Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  Indeed if it were not for some multiple-footed, velvet-muffled relative, to whose cocoon-piercing, chrysalis-searching eyes no pair of winged creatures were exactly alike, how easily might the brown moth have been a nameless unidentified nomad, flitting over the earth’s surface until she fell by her own propensity for self-sacrifice into some worse fate than becoming the obedient servant of the Priest of Orpheus.

  Such a born Ambassador was Nisos that he had hardly caught sight of the two insects fluttering through the air towards him, so submerged in their metaphysical argument that they had no attention left for what they were doing or where they were going, than he stretched out his hands palms downward towards them and addressed them with his fondest and politest social salutation, a salutation that was only a little less respectful than the one he used, in his imagination, for kings and queens, and also, it must be admitted, for members however young of the ancient houses of the Naubolides of Aulion.

  Having thus saluted them the youthful diplomatist uttered a deep sigh and ejaculated the gnomic syllables, “What a shame!” The subtle implication of this sympathetic groan was indeed, though few would have had the sensitivity to catch it, that the ignorant, vulgar, illiterate, brutal retainers of the Priest of Orpheus had clearly refused to allow the sophisticated homage of such noble insects to enter the inmost shrine, in spite of the fact that all the world owes honey to honey-bees, silk to silk-worms, pearls to oysters, and Tyrian dye to the lovely sea-shell, Porphura.

  Seeing that he had succeeded in interrupting their dispute and that they were hesitating and flying in circles and hovering round his outstretched hands, the boy withdrew one arm, moved the other with a mute solicitation, and drawing in his breath with an instinctive movement of his whole frame that was in itself a crafty-imitation of a sub-human gesture, he made a peculiar humming sound between his palate and the back of his tongue.

  All these things were done, all these signs were made, purely on the inspiration of the moment; but seeing them still hesitate and feeling in his open mouth and widened nostrils the morbid smell of the incense-heavy sacristy-dust they carried on their wings, he suddenly lifted the back of his hand to his mouth, licked it with his tongue, and stretched it forth again.

  Ah! He was indeed a clever plenipotentiary. He had done it! Both the insects settled on the back of his hand which the moth desperately caressed with her wings and the house-fly began hurriedly to use as an ash-can for the dirt he scraped, first by the aid of one gauzy wing and then of another, from his exploring feet. Here indeed was the Ambassador’s opportunity! He must convince himself that he had come from the kitchen of his mother Pandea, the wife of Krateros Naubolides, straight to this sacred half-mile of well-watered grass.

  He must let that ominous crack in the image of Themis be blotted from his mind and that bloody heap of super-human claws vanish like an obscure dream. Here upon the back of his hand were two living creatures, each of them endowed with wings, who had come straight from this temple, borne forth upon a dusty wafture of incense-bearing smoke.

  But how, in the name of Tartaros, was he to obtain from them the information he required? How on earth could he cross the gulf between his human consciousness and their insect-consciousness? How was he to enter into conversation with this brown moth and this house-fly now that he had persuaded them to settle upon the back of his hand? Nisos Naubolides never forgot to the end of his mortal days this crucial moment. He drew his arm a little inwards towards his ribs and hung his head, staring helplessly at the back of his hand where from the knuckle of his longest finger, which she evidently felt to be a wisely chosen observation-post, the brown moth was explaining to the black fly, who was cleaning his shoes on the knuckle of Nisos’ finger, just how it was that with such unusual words and gestures the Priest of Orpheus had bidden her show her friend off the premises and see to it that he never returned.

  What, in the name of their universal mother the earth, was he to do to break down this cruel wall of difference between his human senses and those of these two creatures?

  And then suddenly, to the born diplomatist, the inspiration came! Of course there was only one thing to do, and that was the thing indicated by every vibratory law of tellurian politeness. He must pray to Pallas Athene!

  No sooner had he decided upon this line of action which was obviously the most proper, the most natural, the most pious line for a diplomatic ambassador to a great goddess’s temple to adopt, than he lifted up in his heart an intensely concentrated prayer to Athene, imploring her to reveal to him how to exchange thoughts and experiences with this moth and this fly.

  It was soon clear to him that the goddess had heard him and had taken measures without delay to give him an answer to his prayer. Well must she know the limits of her power and not only its limits. She also must know the evil effect, so often precisely contrary to the desired effect, of manifesting her power in her own person. So to enlighten him as to the way moths and flies received and remembered their impressions she evidently brought it about that her most understanding worshipper in the vicinity should at this critical moment be descending that grassy slope.

  This was an elderly virgin called Petraia who belonged to an island family into which in each generation for hundreds of years an old maid with Sibylline inspiration had been born. Petraia was not the prophetess for this particular generation but she was twin-sister to the woman who was. And the goddess knew well that there existed, as happens sometimes with twins, a mysterious thought-transference between Petraia and her sister, who had fled from the world to the sacred Arician Forest of the Italian King Latinus, where she had become a follower of the immortal Nymph Egeria who lived like an oracle in a hidden cave.

  It was through her sister’s association with this Italian Nymph that Petraia was able to keep the virgin-goddess whom she served in close contact with all that preceded the founding of the New Troy, destined, so the word went forth, to rule the world from its Seven Hills.

  Nisos was thoroughly at home with Petraia who in his infancy had been his nurse as well as his mother’s midwife, so that he at once accepted her appearance at this juncture as an authentic answer to his prayer. Without a moment’s delay in one wild rush of excited words the boy poured out the whole of his story and explained his difficulty about the insects.

  The slender and stately old lady surveyed him with whimsical scrutiny. “So you want to get the news from those two small prisoners of yours, do you? And you need an interpreter?”

  “O Nurse, I’m thankful it’s you!” gasped Nisos. “Mother wanted me to find out what’s going on and I don’t feel like telling her about what I’ve just seen down there”; and he gave his head a jerk in the down-hill direction. “Does the goddess, do you think, know all about that? Does she know they’ve left a lot of their disgusting nails or claws, or whatever they are, behind, and all bloody too? Why does she let such things happen, Nurse, and so near her Temple? Themis is cracked clean through—does she know that?—clean through, from shoulder to hip! Mother will have a fit when she hears. I’m not going to be the one to tell her, nurse. You bet your life I’m not! You know what she is when she hears things like that. She’ll go rampaging off to Druinos to pour out everything to Nosodea; and there in his corner like a hunched-up toad you may depend old Damnos Geraios will be gloating over every word and thinking what new silliness he can invent for dear sweet simple Leipephile and what new imaginary wickedness for that idealistic fool Stratonika, so that she’ll have to lacerate herself to the bone to purge it away! But tell me, nurse most sacred, nurse most precious, nurse most holy, does our great goddess, who sent you here in answer to my prayer, know about Themis?”

  He looked searchingly at the virginal midwife as he asked this question. He knew well that his faith in the omnipotence of their goddess wasn’t what it had been when he was five years old. He was nearly seventeen now, and in these last years he had had a great many very private and rather peculiar thoughts; but it would still have shocked an indest
ructible vein of piety in him to think that such things could happen as this horrible attack on the obelisk of Themis so near Athene’s very judgment-seat, without her knowing anything about it!

  Petraia smiled that reassuring familiar smile that had so often comforted him in his paroxysing panic lest the feathered bosom of aboriginal Night should swallow him up alive.

  “Let’s think of your insects first,” Petraia said now, and she added: “Moths and Flies before Law and Order!” She added these words with that particular kind of domestic persiflage that is more annoying to a boy nearly seventeen than a slap in the face.

  However, he obediently lifted the back of his hand closer to his eyes and stared at the moth and the fly so intently that he could see the delicate lacy fringes on the margins of the moth’s brown wings and the metallic circles like polished adamant round the bulging eyes of the house-fly.

  As Nisos stared at the insects it seemed to him that he could feel like a palpable wafture of nard-scented air the divine power of feminine virginity, a power that male youth always recognizes without knowing precisely what it is, pass from Petraia’s hand to the nerves of his shoulder. It did, yes! it actually did, transform the quivering of those brown wings and the friction of those jet-black legs upon those gauzy wings into the expression of thoughts that a human being could follow. “So that’s it!” he said to himself sharply and shrewdly.

  And he was so afraid that just as a crib of some classic paragraph might be snatched from a school-boy before he had got the hang of it, that this preternatural translation of the sign-language of insects into the sound-language of men might be withdrawn before he got its full import that he began announcing to Petraia in a louder voice than he generally used and in a hurried and curiously jerky manner that what the insects had revealed to him was that there was a quarrel beginning, that might soon become a deep rift, between Zeus and Hera, the former being alone on the peak of Gargaros deprived, one rumour declares, of all his weapons, while the latter was almost equally alone on the summit of Olympos.

  He further announced to Petraia that the effect of this quarrel upon the great goddess Athene was to force her to withdraw herself from taking any part in any public movement until the issue between Zeus and Hera became clearer or definitely resolved itself in one way or another.

  “But at this point,” so he explained to the old midwife, “while the moth understands that our goddess has left Ithaca altogether, the fly is sure she is still in the island, and probably still in the temple; but is unwilling to commit herself, or take any side, or make any definite move, till things are clearer than they are at present.

  “Another thing the fly tells me, Nurse dear, which astonishes me a good deal, and to confess the truth gives me a funny feeling, indeed, if I were absolutely honest, as you used to teach me every Naubolides with our claim to the kingship ought to be, makes me shiver and shake is that Tartaros has broken loose, and that Typhon, the most terrible of all the Titans, has burst his bonds from beneath Etna and is again breathing fire and smoke against the gods.

  “But you see, Nurse dear, what makes it so hard for me to tell you all they say is that they keep contradicting each other as if they were speaking as ambassadors from opposite camps. For instance what the fly says is that the real reason why our great goddess Athene has withdrawn ‘pro-tem’ into herself is that she is waiting to hear what Zeus will do if certain rumours that have reached her from Italy are correct, namely that at a special place in Italy where there are seven sacred hills the descendants of Aeneas the pious ally of Priam have already begun to build a new Troy.

  “The moth, on the other hand, swears that Athene has gone to visit the blameless Ethiopians to find out for herself whether it is true that Persephone has quarrelled with Aidoneus and helped Teiresias to bring back from Hades the weeping Niobe, the First Woman, together with her husband Phoroneus, the First Man.”

  Long before the insects had ceased revealing their discoveries to the undulations of the knuckles of his now weakly and wearily extended hand, the inspiration proceeding from the virginity of the old maid who had nursed him ceased to give him the clue to the small creatures’ sign-language.

  He gazed helplessly at her, while a wave of tiredness and the feeling of being a hopeless fool engulfed him. “What do you make of it all, Nurse?” he murmured feebly.

  “It is clear enough, Nisos,” commented Petraia, “that a female moth and a male fly are bound to be on opposite sides in the great ‘old battle’.”

  “What old battle, nurse darling?” enquired the boy, contemplating the insects on his knuckles with re-awakened interest.

  “Between males and females, silly!” There fell a dead silence between them with the weight of a heavy stone: a silence that was broken at last by the old maid herself. Her voice rang out with something of the prophetic resonance that had belonged to that twin-sister of hers who was a neophyte of Egeria, the Nymph in the Cave in the Italian forest.

  “Didn’t I always tell you, forgetful child, how Apollo and Artemis persecuted Niobe, the First Woman, whose husband Phoroneus was the son of a Melian Nymph? Didn’t I tell you how that pair of murderous deities—holy Athene guard me from them!—between whom and our great Goddess there has always been war since, like that dangerous Cyprian Aphrodite, they took the side of the Trojans and may the golden Sun, Helios, and the silver Moon, Selene, shake off such intruders!—didn’t I tell you how that murderous pair killed the children of Niobe the first woman? And how they wouldn’t even let their neighbours bury those beautiful maidens and heroic youths? Haven’t I told you all that?

  “And now this liar of a house-fly is trying to make out that our great goddess has lost herself in some kind of trance when the pillars of the world are shaking. O you male creatures, what infants you are! Children of women and nurselings of women, it is your mothers, your mothers, always your mothers, who are to blame! It is only from us, the unmarried ones, the childless ones, who have never known a man, that you ever hear the truth! That is what my sister always used to say. That is why she went to that forest of Aricia, which in Italy must be like the Nemean Forest in our main-land, and a little like our Arima too, only much bigger. Lucky, yea a thousand times lucky, are we in Ithaca to serve a Virgin Goddess!

  “The mothers of men are the worst traitors to the cause of women. I tell you, boy, from the beginning of all things women have been betrayed, exploited, enslaved, insulted, perverted, depraved, debased, by men!”

  Petraia drew breath at this point, while Nisos, feeling a little uneasy, since he still assumed it was in direct answer to his prayer that his old nurse had appeared on the scene, stared at the black fly on his knuckle with the vague idea of finding an excuse if not a justification for the wickedness of men in that big black head supported on those gauzy wings.

  But the indignant old maid went on in mounting emotion, until her indictment soon became so detailed in its survey of the wrongs of women and so crushing in its denunciation of their corrupters, that all he could do was to rub his knee with his free hand while one method of defence followed another in mute succession through his bewildered brain.

  “Petraia,” he thought, “must have gone down to Hades like our King Odysseus for she can’t have seen all these things happening round here.” And then as his attention wandered a little from what he was hearing he became aware of an extremely unexpected and very curious experience. He found himself in fact whispering to the fly and being whispered to by the fly in a language of which he was absolutely ignorant. It was like a dream, though he was fully awake. The fly was a boy among flies as he himself was among people. And with this other boy he was now making fun of everything.

  “But it’s our great goddess—it must be——” he told himself, “who in answer to my prayer has arranged this meeting with Petraia and has helped me and the fly to make friends! She is a Divine Being, therefore she must herself understand the language and the thoughts of all the animals, birds, reptiles, insects and even plants,
that walk and fly and creep and grow around her temple.”

  He had begun to call the fly “Kasi”. “Kasi-kid,” he said, “isn’t this whole business just like a game of Blindman’s Buff? Don’t you think so, Kasi?”

  The old midwife at his side went on with her arraignment of all males; but he kept his attention fixed on the fly, for it had become a deep joy to him to feel that they’d really made friends. “Kasi” was an abbreviation of the Hellenic word for brother and it was the old class-mate expression that all the younger boys of Ithaca had made use of between themselves in the Island’s preparatory-school.

  As for the fly, it was natural enough that since it had got older considerably faster than his new friend it was as gratified at being called “Kasi” as Nisos would have been if he had been treated like a young comrade by one of the heroes in the Trojan war.

  “Blindman’s Buff?” cried the Fly. “It’s as if we were all buzzing round a new-dropt cow-turd of Tis’ s old Babba, all warm and steaming! But this lady-moth here keeps giving me a flap with her left wing to remind me that I promised to escort her home; so I’m afraid I must say ‘cheire!’ for we must do what the ladies tell us, is it not so?”

  “It is indeed the sad truth, Kasi,” admitted Nisos. “Ta-Ta! till the next time!” shrilled the Fly. But when the insects had commenced their flickering and wavering departure in such close colloquy that the all-seeing sun, whether ruled by an Olympian or a Titan or by nobody but his flaming self, couldn’t decide whether to turn them into one darting jewel or into two darting jewels, Nisos found that Petraia had fallen silent and was regarding him with a look that was a palimpsest of different expressions. It had reproach in it. It had a grievance in it. It had mischievous amusement in it. It had a puzzled pity in it.