Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “But how,” thought Nisos, “how can the old man endure all this?” And then, as in obedience to a whisper from Akron he picked up the blanket that the Priest of Orpheus had dropped and wrapt it round the fellow’s shoulders, he noticed that Enorches gave him a very queer look. All the same the priest wrapped the thing round himself with obvious relief and crouched down again, this time with his back to the mast.

  “Stay and watch him for a while, will you, son?” whispered Akron. “I’ve got to go down now to the oarsmen to talk to them about this rock to which we have to tie up the ship for the night. And keep an eye, sonny, will you”—here Akron moved close enough to add this in an extremely low whisper—“on Zeuks, while I’m down below? He seems to think that as long as he’s embracing that girl he’s keeping her from some mischief she naturally will be up to the moment he lets her go! But it’s much more about himself than about that poor worried-looking waif from Troy that I’m concerned.

  “You know the man a lot better than I do; in fact, as far as I can see, you’re the only one aboard our old ‘Teras’ who knows anything about him at all. He’s a funny-looking fellow right enough; and he’s got a look as if at any moment he might break out into a roar of laughter that would burst his skin! I don’t like the look of him and I don’t trust him. So keep an eye on him, son, will you? They’ll be calling us down before very long to the old man’s cabin for supper. I pray we’ll be reaching this confounded rock he talks about before that’s ready. But maybe not! Anyway I’m off now. I’ll be seeing you later. At supper, if not before! I won’t ask you now how you suppose the old man knew about this same ‘pointed rock’ to which we’re to moor the ‘Teras’? He can’t have been here before, can he? Well! See you soon again, son! But keep your wits about you. I leave the old man, so to say, in your care. See you soon!”

  Both pairs of ladies, Pontopereia and Eione in their cabin, and Nausikaa and Okyrhöe in theirs, were, in a leisurely, negligent, nonchalant way, preparing for the passengers’ supper in the much larger cabin dedicated to the comfort of Odysseus.

  “What do you really feel, Eione darling, when you see that queer-looking individual Zeuks, holding that grave, sweet Trojan woman on his knee?”

  Pontopereia held her own not very shapely left leg balanced across the knee of her other while she carefully adjusted her left sandal so that a particular wrinkle in its leather shouldn’t hurt a bunion from which she was suffering.

  Eione screwed up her forehead, but gave her friend a very straight look.

  “It wouldn’t suit you, my beautiful one, to feel as I feel,” Eione replied, “for you’re a clever girl from a big city and are born with an intellect of your own; and if a man began fooling about with you you’d either want him to come to the point, take your maidenhead, as they call it, and have done with it, or to let you alone and come back to listening while you explained your philosophy to him.

  “But country girls like me are quite different. We’ve lived so close to animals that we’ve sort of turned into animals. We’re fond of our own human flesh just as animals are. And we’re particularly fond of our own flesh when men are enjoying it, I mean feeling it with any part of their bodies. I know what I’m talking about, Ponty darling, for I’ve had an experience that doesn’t happen to every girl in the world I can assure you! I mean I’ve been, as they call it, ‘made love to’—not much ‘making’ and not much ‘love’ in it, but never mind that!—by no other than the most lecherous Being in the whole wide world, the great Arcadian god Pan, his own self!

  “And do you know what happened? We just simply made friends. I begged him not to meddle with my virginity, for, as I told him frankly, I didn’t want to be bothered with the consequence of that sort of thing yet! I wanted to enjoy my life before starting to be a mother and all that sort of business. Arcadian Pan fully understood what I said to him; and he fully agreed with my point of view. I told him it wasn’t fair that our mother the Earth should just use us as procreating nest-eggs for her own purposes. And he agreed.

  “He said that in the act of copulation a woman got more pleasure than a man the moment the pain was over and sometimes even while the pain was going on. But he said he’d make a bargain with me that he’d agree not to meddle with my virginity if in return I’d let him hold me on his knees and enjoy the feeling of my thighs pressed against his thighs and the pleasure of stroking my breasts. He said that the pleasure to male flesh of having female flesh pressed against it was greater than the most delicious taste to the tongue or the palate or the most exciting bathing in water, rushing through air, burrowing in earth-mould, or brandishing blazing fire.

  “He said that to deny to masculine flesh its greatest possible thrill, namely the ecstasy of being pressed against feminine flesh, was the most cruel and wicked perversion in the whole universe, and that the whole idea of refusing our human flesh to each other, when the meeting of these two sorts of flesh, the male and the female, gave to each the greatest thrill of pleasure possible to all organic beings in the whole universe was a wicked and cruel denial to life of what life had come into existence to enjoy.

  “‘Life,’ said Arcadian Pan to me, ‘life is lured and attracted out of the inert and inanimate elements into its earliest existence by the promise of the indescribable ecstasy of sexual pleasure! And so, when we have lured life out of the inanimate, to go and deny to it,’ thus spoke Arcadian Pan to me, ‘its prerogative and privilege and proprietary right, is an abominable treachery to the mysterious pressure, whatever it may be, that brought life into existence!’

  “And I must tell you this also, Ponty, my true and only friend. When Arcadian Pan had taught me the ineffable, the unfathomable, the infinite pleasure that comes from male flesh pressing female flesh against itself—and, mind you, this has nothing at all to do with ‘taking maidenheads’, as they call it, or de-virginating virgins—he and I became excellent friends. I found his society extremely agreeable; and it seemed to me that he found mine the same! At any rate the result of our daily contact was that I got genuinely fond of him and sincerely attached to him as a friend; and I believe he felt exactly the same about me! That he was an immortal god and I a silly little mortal girl, doomed to perish in a few years, seemed to make no difference to him or to me! I can only tell you, Ponty dear, that if it weren’t for meeting you, and your being so sweet to me, I should miss his company so much that there’s no telling what silly things I might do. And what is more, I believe, though it seems conceited and vain to say so, that he misses me, though not of course as much as I miss him!”

  At this point Pontopereia, as she lowered her not very shapely leg to the floor of that lowest deck of the “Teras” and endured with a little laugh the twitching pain she got from the contact of her sandal with her bunion, believed she beheld by the feeble flame of a flickering wick floating in oil, a real, actual, round pearl of a wet tear rolling down her friend’s plain, simple, and the extreme opposite of what could be called a clever face and sliding from her retreating chin to the white hollow between her girlish breasts.

  A very different dialogue was proceeding meanwhile in the cabin of the two older women. There was no inclination between those two to make the relation between male and female flesh the subject of discourse. Their talk was actuated by, and revolved round, and obstinately and viciously returned to, the intense heart-gnawing jealousy they felt with regard to each other and the old wanderer with whom they were sailing.

  “You have no idea then, is that what you want me to believe, as to what you will do with me, when you and this ugly, badly built ship of yours have lured Odysseus to his death?”

  “Do with you? I don’t understand! I presume you’ll stay here on board with us until you’re tired of us? We shall, of course, when we’ve seen all we want to see of the ocean that swallowed up Atlantis, sail back to the land of my Fathers. If you think we’re going to visit Ithaca just for the sake of ending where we began you’re challenging the very mill-wheel of disappointment.

/>   “And if you are playing with the crazy idea that you can persuade me to enter the harbour of the city of Thebes on your behalf you must be losing your head. What you ought to be asking yourself all this while is what you will do when we return to my country. I shall have no particular authority there; and if I had I doubt whether, from what I now am learning about you from personal contact, I should be particularly anxious to—What was that? The first call for dinner was it? Or was it a call for us to gather on the top deck again, before something—heaven knows what!—begins to happen?

  “No, no! thanks all the same! You go on dressing; and be quick about it and stop talking! I can manage with this curst necklace if you leave me alone. Yes, you’re welcome to all the hot water in that pro-cho-os over there. I’ve got all I want.”

  Meanwhile on the top deck the same sound of the same bell that had disturbed Nausikaa and Okyrhöe reached the ears of Odysseus. He had left his club propt against the bulwarks and had already begun to move, slowly and cautiously, as he always did when on board ship, from his seat of coiled ropes to the ladder leading to the oarsmen’s deck.

  Over the face of the priest Enorches as he lay naked in a couple of blankets, for some kindly sailor had brought him a second one, now that the only light in the sky and on the water was moonlight, there floated an unquestionable smile of pure comfort and relief. Most onlookers would have supposed this look to have been purely due to a draught of rich Cyprian wine which another kindly sailor had brought him; but our old acquaintance the Fly who was now in a position to observe these things at close quarters knew well enough that it was his friend the brown-winged Moth, who by deliberately fanning with her wings the wine-moistened lips of the Priest of the Mysteries, had drawn from him this genial token of well-being.

  As to the Moth herself, she had no sooner returned to her friend in their familiar refuge than she was compelled to listen to one of those cosmic conversations between the Sixth Pillar and the Club of Herakles which the Fly’s scientific mind always found so fascinating and illuminating.

  “You must have noticed already, my dear old friend,” the Sixth Pillar was saying, “how strongly and emphatically the four elements are joining in this multiversial revolt against the authority of the Olympians? Of course there are voices abroad and I can hear them in this corridor who declare that what is now going on is a world-wide revolt of women against men rather than of men against gods or of Titans against Olympians; but with my own personal nearness to the Four Supreme Elements I cannot share these eccentric opinions.

  “To me it is clear that what is happening in the multiverse at the present moment is a revolt against Zeus the Son of Kronos by every other power in the wide world! The best proof of this is the definite news that Hera and Athene who have always worked hand in hand are now encouraging Poseidon and Aidoneus to join with Zeus in some final desperate act of authority and retribution.

  “What I am most conscious of now,” went on the Sixth Pillar, “is the mental awareness of what is going on by each of the Four Elements. Take the earth, to begin with, my good friend. I assure you I cannot imagine anything clearer or more definite than the vibration of sympathy with the rebels in this cosmogonic revolt which I feel—yes! at this very second as I talk to you I feel it—emanating from the earth! The vibrations I feel, you must understand, my friend, are not spoken words. They are more like the deep, dim rumblings of an earthquake! They are thick and dense and dark, and convey to me something of what animals must feel when they fall and strike their foreheads upon the ground. On the contrary the vibrations I get out of the air are like a mighty rushing wind which seems in the fanning and flapping of its vast feathers to have completely surrounded me and to be carrying me into a boundless void.

  “And then what I get out of the heart of the hot black fire of the darkened sun as he travels beneath the earth, and what I get out of the heart of the cold white fire of the ghostly moon as she rides through the clouds, are two infinite throbbings that are like thunder in my own heart!

  “And strangest of all is the vibration that emanates from the massed volume of all the waters of the ocean, a vibration that is in many ways more important for us in this corridor of the rock-palace of the Island of Ithaca than all the other three; for it is a vibration from an element that resembles air made palpable, air thickened out into a tidal momentum encircling the earth, grey, fathomless, immeasurable, salt with all the tears ever shed, cold and ultimate as a universal grave.”

  The monotone of the Sixth Pillar’s discourse as he thus informed his friend the Club of Herakles, to whom Atropos had given the name of “Expectation” and who had always had the name of “Dokeesis” or “Seeming”, how the Four sublime elements of earth, air, fire and water responded to this world-wide revolt against the gods had scarcely died down, before there came, reverberating up from the depths of the “Teras”, the second call for supper.

  It was the custom on board this particular ship for the white crew and their black helpers to enjoy their evening meal in a haphazard manner, casually, and irregularly, and in no particular order, slipping down by twos and threes to the kitchen in the hold when opportunity offered, and lingering with a friend over a flask of wine down there when the wind was in their sail and the ship was moving quietly.

  At the moment therefore when the second call for the supper went forth on this particular evening our young friend Nisos, who was to have a berth that night with the master of the ship so as to give the only remaining one-man cabin to Zeuks, was already wondering whether to obey the call alone or to beg Zeuks and Arsinöe, the latter looking half-asleep as she reposed partly on the knees of the son of Pan and partly against the base of the ship’s figure-head, to accompany him.

  If Arsinöe was half-asleep, Zeuks, as far as Nisos could tell, was entirely so, for his eyes were tightly closed and his face had the expression, already familiar to Nisos, that it always assumed when the man was asleep, an expression as if he were some whimsical creator of the world who had dozed off in the act of trying to suppress his amusement at his creation.

  Pontos and Proros were playing some private game of their own at the foot of the mast, a game that was clearly one rather of skill than of chance; for they threw no dice, and seemed to be moving little bits of wood from one position to another across some geometrical figure scrawled on the deck.

  Nisos had the boldness at this moment, so quietly and silently was the “Teras” being rowed along that rocky coast of the Island of Wone in that unearthly moonlight, to sink down himself upon the old king’s seat of coiled ropes, as he watched in a sort of trance across the slowly changing rocky edges of Wone those two weird figures from Arima, whose unearthly and unending disputation with each other the wind must now be carrying back towards those old Eastern lands they were so steadily leaving as they sailed through the moonlight towards the unknown West.

  It was a moment in his life, so our friend told himself, as he tried to arrange his limbs on his pile of ropes as comfortably as the king always did, that until his death he would remember.

  “I don’t believe I will go down to dinner at all tonight,” he thought, answering, as he fancied, some call out of the moonlight that was more imperative for him than even the second call to the most important meal of the day, and in a flash of interior penetration he recognized that he still couldn’t decide whether it was Pontopereia or Eione he would like best to have for his wife.

  “I don’t even know to which of them I am the more attracted! In fact, as I watch Arsinöe now, who is ever so much older than they are, I really think I would feel more at ease and more content if it were she rather than either of those young girls who was to be my mate. And she’s not only older; she’s a Trojan too! Of course I’d be thrilled to make love to either of those girls and overjoyed to sleep with either of them; but I’d be scared of being fixed up for good with that stupid little face of Eione’s or with that heavy little body of Pontopereia’s. I simply can’t understand it! But there it is: it�
��s the truth. What I feel now is that something—someone—a Presence of some kind—is calling to me out of this moonlight and out of this night-wind and out of these waves, though I’m damned if I know what kind of a Presence it is!

  “Come! Tell me, you Unknown! Are you a living girl, you Mystery of the Night? Or are you a boy like me, alone and puzzled and not quite knowing what you want, but not wanting to go back to your mother, and hating your father and brother and your brother’s girl? Are you a boy like me, you Mystery of the Night, serving one of the greatest heroes the world has ever seen and a hero who has seen more of the world than any other human being who has ever been born? Are you a lonely girl who-want me for your mate? Or are you a lonely boy who want me for your ‘Hetairos’ or friend? Speak you Mystery of the Night! Speak and tell me which of the two you are!”

  But there was no answer and the Moon grew steadily larger and larger and larger. And as Nisos settled himself deeper and deeper in the centre of that pile of ropes he began to feel as if it were the Moon herself, Selene the Moon-Goddess, who had selected him, as according to the rumours he was always hearing she had long ago selected Arcadian Pan and as she had lately selected, so the angelic scandal-mongers swore, the Carian shepherd Endymion of Mount Latmos.

  He allowed himself to dally with this idea of having really attracted the attention of the Moon-Goddess on this night of all nights when her circle of white magic was full to the brim, until the inhuman murmur from Eurybia and Echidna, neither of whom seemed even remotely affected by their voyage through the air from Arima to Wone, reached such a point in their choreographic accompaniment to his fancy, as if—pair of ancestral Titanesses as they were!—they were about to vary the monotony of their immemorial argument by hopping up and down in the fury of their repartees!