Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  The king looked calmly round, evidently deciding, as not only his Heraklean club was deciding, but as the fly and the moth in their hiding-place in the bosom of the club were still more anxiously deciding, that some appeal to the absent Naiads to whom the cave belonged was called for at this juncture. Had the club, however, and, still more had the insects in the bosom of the club, made the appeal that followed, it would no doubt have been a more tactful one, but at any rate the king’s voice echoed mightily through the whole place.

  “O divine Naiads, I know your lives are determined, even as the lives of your cousins the Dryads, by the lives of the Forests and the Fountains and the Groves and the Caverns which you deify by your dear presences but which you cannot survive, whereas the fifty daughters of Nereus remain undying and imperishable even as Keto herself, the monstrous wife of Phorkys, for the sea cannot cease to exist, any more than can the earth herself, mother of us all.

  “But it was the great goddess Athene who met me here when I was brought home by the ship of the Phaiakians and she told me to pray to you and to worship you and to cry aloud to you whenever I came here to build my ship for myself. And thus I obey her; and through my weak old voice it is the great goddess herself who calls upon you, O heavenly Naiads, who calls upon you to tell why you have deserted this beautiful cave and whether the cave itself is soon to be destroyed under the wrath of Poseidon the Shaker of the Earth as he avenges himself on the monstrous——”

  He was interrupted by a clear young girlish voice which was certainly not that of any Nymph, whether an immortal Nereid or a more vulnerable Naiad, but was obviously the voice, as Odysseus and his Heraklean club and those other living consciousnesses within the club, felt at once, not only of a maid of human origin but of a maid who spoke with the native island accent.

  “Go away, you horrid thing! Go away! Or I’ll call the King!” The little girl had evidently been watching the approach of the wily old warrior and his war-experienced weapon; for she now sprang up from the deepest portion of the ship’s stern, where this one man’s dry-dock work had advanced furthest, and with outstretched arms and streaming hair began shaking her fists and staring with wide-open eyes at something at the waves’ edge.

  Odysseus swung round on his heel; but between what this island-maid beheld and the line of his vision there was some obstacle, the corner of a rock, or an enormous fossil jutting out from the wall, or perhaps only an extra-thick tuft of salt weed on the floor of the descent into the sea, that completely hindered his vision as he struggled to focus the object that was giving her this shock.

  It was an intensely awkward moment; for it was clear that the advancing monster, if such it were, must have assumed that Odysseus could see it as clearly as did the maiden but was scared either by his own old age or out of respect for the power of the immortal sea-god from interfering.

  “She thinks,” said the club of Herakles to himself “that the king is so old he’ll just remain quiet and still while she tears the girl to pieces and swallows her!”

  This idea was so appalling to the great weapon that, inspired, as we all can be by sheer desperation, he made one surpassing effort and slipping out of the hero’s hand fell with a crash upon the rocky floor.

  And then, in stooping to pick him up, Odysseus saw Keto. Never had the shrewd old hero shown more self-control or more subtle and convoluted cunning than he showed now. With the club in his hand and held by the middle as hunters hold a short boar-spear he ran down the slope straight towards the creature who was already half-out of the water. Keto’s face was that of a beautiful woman, though it had at that moment an expression of horrible lust, mingled with insatiable greed: but it was not her face but her hair that was the strangest thing about her.

  Her hair was of an extremely weird tint and was so long that as it spread out over the wave that was carrying her forward it changed the colour of the wave to its own hue. It was doubtless due in part to the fact that the season being an exceptionally early spring, there was so much fresh green to be observed in every direction, together with such startling contrasts as the blue of the sky and the purple of the mountains, that this weird apparition of Keto’s hair struck these three consciousnesses as it came nearer and nearer, with that appallingly beautiful face at the head of its advance, as something so absolutely ghastly in its reversion to a colour that could only be described as a manifestation of Death and Nothingness in the midst of Life and Joy, that each one of them felt the approach of something like a frozen paralysis.

  Not one of the three, not the wise old king with his staggering burden of memories unequalled by any man who has ever lived upon earth, not the terrific club of the greatest killer of anti-human Pests who has come to the rescue of humanity, not the young girl in her fresh youth from the oldest and simplest of the island’s farming homesteads, had ever in their life before been thus paralysed by all that was suggested in a mere colour, and that colour without horns or claws or teeth or sting—just simply the colour of hair!

  But all three of them felt simultaneously that their fearful impressions from Keto’s hair were connected with one single simple thing, with nothing more or less in fact than the dead leaves of one particular kind of tree—O so well known to them all!—that grew somehow round every one of their homes in this island.

  Over and over again had all three of them felt some strange shudder over this particular colour; the Heraklean club rather less than the old man or the young girl, since his native home was really in the forest of Nemea, situated on the “epeiros”, as the islanders called the mainland.

  Like a flash that combined the deadly bolt of forked lightning with the more widely spread illumination of sheet-lightning, some peculiar horror for normal mortal senses seemed to lurk in the mysterious colour of this sea-monster’s hair. Yes! the only parallel to it was the colour of the dead leaves of that one particular tree in autumn, especially when autumn came earlier in the year than usual, causing these dead leaves to be isolated from their fellows.

  It wasn’t a negative colour or the absence of anything. It was a positive colour, and it possessed its own absolutely special metallic gleam. The colour grey, contrasted with what this colour was, would have appeared a friendly and natural if rather a melancholy apparition. But this colour flung forth a metaphysical shock. It possessed a look as if Nothingness itself, the primordial and perhaps the ultimate Non Est had chosen to incarnate itself in visible appearance.

  “You will see me again!” it seemed to say to the old king, to the young farm-girl, to the club that slew the Nemean Lion. And the club was fully aware of the fact that there was a special reason for its sharing the horror that now menaced the other two, the fact namely that the Nemean Lion whose brains it dashed out on the “epeiros” was actually, though belonging to the earth, an offspring of this monster of the deep.

  Little did either the old man or the young girl guess that the forward rush with which they both followed the Heraklean weapon, as, straining itself forward till it almost flew out of the king’s grasp, it rushed with blind defiance down that slippery slope straight towards the beautiful face in its terrible hair, had anything to do with the fact that the weapon the king carried knew so much more than they did of the creature they were encountering.

  So terrific, however, was the shock of sheer panic that struck them all three when they came within reach of that swirling whirlpool of hair—the colour of the absolute void before there was any world at all—that fortunately for the two human ones it broke through, just as if it had really been a flash of metaphysical illumination, the natural barrier between the consciousness of the club of Herakles and the consciousness of the man and the girl, so that when, within a couple of yards of the wave’s edge, they finally stopped, Odysseus was able to threaten that beautiful face in the midst of that abysmal hair with the knowledge possessed by the weapon of the son of Zeus and his mortal bride Alkmene.

  “Beware, you evil mother of good daughters, you mother of the Graiai, born with
white hair, of the Graiai, who still live in Kisthene, the cavern of rock-roses, where there is neither sun nor moon, and where no stars shine, and who have only one eye to see with, and only one tooth to eat with! Beware, I tell you, you demon-mother of the white-haired Graiai! If ever your face is seen again near this Cave of the Naiads I shall rob your daughters of both their one eye and their one tooth; for none knoweth the road to Kisthene of the Rock-Roses better than I, wanderer as I’ve been through both the world of the living and the world of the dead!”

  Had Keto, the eldest daughter of the Sea, possessed, at the back of her swirling hair, now the very colour of that Nothingness into which everything shall return, possessed a foam-drop of the feeling resembling ours, she would have been softened in some infinitesimal measure by the poignant sight of those two pathetic human beings, the little farm-girl with slender outstretched arms and the broad-shouldered shepherd of the people, brandishing his old cracked root of a twisted pine disfigured by honeysuckle and brooding on the spilt brains of lions; but that drifting face remained as impassive as the exquisite convolutions of a cockle-shell; impassive and implacable, and still slowly advancing.

  But it was at that moment that behind this intolerable sea-horror with its appalling beauty and its deadly hair there suddenly rose up a three-fold prong held aloft in a vast overshadowing muscular arm. “Stop, all of you! stop, I say!” boomed the god’s terrific voice, as the outstretched trident was directed towards them.

  With the sluicing and shelving roar of a hoarse, out-drawing, tidal retreat the whole volume of water, swallowing up Keto entirely as it went, rolled back about the tall and menacing torso of Poseidon. Recognizing his worst personal enemy in this insatiable avenger of the Kyklops Polyphemos and this passionate ally of the Trojans, Odysseus contented himself with shrugging his massive shoulders, with extending an imperative yet kindly hand to the young girl, with swinging the club in an almost humorous gesture of submitting to fate, and with walking, without another glance at the ship he was building, slowly forth from the Naiad’s Cave by the nearest inland path; a retreat from action that was an unspeakable relief to both the fly and the moth.

  “Were you on your way somewhere, child?” he asked the young girl in a friendly voice, still retaining her hand. “I’m herdsman Tis’s youngest sister,” the girl replied in a docile voice. “Grandfather sent me with a message to him. Grandfather told me to stop at the Naiad’s Gave and see if it was true that you were building a ship. They say, down our way, that if you, my lord, sail from Ithaca, one of the Naubolides boys will be king in your place: but I tell them that’s all silly nonsense.”

  The girl’s obvious sincerity made Odysseus look more closely at her and he was struck by the oddity of her appearance. She had one of the plainest faces he had ever seen, and her stomach and torso were shapeless and graceless, but her legs were as beautifully formed as those of some incomparable dancer. “I’ll take you to the house,” he said. “Tis sleeps there and the women will find a place for you.”

  CHAPTER III

  Never had Nisos Naubolides felt surer of himself or of his destiny than when, on this same morning of the old king’s visit to the cave of the Naiads, he set out for the Temple of Athene. He had come straight from the presence of his mother Pandea whom he had found as he had expected, not in the Naubolides homestead of Aulion, but in the house called Druinos, where lived Nosodea, the mother of the two girls Leipephile and Stratonika, who was Pandea’s best gossip, best scandal-monger, and best-loved friend.

  The old Odysseus must have been still lying on his bed with his eyes closed after his nocturnal conversation with the Dryad Kleta when Nisos set out so full of confidence in himself and his future. As to Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth, they must already have discovered for the benefit of the Club of Herakles and of the inquisitive Olive-shoot which had sprung up near the club, some important news about the ambiguous activities of the Priest of Orpheus who had occupied the ante-chamber to the Temple, for they were now flying back in their return from the Temple.

  At the foot of a long slope of carefully tended green grass that led away from the Temple in an Eastern direction there was an old roughly hewn ungainly statue—scarcely a statue at all for it was more like a low stone pillar or “herm”, with the crude outlines of a clumsily carved feminine face just indicated at the top of it—not of Athene but of the Goddess Themis, the special guardian throughout all Hellas of law and order and justice and decent behaviour.

  Nisos stopped in amazement in front of this image. He knew every curve and every hollow and every tinge of colour upon this ungainly block of stone. But behold! there was this morning a horrible great crack clear across it. It was a crack that reached from what might have been the figure’s left shoulder to what might have been its right buttock. Nisos now examined the injured image with the utmost nicety from top to toe.

  As he was doing this he suddenly paused with an excited gasping little cry, the sort of cry a young soldier might have uttered who had just discovered on the battlefield the severed head of his general.

  It was not quite as startled a cry as that; but it was in the sa me category of shocked astonishment. What he had seen were unmistakable blood-marks at different places all over the stone’s surface.

  “Whose blood?” was the question that shot through the boy’s mind. Down on his knees he sank and began scrabbling with both hands in the grass. Here his startled curiosity was more than rewarded. Again and again his fingers encountered certain curious horny objects, which, as he lifted them up into the sunlight that was now blazing down upon him from a cloudless sky, revealed themselves without doubt or question to be nothing less than broken finger-nails, enormously sharp and super-humanly long finger-nails, some of them thicker than others, but almost all, he soon noticed, bloody as well as broken. “Whose blood?” the boy desperately asked himself again.

  His whole feeling towards these abnormally large finger-nails was an extremely queer one. It was indeed such a confused and complicated one that, clever as he was, the lad was completely non-plussed. What agitated him was not so much these large and bloody finger-nails in themselves as what they represented and the world of associations they brought with them.

  “This must be,” the boy told himself in one of his characteristic introspective mole-runs, as he automatically gathered those horrible fragments into a heap, “this must be what you feel when you go mad. Didn’t Herakles go mad? Didn’t Ajax go mad? I mean when they’d annoyed Zeus in some way? Perhaps I’ve annoyed Zeus in some way without meaning to, and what I feel now is the beginning of my punishment.”

  For the last year and a half Nisos had deliberately cultivated his tendency to elaborate his fancies and enlarge upon his feelings. He had done this ever since the day when, neither of them knowing that he was within hearing, he had overheard his mother say to his father, “Nisos will be a famous philosopher one day! Don’t you see how introspective he is?” “Introspective is what I am!” he had henceforth always told himself.

  And when other boys beat him at racing or jumping or throwing the discus, “I’ll be a prophet,” he told himself, “when you are all common soldiers!”

  His face just then, while the blazing sunshine caught the five beads of perspiration on his forehead and behaved towards them with the same passionate intensity as it was at that moment displaying towards the whole Aegean Sea, had a very curious expression. At that heap of supernaturally large and inhumanly pointed finger-nails, all torn and bloody he felt he was in a dream, whence, though he knew it was a dream, he was unable to force himself to wake. “Heavens and Earth!” he thought. “Of course I know whose finger-nails those are! They’re the ‘Harpies, the Snatchers’! They must have some quarrel with Themis.” He shut his eyes and with the back of his hand wiped those five miniature seas of sweat out of existence.

  And then he remembered what he’d been taught about the Strophades or Isles of the Turning-Point, and how it was there that Themis compelled the fierce so
ns of the North Wind, brandishing their sharp swords to turn from their pursuit of these fatal females who had no weapon but their own snatching nails! And so this foul crack in the image of the goddess of Order was the gratitude of these infernal Harpies!

  Well, well, well. He decided that it might be wiser not to tell his mother about this crack in the image of Themis, nor to ask her what he had better do about this little heap of finger-nails. “Cover them up with Babba’s dung! Tis would say”, he thought; and then he thought: “No! I won’t be the one to tell mother. Those bloody nails give me the shivers!”

  He did his best, as he left that desecrated image and made his way up the grassy slope towards the temple, to recover his self-esteem by remembering his mother’s words about his being “so introspective”. “Neither Daddy nor Agelaos,” he told himself, “would have the cleverness to feel things like this as I feel them.”

  He was still nearly half a mile from the top of the slope where the first buildings began when he saw the two insects, so well known to him in the palace-porch, flying slowly towards him engaged in some absorbing argument between themselves. Yes, he was sure he knew them both. One was that pitifully nervous and weak-looking brown moth with fluttering wings. The other was that extremely self-centred house-fly with a calm collected manner, a black head and staring eyes.

  And now if it were possible for him to enter into conversation with them, or at least into some sort of intelligent communication with them, he would gather all sorts of hints as to what this Orphic Priest, who called himself Enorches, was doing, and have something important to take back to his mother quite apart from those horrible finger-nails, concerning which he had decided to remain silent.

  Yes, he was pretty sure he knew both these insects; but of course it was possible that the house-fly, with those transparent prismatic wings upon which it was always cleaning its rapidly moving feet, had two or three, or even four or five, brothers and sisters. It was also possible, though less likely, that the brown-winged, anxiously obsessed, sacrificially dedicated moth had a twin-sister who resembled her so closely in the eyes of gods and men that only a caterpillar could distinguish the one from the other.