Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “Still myself,” continued the great weapon in its slow confused awakening under the gradual approach of dawn, “still old Dokeesis—who was embraced in that far-off forest by God knows what treacherous neighbour-plant, but who is still able to fit himself as easily into the hand of an older hero as into the hand of a younger hero; Yea! by the gods, and into the hand of a mortal hero as into the hand of an immortal one!”

  Pondering thus, the fire-blackened, well-polished club, deeply furrowed into rounded grooves and convoluted curves by the parasitic plant which had so assisted or impeded—who can say which?—its natural growth as to endow it with what resembled a female bosom, found himself recalling his feelings, when, years and years ago, he was washed up by the waves on the coast of Ithaca.

  Broken pieces of sea-bitten wreckage from far older vessels than the one upon which the sea-god’s wrath had most recently been wreaked were strewn about him on the strip of shore beneath the rocky promontory where he lay. Sand-crusted fragments of sea-shells together with wind-tossed wisps of foam and salt-smelling ribands of slippery seaweed had drifted by pure chance and were piled up by pure chance against the rounded wooden curves of his female-looking bosom.

  Just because he was the latest object to be cast up out of the deep upon that shelving shore the club of Herakles had felt in some dark and deep sense humiliated as well as ill-used.

  It was curious, he thought, that this ancient feeling of humiliation should return to his consciousness at this particular moment of this February dawn; but as he tried to analyse what he felt, for the club had grown almost morbidly introspective during these long years of peaceful relaxation with his head resting sometimes against a piece of quartz to the East and sometimes against a piece of quartz to the West, he could only repeat over and over with a proud, furtive, sly, secret detachment, “I am myself”, and as he did so he felt detached not only from the service of Odysseus, but also, and this struck him as something quite new in his experience, from the service of his old master, the demi-god Herakles. He had therefore two introspective riddles about himself to ponder on as this cold pale light of this early dawn moved from pillar to pillar. Why should there be any sense of humiliation in his memory of surviving, in the way he had, the wrath of Poseidon?

  And why should he be feeling this savagely cunning, ferociously sly sense of detachment from the service of any master, while at the same time he had such a self-confident sensation of power; of power to serve a mortal hero like Odysseus, quite equally with power to serve an immortal one like Herakles?

  “Perhaps,” he said to himself, “I have spent so many days and months and years with my head drooping and slipping and sliding and sinking, first to the east and then to the west between these glittering blocks of quartz that when I try to form any clear-cut explanation of my real inner feelings I just swing from the extreme of shame to the extreme of self-confidence.

  “But that seems a silly explanation when I think of the pride I felt in throwing my life into every blow I struck for Herakles, and when I think of the shame that shivered through me as I lay, like a swollen and bloated baby’s rattle, half-covered by seaweed, between two rock-pools, and felt the swishing of sea-gulls’ wings brush against my bare cheeks and my bare stump-end.”

  But it was at that moment that the awakened consciousness in the club of Herakles decided that common decency as well as common courtesy, not to speak of prudence, demanded that he give some flicker of attention to the small brown moth that for the last half-an-hour, indeed long before any light entered that corridor, had been struggling to tell him things that concerned them all.

  “What’s that? You imp of Erebos? What’s that you’re telling me now? Isn’t it enough that for more years than I can count I’ve been listening to you, and listening to your mother’s and your grandmother’s and your great-grandmother’s chatter about this infernal Priest of Orpheus who has ousted every other prophet and seer and soothsayer and omen-reader from the Temple of Athene, that I must now treat you seriously; and begin solemnly answering a whole series of ridiculous questions about the end of the world?

  “What’s that, you silliest of insects? No, of course I’ve felt nothing of the kind! Have I felt, do you say, that the world was coming to an end as soon as the sun was up? Of course I’ve felt nothing of the kind! Don’t I feel it now, you ask, this terrible news? No! I certainly don’t feel it! I feel the confounded tickling of your tisty-wisty wings against my old life-crack; that crack from outer to inner, I mean, from what’s going on to my consciousness of what’s going on, that began when He—and if you don’t know who He is you’d better get back into your baby chrysalis as soon as you can!—hit that great roaring Beast over the head in that Nemean wood.

  “It’s ever since then that my hearing’s been so good. Curious, isn’t it? Shows how wisely old Father Zeus governs the affairs of the world, eh? And so this blasted fool of an Enorches thinks the world’s coming to an end does he? He’ll soon learn the opposite if that great Son of Zeus whose business it is to purge the world of those who try to bring it to an end comes this way again!”

  “Please, please, please, great Club,” pleaded the little Pyraust in her most tender tone: “Please believe me when I warn you that there is serious danger ahead for all who fear the gods.”

  The voice of the club of Herakles shook with wrath. “I tell you, silliest of girl-moths, that this world of ours is founded forever on the will of Zeus the Father of All, he who wields the thunder and lightning, he who kills and makes alive, he who can cast those who refuse to serve him into the lowest depths of Tartaros; and Tartaros, you must remember, O most misled and most infatuated of small moths, is as far below the earth as the earth is below the starry heaven! Think, little whimperer, think, what it must have meant to an enemy of Zeus and of the Olympians when he felt himself falling, falling, falling, falling, even as the monster Typhon must have felt himself falling when, with Etna on the top of him to keep him perpendicular, down, down, down, down he went, down to a place—and don’t you forget it, little flutterer with a wren’s eye!—that is as far below the kingdom of the dead as that is below the earth!

  “Yes, you flipperty-flap of an insect, what you’ve got to realize is that the Kingdom of the Dead is the Kingdom of Aidoneus; and that Aidoneus is the brother of Zeus and as much under his will as you and I are under his will.

  “It is by the will of Zeus, as well as by the help of Queen Persephone, that Aidoneus keeps the ghastly myriads of the dead in control and compels them to submit to their fate. And do you know, you flicker-fan, what their fate is? What yours will be, yours will be, yours will be, if you flap at my crack of quietness, or disturb my groove of wisdom any more!

  “But if you ask me, you silly flitter-fluff, what their fate is now, and what yours will soon be, I cannot answer. ‘Shadows they are and shadows cover them,’ as I heard Herakles muttering once when we brushed the dead leaves from his lion’s skin. Have you forgotten, O grain of sand on a pair of wings, the story of how our old Odysseus called up the Theban Prophet Teiresias from among these shadows?

  “And how the Prophet had to drink blood before he could speak? So much for the most intellectual of mortal men when it comes to real knowledge! Drink blood is what they have to do, little brown one, drink blood! Is your precious Priest of Orpheus prepared to do that?”

  The wings of the moth-girl emitted a faint susurrating shiver. Then they relaxed and closed above her sunken head. But she was still perched on one of the bosom-curves of the monster-killing Club where she must have looked to any smaller creature, to a thirsty louse for instance, searching for half a drop of sweat from a human hand, like an exhausted sea-mew resting on the crest of a sea-wave.

  And her voice filtered down like a distillation of mist into that long and narrow crevasse where dwelt the club’s consciousness.

  “Is it true, O immortal one,” she asked—and behold! it was brought about by her very fear of the gods that the voice of Pyraust, the moth-gi
rl, gathered up as she spoke some of the rhythmical lost notes from the wailing of the earth over the rape of Persephone; and thus, while not too faint to be audible to the smallest louse, had in them that which caused even the pine-wood sap in the club of Herakles to stir and rise—“please, please tell me if it is true what I heard the Priest of Orpheus tell the Priestess of Pallas Athene: namely that on the confines of the country of the blameless Ethiopians there have now come back from the Kingdom of the Dead the First Man and the First Woman; and that the First Woman, whose name is Niobe, no longer weeps like a ceaseless torrent from an eternal rock; and that by her side once again is the first man, whose name is Phoroneus and who was the son of a Melian Nymph who came from ah Ash-Grove, even as thou thyself, O immortal one, came from a Pine-Forest.”

  Now indeed had the moth-girl said the wrong thing! She had been taught from childhood about the Melian Nymphs and about their association with Ash-trees and there had been a family tradition among her own brown-moth ancestors that it had been by the special intercession of one particular Melian Nymph that the original pair of brown-moths had extricated themselves from the hidden parts of the Great Mother.

  But what she had never been taught, or, if she had, what she could never keep in her head, was that the effect of every act and every word and every gesture of every living creature depends, not on the nature of what’s done, spoken, or indicated, but on the manner of these performances.

  And where this impulsive flutterer made her mistake was in speaking so carelessly about Ash-Trees and Pine-Trees that the natural implication was left upon the atmosphere that the only difference between them was that one was the haunt of Nymphs and the other of Lions.

  But the savage beast with whose brains the Club of Herakles had sprinkled the pine-needles of the Nemean Wood had never made a more violent sign of fury than the heavy thud with which the Club struck the paving stones of that palace-porch or the harsh groan with which it bade the terrified little flutterer “get back to your Priest of Blasphemy and your Father of Lies!”

  Out into the dawn flew in deadly silence Pyraust, the brown moth, while Myos, the black house-fly, spread his gauzy wings and with the tense buzzing sound that always, for all its low pitch, suggested the impetus of a classic messenger, flew in pursuit of her to the Temple of Athene.

  It was at this moment that the cow-herd Tis stretched himself with a comfortable groan and rising to his feet lifted up first his bare right leg and then his bare left leg, supporting them against the base of the third pillar, while he fumbled for his sandals. He had been sleeping in his single garment, his shirt-tunic or “chiton”, and he now surveyed his companion, the boy Nisos, who, asleep in a similar garment, though fashioned a little differently as befitted not only his fewer years but his nobler birth, had been so suddenly submerged in sleep that though the cords that bound his sandals to his ankles had been loosened and now trailed over the flag-stones, the sandals themselves remained on his feet.

  Tis regarded the sleeping boy with friendly amusement for a moment. Then he shook him gently by the shoulder. “That girl will be down here in a moment,” he said. “In fact I keep thinking I hear her step. Of course neither she nor Leipephile would worry about me if I were like you a son of Naubolos who claims to have more right to be King of Ithaca than Odysseus himself.

  “But if I were your elder brother or your uncle that girl Arsinöe would still throw her witch-look on me just the same as she does on you. She hates us all, and not altogether without—God! master Silly-Boy! wake up for Hermes’ sake! Tie your sandal-strings tight!” As he spoke the Cow-herd disentangled the boy’s sandal from the cords of the mattress on which the lad had been sleeping and helped him to get his foot into it.

  “Has Babba been making a noise?” enquired Nisos somewhat irritably. “The old lady ought to be ashamed of herself,” he went on, “if she has been raising hell again just because her damned udders are too full. Didn’t I hold on to my bladder when it was nigh to bursting yesterday when mother sent me to the Temple to see Stratonika and I had to wait till her morning chant was finished and she’d put off her garlands and black ribbons in the porch?

  “How ridiculously different from one another women are, Tis! Who would ever have imagined that Stratonika was Leipephile’s Sister? It seems just simply crazy to me whenever I think about it. I can’t help rather liking Leipephile myself. It’s the way she smiles at you when you tease her; as much as to say: “of course, kid, I know perfectly well you’re much cleverer than I am; and I’m a bit of an idiot; and I know that the great House of Naubolides is much grander than we Pheresides can ever claim to be; but yet,” so her looks seems to say, “you and I, Nisos Naubolides, are born to understand each other. That’s what the gods have willed that you and I should understand each other!”

  The boy was now engaged in smoothing down his blue-black hair with a small ivory comb which he drew from an interior pocket of his “chiton” and the odd fancy crossed the patient mind of Tis that his own left eye upon which Nisos seemed to have concentrated his gaze had suddenly become a mirror, but a mirror that didn’t interfere with his keeping both his own eyes firmly fixed on the boy’s face. “It’ll be your brother Agelaos she’ll soon have to understand, if what Eurycleia told me the other day is true,” muttered Tis carelessly.

  “O I know all that,” cried Nisos; “and Agelaos is as simple as Leipephile! It’s Mummy and me who are the clever ones. You should hear us confabulating in the kitchen when she’s stewing pears and how I say something about Leipephile and she says something about Agelaos and how we both laugh. Dad has no more idea than Agelaos how mother and me talk about them and what we say and how we laugh; but naturally”—here the boy gave the cow-herd a very searching and very quick look—“naturally it’s different between us, Tis. You’re the oldest friend I’ve got; and I’ll never have another like you. However! We are what we are, Tis, old partner—you the perfect cow-herd and me Eurycleia’s clever little House-help—and if dreams mean anything some very queer happenings are on the wind. Do you know what I was dreaming when you woke me up? No, no! I’ll tell you later! There’s Babba making that noise again! Don’t let’s wait here, Tis. I’ll come out with you. I’ve got to see mother anyway before I help Leipephile with the old man’s breakfast. So I’ll come down the road with you to the Milking-Shed and then I’ll go on to Aulion. I’d better run in at Druinos as I pass its gate. My mother and Leipephile’s mother tell each other everything! Dad and my brother can’t understand how everything they say to each other is known all over the island.

  “But what can you expect from two elderly well-to-do mothers with trained servants and children as grown-up as Stratonika and Leipephile on the one hand and my brother Angelaos on the other, and with nothing to do but comment on what other people are doing and saying?

  “I call it perfectly natural and right. Why shouldn’t our mothers have their little pleasures when they are too old to make love? I don’t like these Temple-chanters who blame Nosodea and my mother for exchanging tales about their husbands and children. I know well how stupid Dad and Agelaos are; and we all know what a funny old customer Damnos Pheresides is! who in the name of Aidoneus can say what goes on in that queer-shaped head?

  “If I were Leipephile’s mother I should certainly want to talk to somebody about my husband.” The shrill boyish voice of Nisos Naubolides drifted away between the olive-trees till it was lost among the slaves’ graves. Very soon both that youthful voice and the cow-herd’s hoarse responses to it were lost in Babba’s call to be milked.

  Even the Sixth Pillar, whose unusual consciousness had been at once fortified and dulled by its bewildered ponderings upon those two deeply-engraved letters, that “U” and that “H”, which had in the early times appeared on its base, could no longer hear a sound.

  Little big-eyed Myos the house-fly, was gone; indeed he was at this moment waylaying in the porch of Athene’s Temple in defiance of the Priest of Orpheus his pathetically frail acquainta
nce Pyraust, the brown moth. Thus the most intelligent consciousness left just then in the Porch of the Palace—for the five younger Pillars were even more lacking in response to anything outside their own substance than their venerable comrade the Sixth Pillar who at least had kept up an interest in the letters “U” and “H” for a few thousand years—was the half-burnt pine-wood Club of Herakles, whose heavy head and almost feminine bosom as they rested between those fragments of quartz while the movements of the man and boy were still causing vibrations through the substance of the flagstone, lost no opportunity of swaying consequentially, and pontifically, first to one side and then to the other of their narrow enclosure.

  It was indeed with almost a sacerdotal alternation between east and west or left and right, and with a quaint blend of judicial finality and suspended fatalism, that the Club of Herakles acted the part of Guardian of the Gate that early Spring morning.

  Thus it was with a shrewdly expectant acceptance of the worst rather than a mischievous enjoyment of what was happening at the moment that the Club listened to a light step descending the unseen stairs to the door behind the throne and watched the stealthy opening of this same door and the emergence therefrom of a plaintively wistful middle-aged woman who looked as if she would have more willingly reconciled herself to welcoming the last dawn that would ever reach this earth than the particular one which was now removing the kindly veil of darkness from the repetitive horror of life.

  The Pillars in the corridor were by no means evenly placed. They were indeed so divergently and so erratically arranged that they resembled the sort of massive supports that might have been found in the crypt of some sea-king’s palace beneath the floor of the ocean, the building of which had been disturbed by the movement of sea-monsters.