisan activity on behalf of those who were opposed to the Priest.

 
But the moth soon found that this particular moment was too tense with opposing currents of feeling to allow for their usual verbal dispute. “Hush, sweet fool!” cried the fly. And then, when she tried again: “Hold your tongue you flapperty twitter-thighs! Don’t you sec, little fool, that your friend the Priest is going to prick his own bubble?”

  And indeed it was then that Nisos saw the Priest of the Mysteries leap up from the deck, throw away the seaweed with which he had been playing, and point with a pair of long bony arms at the flat, level, rocky Island that had suddenly risen out of the salt deep in front of them and now extended itself before the prow of the “Teras”.

  “There they are!” cried the Priest hoarsely. “But it’s only another big ship with two tall masts!” screamed Okyrhöe. “It must be another ship! It shall be another ship! Those two things sticking up there, I say those two things there, shan’t be anything else than two thick ugly Cretan masts!”

  But Odysseus had suddenly swung round and was now addressing a quiet figure whose head, emerging from the ladder leading to the lower deck, had been followed by a pair of easily-shrugged shoulders and an active mobile body, clad, for this special occasion it would almost seem, in the most conventional attire.

  “Zeuks! Zeuks! My good friend! Do you mind coming here for a second!” cried the old hero; and in all this whirligig of a phantasmagoric pandemonium Nisos was so hit by the old man’s calm that while Zeuks hurried to their side he began scolding himself for the agitation he felt and for the fit of trembling that had seized him.

  “Pray to Atropos, you immeasurable ass,” he muttered to himself. “Pray that you may never forget what you now see, or, by the gods! that it may be the last thing you do see, before we’re all drowned! … just a feeble old man with a pointed beard and this ‘Jack-O-Lanthorn’ on his head reducing the howling chaos of a wilderness of waters to something comparatively unimportant!”