“Oh child of my soul think of it! Yes, Keto herself, sister of that awful Eurybia who along with Echidna haunts Arima over there, where only those of us who have lost their wits ever go; yes! Keto the sea-monster who plays the beast with old man Phorkys of all the old gods of the sea has been seen in your cave; and since she has been there not a Naiad dares to go near it; and Kleta-Charis told me that nothing would ever induce her or any of her sisters to visit the place again! O my child, my child! It’s terrible to think of! What it will really be is a second Arima.
“Yes, Odysseus, a second ‘Arima’ whose threshold none of us will dare to cross. What are you doing? Where are you going, Odysseus? You’re not forgetting there are two hours still before Dawn, are you? Where are you going, Odysseus? You frighten me when you pull your blanket round you like that!”
Her voice rose to a hoarse shriek. “Stop, Odysseus! Stop! I tell you there are two hours more of night before the dawn comes. You can’t go now, my child! You can’t go like that!”
The only reply he made to her frantic appeal, as he rose to his feet and wrapped his blanket more tightly round him, was to turn his face towards the East and stand absolutely still with his mouth open, his nostrils wide and quivering, and his breath drawn deeply inwards in long spasms of excited suction.
But when the troubled old creature went so far in her agitation as to clamber grotesquely if not indecently out of the hollow oak and seize him by the wrist, he did speak, and when he spoke he did so with a natural and easy calm entirely free from all intensity of locked-in emotion.
“I am only going to my room,” he said, “to get some sleep, and I’ve not the least intention of going anywhere, Kleta, old friend, till I have had a good meal. Athene will no doubt either send me a message or come herself. I only hope she won’t send Telemachos. Why is it, Kleta dear, that I find it so hard to feel at ease with Telemachos since his mother died? He’s become so rigid and austere and pontifical; more of a priest than a son. The great goddess herself is free enough and natural enough with me. I can even fool her a bit now and again and make sport of the way she has treated me and challenge her to treat my son in the same way.
“And all this without her getting angry with me or my getting angry with her. Though she’s an immortal Olympian, and I am very much of a too-human mortal man, the goddess and I understand each other perfectly. Nothing anyone said to make trouble between us about her telling Telemachos things she doesn’t tell me would make me angry with her. She’s the goddess who all my life has helped me; and I am the one from among the rulers of men she has chosen to aid and defend—and that’s all there is between us.
“This business of priesthood and worship, and sanctity and calling upon the dead, and swallowing the smoke from mystic tripods, and eating the flesh of dead or of living gods, and drinking their blood, and bringing the dead to life by boiling their bones in magic cauldrons is something beyond me altogether and alien to me, and I cannot understand what has come over Telemachos since his mother died. He’s become so silent and secretive and so wrapt up in all this priestly ritual, that I can’t get a word out of him. He says he has no wish to be king of Ithaca and lord of the islands when I’m dead!
“Sometimes I think it’s all due to this curst Priest of Orpheus. But that is hard to believe; for Telemachos from his infancy has seen the Maenads and Bacchantes of Dionysos without wanting to join them! He has seen the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone without wanting to follow them into the Kingdom of Aidoneus. I tell you, Kleta, all the priests and prophets of the gods that I’ve known, and I’ve known many, are such as teach us rulers how to overcome our enemies and how to break down the gates of their cities and take their women captive.
“No, I can’t understand it, Kleta old friend. Do you remember how the other day you asked me why I didn’t go to the Agora over there and make a public oration calling upon the people to collect all the sail-cloth they could get hold of and bring it to me? There are thousands and thousands of pieces of it woven into the huts and hovels of slaves in our city and hanging idly in the chambers of our merchants, when they ought to be filled with all the winds of heaven and carrying good well-benched ships over all the waves of the ocean.”
He picked up his torch and looked about him. The torch had begun to burn badly and its smoke had an unnatural smell because of the moisture rising from the wet ground into which it had been thrust; but as he brandished it in the air to quicken its flame this badly-smelling cloud of smoke drifted away towards the Temple of Athene.
The old king followed its departure with his eyes while his head remained turned to the West. Slowly that small cloud of evil-smelling vapour floated away over the Temple towards the Agora. With his imagination conjuring up his speech to the assembled people of Ithaca he followed that small cloud to the low walls of their compact little city and to the amphitheatre outside those walls, with its stone seats and wide stone platform, where the citizens of the whole island, if once gathered together in a popular “ekklesia”, could be conveniently harangued.
Then turning once more to the troubled old Dryad who had taken to heart so bitterly this invasion of the Naiads’ cave by the monster-wife of the oldest of the “Old Men of the Sea” he saw that she was weeping silently with her forehead pressed against her knuckles and her hands clinging tightly to that uneven edge of rottenness, so frayed and so fragile and so soft and crumbling that it looked as if it had ceased to be a substance and had become a momentarily objectified taste or smell, such as, together with the aged transparency sobbing in its midst, might vanish like a ghost at cock-crow.
As the king turned his back upon her and moved off towards the stair-way to his chamber he had the feeling that the bowed old creature were nibbling her own flesh as if it were a bread of phantom-sorrow made of the crumbling wood of an ancestral oak.
Back in his room, however, Odysseus behaved exactly as he had declared to his old friend he would behave. He loosened his belt, wrapt his blanket more evenly round him, and lay down on his bed, shutting his eyes so as to replace any sort of steady staring into darkness by an absolute blindness to the whole phenomena of the visible world.
Thus he remained, and no one but himself could possibly have told whether he were awake or asleep, till dawn was more than well advanced. In fact the sun was high above the horizon, and all the paths and vineyards and gardens and woods and desert-places were illuminated by full daylight when he rose from his bed and shouted for his ancient nurse.
It was indeed in magnificently pleasant sunshine that Odysseus found his circular bath of polished stone awaiting his appearance. Eurycleia had already seen to it that no fewer than eight great water-jugs of carefully varied temperature were arranged in order round that hollow circumference of polished stone.
From the surface of some of these jars the steam rose in clouds into the air, while, in other cases, ripples from newly dissolved circles of vanishing bubbles, all tinged with rainbow colours, proved from what clear fresh springs they had come. Here Eurycleia awaited him herself, and as, with the help of Leipephile and Arsinöe, the old nurse poured in alternation the cold and lukewarm and hot streams over him as he crouched and bent and straightened himself and moved this way and that, under the varying temperatures of those jars of water, his thoughts took shape and formulated themselves into a resolution to quicken to a much more rapid speed his preparations for hoisting sail once more and setting out to explore the world again.
“Yes,” he thought, “I’ve given this pleasant routine of the beautiful seasons repeating themselves, and the beautiful days following the beautiful nights in beautiful succession as Themis the great Goddess of order under the will of Zeus decrees, its full opportunity to soothe this itching, fretting, chafing, gnawing, fermenting, biting, seething ache in my wicked old midriff!
“But this happy easy lazy time has not done it! The marrow in my bones howls and growls for the random odds of the old great Circus! I must, I must taste again the salty taste of real
plotting and real planning and real deceiving and real achieving!”
In his massive, caustic, long-sighted, super-human and yet subhuman way Odysseus had acquired the power of what might be called a “postponement of thought” while a series of instinctive impulses directed his actions. This power which would certainly appear an odd one to most clever people, had not so much been forced upon him by the particular nature of his experiences as by the prevailing mood of his reactions to these experiences.
This power was not essentially a philosophical one, nor was it even a predominantly intellectual one. What it really might be called was the controlled release of that deep intimate rush of life which at special moments takes possession of us all with what feels as if it were a wild prophetic force under the direction of a calm calculating will.
While he gave himself up, therefore, to all the small physical movements which the process of being bathed by a commanding and rather cantankerous old woman, a beautiful, secretive, middle-aged woman, and a lovely but incredibly simple young woman, his whole nature was gathering itself together, not so much to follow a thought-out plan of action as to have his nervous, electric, magnetic soul kept, in intensely conscious reserve, just under his physical skin and ready for any event, a soul that was not necessarily composed of a single compact consciousness but retained the power of dividing itself at will.
It was indeed a very curious power that his soul possessed, of splitting itself up, if need were, into an array of square-headed conscious souls that still were Odysseus “pro tem”, though they were Odysseus in multiplicity rather than Odysseus in unity!
By the time the old hero was seated on his simple throne in the great open dining-hall of the palace, to which hidden steps descended from the upper chambers, and had begun to break his fast with bowls of red wine thickened by various powdered nuts and sweetened by a particular kind of honey, while he accompanied this rich beverage, after pouring out a libation to Zeus, by devouring greedily—for this first meal of the day was a good deal later than usual—the particular portion of the backbone of a fatted hog which best pleased him, he was fairly at rest in his mind.
He knew more or less what he was going to do, and he left the details of the thing to chance and occasion. Never in the history, not only of Ithaca, but of all Hellas, had there been such a born opportunist as Odysseus was. He had always been a difficult one for women to mould to their will.
It was because her powerful personality took the line of indomitable independence that Penelope had suited him so well; and it was probably because she had brought up their only child to live his own life independently of each of them that as a mature man Telemachos was so reserved and self-centred.
On this particular day therefore the old king had already thrust clean out of his contemplated groove of action any visit to or visit from his ritual-absorbed offspring. What he had to do was to visit the Naiads’ Cave and find out if Keto the Sea-Monster had meddled in any way with the building of his ship of escape. “How queer,” he told himself as he swallowed his final bowl of enriched and thickened wine, “that I should think of my ship as a way of escape! Escape from what? Have I acquired a hatred for an honoured, peaceful, well-regulated life? Is it now again just as it was on the Isles of Circe and Calypso where women’s love was my accursed chain?
“No, no! That’s absurd. My wife is dead and has left none to take her place. What’s wrong with me then? To reach home from those immortal bitches was to escape slavery. But now that I’m at home and at peace, in rich, untroubled luxury, with my son a devoted priest of my divine protector, now that I am free from all ills of mind and body and have no enemy that I couldn’t destroy with a look, a step, a thrust, a blow, now that I’m within a bow-shot of the ‘herm’ of Themis, the Mistress of Order and Decency and Custom, and only a couple of bow-shots from the Temple of the Daughter of Zeus, what’s the matter with me that I can’t rest by day or night till I’ve built my ship and hoisted my sail and am steering for an unknown horizon?
“Well, let’s see,” he was addressing the three women now, “what’s been happening in my Cave of the Naiads. No! I’m not going to rush off, Nurse darling, in any mad hurry nor with unmoved bowels nor unrelieved bladder, and I hope to find you, and Leipephile and Arsinöe too, ready to give me as good a bath as this when I come back tonight; and I can tell you, my dears, I fully expect I may need it! But we shall see. Good luck to us all!”
All was dim in that long, low corridor, for the Sun was steadily mounting towards high noon and not until dawn tomorrow would there be any striking sign of the lord of light again, whether written in fire or written in blood. The Sixth Pillar was aware of a queer throbbing sensation under each of those grimly-scrawled letters upon its pediment as the king approached it and passed it, making straight for the Club of Herakles near the low arch leading into the olive-garden.
“O my! O my! O my! O my!” sighed the up-lifted arm of the solitary olive-shoot that had reared up between the flagstones of that ancient threshold; but when Odysseus stopped in front of the swollen-bosom’d club and taking it up with his left hand and transferring it to his right took a firm hold of it in its narrowest place, which was about three-quarters of its whole length if you measured from head to heel, he proceeded to carry it at right angles to his hip as a hunter carries a boar-spear when making his way through a thick forest.
By no unusual chance or casual accident, for they had been hovering over the rough ground of the slaves’ graves, awaiting him for several hours, did Myos the house-fly and Pyraust the girl-moth settle upon the great weapon, as the old hero held it at this horizontal angle to his person, and secrete themselves, as best they could, in the deep life-crack of the club’s conscious identity, where existed all the organic pulses of its mortal being.
They were both still huddled close together in this dynamic concealment and were still keeping up the metaphysical debate into which they delighted to throw the whole life-energy of their restless natures when Odysseus, after a rapid walk of four and a half miles, reached the sea-coast.
For a few moments the effect upon him of facing the sea was overwhelming. The purpose of his coming to where the waves broke was completely swept away by the waves themselves. In their breaking they took this purpose of his and tore it to tatters of lacy wisps and wind-tossed feathers and flying flurries of fleeting foam.
He had come to the same exact spot only a day or two ago when the waves were no wilder than they were today and the sun was no more dazzling; and yet the sight of this far-flung spray, of these gleaming sun-dazzlements hadn’t swallowed up then in such a gasping whirlpool of sensation every plan and scheme he had been carefully formulating.
What was there about the sea today that made its effect upon him so much more overpowering than it had been that other time? In the intensity of this question, which his whole spirit seemed to be putting to some faraway heart of the cosmos, he grasped more tightly the club which he carried in his right hand.
Ah! how well the club knew that tightening of the fingers! “Not quite as strongly grasped,” it thought, “as when Herakles heard the growl of that monstrous beast! But I know very well what my new wielder is worrying about now—what’s in these roaring waves that wasn’t in them before?
“That’s what’s sticking in his gullet, not the salt wings of the strangling wind nor the whirling spray. And I know what it is that’s in them. I know what it is that’s made them different. I know what it is that lurks behind these curving and cresting and breaking waves. It’s nothing less than Keto the unspeakable, Keto from the abysmal chasm in the floor of the Atlantic, Keto by whom Phorkys the Old Man of the Sea begot Echidna the Ghost-Serpent of Arima, who, by her own son Orthos the brother of Cerberos, gave birth to the feline abortion that called itself a Lion whose brains I converted into good rich dung for the ferns and honeysuckle of the Nemean Forest!”
Thus murmured the club of Herakles in the hand of its new master, while Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth hugg
ed each other in the crack of his body where his soul was most active, and while Odysseus with an impatient effort turned his back on those gleaming waves and entered the cave.
Then it was that the club endeavoured, by barging against every sea-weed-covered wall and colliding with every gigantic shell-fish that extended its wrinkled curves and scaly convolutions and encrusted horns from every obtruding buttress and arch, to catch his new master’s attention by creating a dying-away echo that could just out-reverberate the hoarse long-drawn roar of the retreating tide by repeating the syllables “Keto-Keto-Keto-Keto” over and over again.
At last they arrived–Odysseus and his vociferous weapon–to the palatial interior of the cave, where the roof was high and the walls smooth, and the pavement, by being lifted up well above shore-level was not only dry but free from all rocky or stony obstructions.
The central hall, so to speak, of this cavernous palace by the sea resembled a gigantic workshop under immortal jurisdiction –not the jurisdiction of Hephaistos the god of fire but of some antipodal God of the extreme opposite element, that of water, but nevertheless a great and divine artificer.
In the centre of this elevated floor, which was surrounded by several subsidiary caverns that Odysseus had converted into storehouses for the materials of ship-building, lay the unfinished hull of a well-formed sea-going ocean-ship.
When the old hero, with his still murmuring but now much less tightly held companion, reached this half-built ship, which had a most curious look in this ocean-temple, he swung round and faced the wide up-sloping approach by which he had come.
This incline, which, as he now gazed down its full length, had become an astonishingly steep ascent, grew narrower and narrower the nearer it got to the flying surf and wildly tossed spray of the breaking waves.
“What has become of all the Naiads?” the king asked himself, “who were wont to frequent this cave? Have they been frightened away by that Monster of the Deep, Keto, the mate of Phorkys, the Old Man of the Sea?”
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