Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  Arsinöe herself was in the vague, dreamy, passive, resigned mood which had been her only happy mood for many a long year. She hadn’t made friends with Zeuks in the way Eione had done with Arcadian Pan. But to be the son of a god is a very different thing from being a god. Besides, the great love-affair of Arsinöe’s life had been her devotion to her father Hector, a devotion that couldn’t have been tenderer or more ardent if Hector had responded to it but all he did was to take her away from her nameless mother and place her under the care of his wife Andromache.

  On this deck of the oarsmen they could only embrace with their eyes a very narrow space of sky; so that neither of them had the least idea whether Pegasos had or had not spread his wings. The Trojan girl had really come to like Nisos quite a good deal and to feel a solid trust in him; but if some woman-friend had asked her point-blank: “What do you feel for this kid?” she would have probably revealed the truth that she felt a strong protective instinct for him and a desire to look after him. She would in all probability have made her woman-friend laugh, if she had not started a regular giggling-fit between them, by confessing that there had been moments of late, since she had known him better, when she had got the same sort of pleasure from his company as she used to get when she played with a special boy-doll of hers she was accustomed to call Ottatos.

  Whether characteristic or not of the difference between the sexes in every human tribe beneath the sun, this interlude, or siesta, or metaphysical sticking-place in the dramatic story of the “Teras” or “Ship of Marvels”, was a noteworthy experience for Nisos whatever it may have been for Arsinöe.

  It struck him very forcibly that the extraordinary good luck—and he prayed it really was, from whatever far distance flung, the impact of the wisdom of that wisest of all old little maids his ancient patroness “Atropos” that had brought it about—of his having been thrown into contact with this Trojan captive was the greatest event in his whole life.

  And it was so because, since his own entire intention was to be a prophet when he became a mature man, the last thing he wanted for his companion through life was an energetic, assiduous, industrious, conscientious, formidable, inexhaustibly active and indefatigably competent. What Nisos wanted or some would prefer to say needed, was someone whose whole nature had the unusual power of being able to devote itself to the one perfectly simple and mysteriously wise act of drifting. Such an one, whether a man or woman, is able to act in a heart-whole and independent way only once in their life; but this act is the infinitely complicated one of stripping themselves stark naked, diving into the deep salt sea and there drifting wherever the tide carries them.

  Compared with the people who put purpose after purpose before them and continue struggling energetically until they attain each of these purposes, these once-acting, once-stripping themselves, once-diving into the deep-sea Drifters seem allowed by Atropos the privilege of being porous to more than one universe and being aware of more than one Space and of more than one Time.

  Yes! The winds of a million systems of things blow across them and one infinity calls to another infinity through them. And the singular thing is that among male children only those who are lucky enough to be born under the special inspiration of that funny little goddess, the old maid Atropos, whose abysmal intelligence has not been killed either by child-bearing or by playing the bitch, know that for life to be life and for the universe to be the universe it is essential that there shall be two embodiments of womankind. Each of these embodiments must have that everlasting mystery in her skin, in her flesh, in her hair, in her bones, in her milk, in her milt, in her mensuration as well as in her mind. But the one must be actively competent and divinely creative, the other incompetent and divinely passive. Nisos felt no longing for a mate who was protective of offspring and eternally producing offspring and keeping the human race alive upon this earth. It was the second type of female, the type protective of dreams and fancies and wishes and longings and illusions and imaginations, and ideals, and rebellions, and destructions, and insurrections, and redemptions, and recoveries, and re-births, and by means of all these things eternally changing the movements and explorations of the energy of life from one generation to another, towards which he felt drawn.

  “What is it,” he asked himself, at that crucial moment, “that this Trojan girl has got in her that neither Tis’s little sister nor the daughter of Teiresias possess, but which I must have if I’m to be happy in my choice?”

  It was at that very pulse-beat of Time that the young man became suddenly aware that Arsinöe was watching him with concentrated attention. Previous to this moment she had preserved the same friendly passivity that had always been her mood with Zeuks and had lasted throughout his recent amorous handling of her. But something, whether a flicker of romantic seriousness passing across the face of Nisos, or some thought or feeling of her own that may very well have reached her from the psychic work-shop of Atropos had suddenly drawn the girl nearer to the young man.

  Nor was he oblivious of this change in her. But the curious thing was that while each of her successive moods, favourable to him or unfavourable to him, were of startling and piercing importance to herself while they lasted, to him, as he watched them come and go, they seemed, each of them in its entirety and intensity, so much a part of her that they endeared her to him in absolute remoteness from their tone, whether for him or against him, in relation to himself.

  What particularly struck him at that moment was an odd relief that she was neither as pretty as his friend Tis’s little sister, Eione, nor as beautiful as Teiresias’ daughter, Pontopereia. “Your preciousness to me, my dear,” he told her in his heart, “is that you are not particularly graceful like Eione or particularly intellectual like Pontopereia, but just simply a sweet-natured extremely feminine woman whom fate has handed over to me for my very own and who has come to entirely belong to me and to no other man in the whole world. It’s because you’re completely and entirely mine,” so his improper, indecent, and outrageous thoughts ran on, “that you’re so entrancingly lovely. What I worship, what I have always worshipped, ever since as a little boy I had a laurel stick called ‘Sacred’, which, though it hadn’t any vital crack dividing its breast and supplying moths and flies and gnats and midges with a refuge from wind and rain, had one end resembling an idol’s head and another end resembling a dragon’s tail, is some object, possessed of an individuality that separates it from everything else in the world, and yet which is absolutely and entirely my very own, not to be shared in any way at all with anyone else. You are mine, aren’t you, you tender, soft, mysterious subtle, enduring, unique creature? Gods in Heaven! if you weren’t, I’d be so alone in this mad, aching, bruising, biting, scratching, stinging cosmos that I wouldn’t care what happened to me! It’s having found you, and having got you as both my idol and as my secret private personal toy that makes you what from now on you’ll always——”

  “Come on, you two! Come on, for the sake of your poor old Zeuks, if not at the command of cloud-compelling Zeus! Come on, or Odysseus will be jumping into the sea with nothing but that ridiculous ‘prumneesia’ on his silly old pate!”

  They both leapt to their feet, followed him at a run to the ladder, scrambled up helter-skelter, Arsinöe clinging to Nisos, while Zeuks, his left hand on the small of the man’s back and his right on the woman’s waist, pushed them violently from the rear.

  Yes! Odysseus was standing alone at the base of the figure-head gripping “Expectation”, otherwise “Dokeesis”, firmly by the middle, and disentangling from the extraordinary object on his head what looked like a couple of dangling, elongated, devil-fish tentacles. Of these tentacles he was earnestly and gravely testing the strength, giving them a series of sharp tugs and using for this purpose both the hand that held the club and the one which was free and unencumbered.

  Close to the mast stood Akron, watching over the curved spines and quiveringly extended arms of Pontos and Proros who were holding the swaying and dripping
rope by which the “Teras” was moored to the rock that in shape resembled the Titan Atlas, and, as he watched those quivering arms and that massive rope, repeatedly turning his head away from the rock and towards Eumolpos at the helm.

  Zeuks led the agitated and excited lovers straight up to Odysseus who swung round at once and regarded them from above his beard with a quiet and approving look, a look that said: “You’re doing very well, my children. Go on as you’ve begun and all will be well.”

  It was only when Nisos realised the direction in which both the eyes and the pointed beard of the old man were now turned that a cold shudder of terror ran through him amounting to something like sheer panic though it didn’t quite reach that point.

  Odysseus was calmly regarding the water, his body stone-still, while both from the hand that held the club and from the other hand trailed those two weird streamers. What these streamers really resembled were the long-drawn-out single hairs of a certain prehistoric creature that swam the salt seas aeons of centuries ago and lived by devouring monstrous cuttle-fish which floated in chasms of water that descended to the centre of the earth.

  Contemplating the greenish-black depths, into which Odysseus kept dangling these streamers from his fantastic helmet and testing their strength, Nisos began to feel more real nervous dismay than he had ever felt in his life before.

  “By Aidoneus if this isn’t worse,” he said to himself, “than when I was in that prison of Enorches!” And then as he stared at that black-green swirling water, into which some deadly intimation told him Odysseus would soon force him to plunge, it suddenly came to him how the image of that mark on the base of the Sixth Pillar—“the Son of Hephaistos”—had acted like an incantation or a magic spell to free him from that cruel Priest’s prison. And wasn’t Hephaistos the god of Fire?

  Well then, wasn’t this mysterious Son of Hephaistos, or rather the Pillar raised up by him, the very saviour dedicated to come to the aid of a person in peril from Water? Thus, just as he had suddenly seen those two Letters on the wall of his prison, so he now saw them in the midst of that swirling green-black water.

  And it was at that second that Odysseus swung round and shouted to Akron: “Keep her off the rocks till we come back!” and then in the same tone addressing Zeuks, just as if the daughter of Hector had been, like the “Teras”, another “Prodigy” of a Ship, “Guard my son’s Trojan as carefully as if she were Helen herself till we return!” Then turning his back upon everything but the miles of water that covered Atlantis: “Now you, my son, watch me carefully and do exactly what you see me do.”

  Thus speaking the old king disentangled the long single hair, that was his Ariadne’s clue, from his Helmet of Proteus and placed the end of it between his teeth. Nisos, after one last hurried glance round, in which he saw the moonlit tips of Zeuks’ knuckles at Arsinöe’s waist but also noted that the knuckles of both her hands were pressed violently against her closed eyes, thrust the end of his “clue” into his mouth and shut his teeth upon it.

  It was at that indrawn beat of the tense heart of their ship “Teras” that Arsinöe snatched her hands from her eyes, fumbled with the clothes of her companion, drew forth Zeuks’ habitual defence, his short double-edged sword-dagger, and thrust it into Nisos’ hand, thus it was not weaponless that our young friend, imitating to a nicety every movement of the old man, followed him over the ship’s side, and plunging feet-first into the water, disappeared from view.

  What did not disappear, however, and it can be imagined the queer feeling the sight of these things gave to Arsinöe, were the two elongated single hairs, so vividly suggestive, whether or not such was their real origin, of some aboriginal prehistoric feminine monster, of that grotesque Helmet of Proteus, These objects remained on the surface of the water; and it was the weirdest thing Arsinöe had ever seen in her life to observe these thin streaks of moon-lit silveriness, bobbing up and down and round and round each other, and every now and then shooting off a certain distance from each other, where, although separated, they would recommence their sport of bobbing up and down and round and round, as if the other one were there, when in reality it was completely outside that particular radius of the game.

  Zeuks was also watching this ocean dance of a couple of moonlit filaments constituting themselves a curious sort of comic-cosmic choroio; but his attention was so taken up with the delight he got from pressing Arsinöe’s body against his own that this dithyrambic crescendo-diminuendo upon the water became merely an outward projection of the deliciousness of the dalliance in which he was indulging.

  To Arsinöe on the other hand, though she could no more help staring at it than she could prevent her senses responding to her companion’s caresses, it was as if the everlasting elements themselves were mocking her and making sport of her; but when Zeuks’ ecstatic embrace subsided and she had once more to deal with the less wrought-up occurrences of the more normal succession of things she forced herself to recall what she had felt when in that “Arima” of Ithaca day after day, with the carving-tool tight between her fingers, she had carved the indomitable features of the defender of Troy out of the heart of an island ash-tree.

  While the son of Arcadian Pan and the daughter of Hector of Troy watched the dance of those nameless things that were like the antennae of some primordial insect-monster of the ocean, our friend Nisos found he needed every gasp of breath, every drop of semen, every throb of blood, every microcosm of will, every spurt of energy, every burst of blind desperation he could call up if he were to remain “cheerful”, as his island school-teachers had always taught him must be at the root of the philosophy of life of every pious son of an Achaian father, while side by side with Odysseus he sank through the water to the roofs and streets and temples of the capital-city of Atlantis.

  They landed on a vast expanse of grey pavement and what was really an enormous space of perfectly smooth and carefully fitted flagstones; and while Odysseus was slowly turning round on his heels and with very little shuffling or stretching or stumbling was making a hurried but obviously a pretty careful survey of the panorama around them, the first thing that came into the head of Nisos to do was to snatch at his own silvery and swaying life-line. When once he had clutched this gleaming object at about five yards distance from the Helmet of Proteus, he glanced quickly at Odysseus for permission, and proceeded to give the glittering thin thing a bold twist round the cavity in the bosom of the Club of Herakles as the weapon reposed horizontally in the hand of Odysseus.

  Noting his son’s action and divining that it had something to do with the curious “life-crack” or naturally-engendered slit in the bosom of “Dokeesis” alias “Expectation”, the old hero raised the weapon into a more perpendicular position and gave it the sort of brandishing shake that Herakles himself must have given it before between them they killed the Nemean lion.

  Held quietly and firmly now at a slanting angle to the bottom of the ocean, and tangled in a twist of one of the two parallel life-lines that reached from the Helmet of Proteus to the surface of the sea, it was possible for our two world-voyaging insects to appear at the mouth of their unusually-shaped caravan and even plunge into verbal relations with their almost equally bewildered fellow-travellers.

  “My friend the Moth keeps imploring me to tell her,” murmured the Fly, “just where in the circumambient trail of our cosmogonic excursion she may know she has arrived. I tell her that this is the only ship upon the sea that fulfils the longing of real adventures all over the world who long to exchange earth for air, air for fire, fire for water, in their natural, heaven-blest longing for new life.

  “My friend the moth suffers unfortunately from one of those troublesome manias that so often afflict lovely and sensitive females. She maintains that the Orphic Priest, who confessed just now, when he saw Eurybia and Echidna on the island of Wone, that the gods he really worshipped were not Eros and Dionysos but Death and Nothingness, had been driven mad by the way we all treated him and by the hatred we all felt for hi
m.

  “She actually went so far as to say that if she could have spent a whole night when he was asleep caressing with her silky wings the frontal bone of his skull she could have restored him to sanity! I think myself that it is the pressure of all this dreadful volume of water upon a creature as delicate as she is that has disturbed her own brain.”

  At this point Odysseus intervened, but quite carelessly and lightly. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “for this confounded weight of waters, in spite of our Helmet, makes me feel a trifle dizzy, I’ll rest here for a moment.” Saying this he seated himself upon a stone bench on a long, low wall; but he continued to keep the club in the same position and took care to hold it so that its “life-crack”, out of which the two insects were peering, might point towards Nisos.

  “Please, O please, thou son of Odysseus,” cried the agitated moth, quickly recovering, under the powerful protection of the Helmet of Proteus, the spontaneous passion of her feelings, “don’t let him traduce by his terrible cleverness a person as holy, a person as chaste, a person as devoted, a person as spiritual as this great Priest of Orpheus! Where is he now, I ask you? Carried away by brute force on the back of a titanic animal who hates him even more than any of you do! Is that the way to treat the greatest Priest of the Highest Mysteries that the history of our world has known?

  “If he were here now, instead of having to crouch as we are doing on the lowest bench in the lowest bottom of the world, we would be marching proudly across these bridges and in and out of these vast temples and forth and back down these sumptuous terraces and across these colossal squares and up and down these palatial flights of gently curving and softly undulating stairways, or we might even have found a chariot to ride in, for that would be the proper fashion for a man as old and famous as our sovereign the King of Ithaca!