Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  But Heirax did have, for all his sudden end, a sort of tributary memorial set up in the scoriac floor of the Trojan girl’s memory; for whenever afterwards she recalled her exultation at the image of Zeus robbed of his aerial weapons and compelled to look down from one of those peaks in Ida, so officially familiar to him as the divine Umpire, and to hear news therefrom, without the power to interfere, of the rising of a new Troy on those Seven Italian Hills, she always felt herself lightly toying, as in her heart she derided the Fathers of Gods and Men, with the swaying neck and dangling head of that small enemy of Ilium, so limp in her hands.

  But she didn’t toss that lump of blood-wet feathers either into Eurybia’s swamp or Echidna’s slaughter-cave. She carried it back to the feet of her tree-carved image of Hector and there as she curled it up, claws against beak and wings against belly, she murmured to it aloud: “I don’t fancy the worms of Arima will bother with you: but you’ll be eaten for all that! In this little matter, the friends of great Hector and the enemies of great Hector are the same. Eaten of worms are we all when we come to it: but at least we give birth to our own worms and are devoured by what we ourselves have engendered.” It may have been that some dim little-girl memory of the funeral-rites of the man whose horse-hair-crest above the armour of Achilles seemed just then to stir in reciprocity, came into her mind at that moment; for as she stared at the bird on the ground and thought of the Son of Kronos on his Thunderless peak her triumphant mood relaxed a little. At any rate it relaxed enough to enable her to hear a thin little reedy voice like an infant’s pipe played in a subterranean gallery.

  “Aren’t you ashamed,” piped that thin voice, “to talk so loud that a person can’t hear Echidna’s answer to Eurybia? Is it nothing to you what has caused this terrible Pandemonium that is shaking the bowels of the universe, cracking the kernel of the cosmos, splitting the fundament of the crustaceous globe and disturbing every civilized and scholarly and sophisticated and weaponless worm who dwells below the vulgar and brutal surface of this blood-stained and desecrated earth?”

  As Trojan maids, whether young or old, were addicted to become when crossed in any personal quest, Arsinöe became rude. “And who may you be?” she enquired.

  “I happen to be,” replied the unruffled worm, “what below the surface of the earth we call a philosopher. I pursue the purpose of all true philosophy which is to live happily without helmet or breast-plate or greaves or shield or sword or spear or claws or teeth or sting or poison. But the human race refuses to let us stay quietly underground. It digs us up. It impales us on fish-hooks.

  “And this invasion of our right as individual souls to pursue truth in our own fashion began early in the history of this planet and is not confined to the cruel race of men. As serpents practise it upon toads, so do toads upon us. Contemptible little birds swallow us whole and we perish in their loathsome little stomachs.

  “Primeval saurians from the aboriginal swamps delight in swallowing us and love to feel us wriggling to death in the fearful stench of their foul entrails. Are you not ashamed to bring your blood-shedding absurdities, your ridiculous feuds, your childish armour, and your murderous weapons into Arima, so that a person cannot even hear the drift of the metaphysical argument between Eurybia and Echidna and hearing it judge calmly for himself whether what is happening is the long-expected revolt, so welcome to us worms, of women against men, or is a revival of the ancient struggle between Kronos of the Golden Age and his ‘Peace to all Beings’ and the reign of these accursed Olympians with their infantile motto: ‘The Devil take the Hindmost?’ Are you not ashamed of yourself, you carver of dead trees?’ Arsinöe touched carelessly with the tip of her right sandal Heirax’s squeezed-up corpse that had the appearance, after the way she had handled it, of a feathered tortoise.

  “Is it permitted,” she enquired sarcastically, “to a humble carver of images who has not yet learnt that the earth belongs to those beneath it, to ask the name of the person who is addressing me?”

  “I am the Worm of—” But the mysterious syllables “Arima” never reached her ears from the uplifted point of soft-wrinkled redness emerging from its crumpled collars of pink skin that diminished in tapering elasticity till they reached that prehensile projection: for she was off at a pace that was almost a run. “I must just go and see,” she told herself, “what that little devil Nisos is up to now.”

  As she hurried away she took care to adjust the “Palace-of-Priam” fold neatly against her breast with the carving-tool wrapped tightly in the linen cloth she had used for the helmet. Not for one second had it occurred to her that, exquisitely as she had caught the curves of her hero’s skull, the way she had armed him would certainly have made Hector’s brother, the wanton Paris, smile; for that Trojan helmet by no means went well with the armour of Achilles while the absence of the famous Hephaistian shield hindered the separate pieces of the golden armour from producing their proper cumulative effect.

  “Have you got a mug or a cup of any kind with you, Tis?” she asked boldly as she passed the open door of the shed where Babba’s large, warm-blooded black-and-white body was being milked. “Come in, lady! Come in lady! Certainly I’ve got the best possible cup here for a beautiful maid like thy precious self!”

  Thus speaking, and squeezing the final drop of milk from Babba’s depleted udder, Tis gave the cow a friendly slap, followed by a vigorous propulsion towards the hay at the head of her stall, and without further delay proceeded to dip into the brimming pail between his knees a great battered silver ladle, which, as his only valuable possession in the world, he kept hidden in a secret place in that ramshackle shed.

  “Here ye be, lady,” he chuckled, “’Tain’t every day old Tis has a fair lass to entertain in’s own banquet-hall! ’Tisn’t wine, as dost know of thyself, being as ye too, like Babba, must suckle offspring when the man and the hour be come; and it aint spiced with nard or thicked out with Pramnian cheese. But right good milk it be, warm from Babba’s teats and properer for a maid like thee than any of the rosy!”

  The Herdsman went on with his quaint compliments long after the Trojan captive had possessed herself of the ladle’s gleaming handle and taken a satisfying sip of its warm contents. When she had restored to its owner the one and only heir-loom in his family except their name, for Tis’s Father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, who all worked on their own farm at the other end of the island, were never known as anything but Daddy Tis, Grand-Pa Tis, and Old Tis, she begged this middle-aged youngest and simplest of the Tisses to tell her if he knew whether Nisos Naubolides had gone back to the palace.

  Without the faintest hesitation—for what did this middle-aged youngest of the Tisses know about cosmogonic upheavals and Trojan second-births?—the herdsman informed her that the young princeling of the great House of Naubolides hadn’t yet returned from visiting Aulion his ancestral home. “He said something,” continued the innocent herdsman, “about running in to Druinos on his way back. My lady Pandea,” he said, “loves a gossip with my lady Nosodea.”

  “But Master Tis,” protested the Trojan girl, aware that there was an obscure shadow wavering across the path she was now travelling though keeping well out of her immediate reach and as unable to shake her new secret triumph as it would have been to touch the adamantine unhappiness of her former mood, “how do you explain this business of the Priest of Orpheus being able—”

  But the girl stopped short. What was the use of trying to make a man like this see what she could or couldn’t understand among the confused doings of these infernal Achaians? “One thing’s clear,” her thoughts ran on: “Telemachos was, is, and ever will be my most dangerous enemy here. He is a priest in Athene’s temple; and suppose he heard rumours that I’d been seen at work in that grove of Ash-Trees within the confines of Arima, he might come himself and get hold of me, independently altogether of Odysseus, and treat me exactly in the same cruel way he treated those others at the killing of the Suitors.”

  The lonely Tr
ojan woman stood like a statue between Tis, who was now wiping his silver ladle with fresh-plucked moss and Babba who was switching her tail in growing impatience to be out, in the sunshine, cropping grass. The girl’s eyes were fixed upon empty space, while before a secret judgment-seat in her hidden soul each of the island-leaders connected with the Palace or the Temple appeared one by one.

  She thought of the great statue of Themis, daughter of heaven and earth, and sister of Okeanos, which stood at the foot of the grassy slope leading up to the porch of the Temple. This goddess of humane Law and Order, and of the righteous customs and traditions of mankind, had been worshipped in Ilium as devoutly as she was worshipped here; and Arsinöe’s chief links between her youthful happiness and her mature servitude were the many gods of Hellas that were worshipped by both races.

  Once or twice when the moon was full she had even slipped out of the palace-porch, and stealing down to the Temple barefooted, so that no grass-stain on her sandals, or gossamer-seed caught in the knots of the threads that fastened them, would betray her daring to the sharp eyes of old Eurycleia, had gone so far as to pay a visit to the stone image of this Goddess of divided mankind and to kiss the earth at its base.

  Of the parents of the two brothers Agelaos and Nisos whose names were Pandea and Krateros, she had always preferred Krateros; not only because as the head of the Naubolos family he was the ancestral rival of Odysseus and Telemachos but because his appearance always struck her as un-Hellenic and even a little Phoenician. Nosodea, the mother of the Priestess Stratonika and of Eurycleia’s Maid, Leipephile, who was the betrothed of Agelaos, she disliked most of all, more even than the King’s old nurse, Eurycleia herself, whose caprices she had to obey.

  Exactly why she so hated Nosodea she felt now, as she mentally caused the woman to be dragged before her judgment-seat, that she could not quite make clear even to herself. “She’s such a regular woman!” she found herself repeating; but she knew she was packing into the word “regular” several qualities that were by no means exclusively feminine.

  Nosodea’s husband, the father of the two girls, was a good deal older than his wife and was something of an enigma to the whole island. The adjective “geraios” meaning “old” was invariably added to his name by the whole neighbourhood; which in itself suggested, Arsinöe could not help thinking, that everybody felt the man to be different in some curious way from all his contemporaries.

  And the odd thing was, the Trojan girl now told herself, while Babba fidgetted more and more irritably and Tis watched her with the expression with which when slaughtering an animal he waited for it to fall stunned after giving it a blow between the eyes, the odd thing was that for some inscrutable reason which completely baffled her she felt there was something in common between herself and Damnos Geraios and that if she could only get hold of the man when Nosodea was well out of the way she could form an alliance with him not only against his wife and two daughters but against the whole world!

  “Well!” she sighed, almost as if she would have liked to spend the whole day thinking of all these people from the new background of her feelings, “I must be off, Master Tis! Thank you a thousand times for the milk!”

  But it was at that moment that the Trojan woman received a startling shock. The herdsman suddenly lifted his muscular body from the tree-root that had been serving him as a milking-stool. He did not raise it to its full height, which at its best was nothing beyond a man’s medium stature, but he raised it sufficiently to make it resemble a quadruped swaying about on its hind legs. He still held the silver ladle; and as if to assist himself in an agitating process of confused and difficult thought he grasped it tightly at both ends and drew it angrily up and down across his forehead like a glittering rod across a sullen and silent musical instrument.

  While absorbed in this process he kept repeating in a series of harsh cries the words: “Lady! lady, lady! The dream! The dream! The dream!”

  Arsinöe experienced a spasm of such nervous irritation at this impediment to her already over-delayed departure that it was with an effort she suppressed the impulse to leave the man to his fit, or whatever it was, that was now doubling him up, and just hurry off. But impulsive selfishness was as foreign to Arsinöe’s introspective nature as was impulsive geniality.

  “What dream are you talking about Master Tis? You really oughtn’t to give people such shocks. You quite scared me, jumping up so suddenly like that. Can’t you tell a person quietly, Master Tis, what’s come over you?”

  But Tis continued to totter like a quadruped on its hind-legs; while, though holding it with only one hand now, he scraped his forehead with the ladle.

  But it was at this moment that Babba, drawn into the situation by an obscure feeling that her friend and protector was being unfairly scolded, and also, by a less obscure desire to be led where she could find juicier and more sap-filled nourishment than the dry hay which at present bristled with so many sharp stalks over the edge of her wooden bin, shuffled back to Tis’s side and pressed her cold nose against the log from which he had just risen.

  This instinctive bovine movement combined with the tone of rebuke in Arsinöe’s voice brought Tis to himself and he began hurriedly to explain. “You see, lady,” he almost blubbered, “great-grand-dad’s, bit of land at the blasted end of this here rock of beggars and bastards was called, in them blessed days of old, after, if ye understand me, the home-stead of Aulion of the Naubolides and also after the home-stead of Druinos of the Pheresides; and we was taught by grand-dad, whose old dad taught he, that on the day when Aulion and Druinos, our poor old bit of rock-dust and grass-root being called, thee must understand, by the name of Auliodruinos came under one hand, that one hand would bring down forever, break-up and bust-up, for good and all, you understand the House of Odysseus! And it just then came into me head that last night I dreamed that Grand-Dad was once again talking to us same as ‘un used to talk about this final confirmation and arbitration of They Above.”

  At this point Tis stopped, and a look of abysmal satisfaction overspread his countenance. It was already familiar to the captive from Ilium that the use of long-drawn-out proclamatory expressions such as “confirmation” and “arbitration” was in itself comforting to the agora-loving inhabitants of Hellas; so now that she saw that look on the herdsman’s face she lost entirely her humanely feminine scruples about leaving this incredible simpleton alone with Babba. It was clear they understood each other. It was indeed not inconceivable that Babba herself derived vague images of rich green grass from words that sounded so rhetorically satisfying as “confirmation” and “arbitration”.

  With her pride in the news that the unburied Heirax had brought quite unimpaired, therefore, by any twinges of a humanely feminine conscience, the Trojan girl, with one of the rare smiles that few in Ithaca had ever seen on her face, indicated to times during that disturbed February night, whileTis that it was time for him to think less about his grandfather and more about his job. She was not greatly worried at being so late; for she felt pretty sure, such were her own secret good spirits, that the king’s aged nurse would be too conscious of calamity on the wind to take her delay as more than a ripple of annoyance following a rolling wave of menacing premonition.

  CHAPTER II

  Four times during that disturbed February night, while the atmosphere in the palace-corridor grew tenser and tenser, and the Herculean club between its quartz-props grew more and more surly, and the fly Myos and the moth Pyraust were working themselves up to a fever of agitation, did the lonely old monarch rise from his bed and look out of his two windows. One of these faced due West, that is to say towards the opposite quarter of the sky from the one upon which the corridor of the six pillars opened. The other window of the king’s bedroom faced due North.

  It was the middle of night when he got out of bed for the fourth time; and this time he heard a certain thin, frail, feminine voice uttering a quavering, rasping, high-pitched appeal from the ancient oak opposite his window.
This was a hollow oak-tree not only familiar to his own boyhood, but equally familiar to the boyhood of Laertes his father; and it was the abode or what almost might be called the second self of a Dryad.

  His encounters with this ancient Oak-Sister had been rarer since his marriage. They had been interrupted of course by the Trojan war and his capture by Circe and Calypso, and had been only intermittently resumed since his wife had followed his parents into the shades and his son Telemachos had turned into a reserved, self-centred, philosophy-absorbed priest, serving Athene indeed, but serving her in a very different manner from the way he served her himself.

  The voice he heard now as he leaned out of the window which looked due North was consequently not only a little querulous but a little injured. He was wearing his usual night-blanket or “claina” which save on the hottest nights he kept buckled round him by his broad body-belt or “zosteer”; so it wasn’t from chilliness that the Dryad’s voice struck him as having in its tone something so disturbing that it went beyond querulousness or hurt feelings. Laertes, his father, who had often talked to her out of this same window, used to call her by her name; a name she had received from a patroness of hers, one of the less well-known Graces, a Spartan Grace named Kleta, or “the one called for in time of need”.

  The Dryad Kleta was indeed a touchy, highly-strung, super-sensitive Nymph, whose chief pleasure was in what she persisted in calling her “garden”: and if you wanted to bring down her anger upon you you had only to meddle with this obsession of hers. Kleta’s garden in reality was simply and solely a wild strip of uncultivated woodland, not as rocky or swampy as the haunted “Arima”, but, like it, belonging to no individual owner, and extending as far as the crest of an up-land ridge from which the wooded peak of the mountain known as Neriton was visible as well as the high rock above that Naiad’s cave where on his return to slay the suitors Odysseus had been helped by Athene herself to hide his Phaiakian treasure.