Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  But in place of any sad, weary, resigned, disillusioned acceptance of fate it had a gravity that was faintly whimsical. “Those finger-nails that disgusted and disquieted you so, my dear,” she remarked at last, “show me who cracked that image of Themis. And now listen to me, child; and lay to heart what I tell you; for I am not speaking only on my own authority. I am speaking to you, Nisos, you Babe that I took from your mother, as an unwedded mortal on behalf of an unwedded immortal, for I tell you, boy, that at this very moment I can feel her presence inspiring me and teaching me exactly what to say and exactly what not to say to you, Nisos, child,” and Petraia’s voice quivered with emotion, “the greatest event, and by far the best event, that has ever happened in the history of our terrible world is now happening.

  “From the lowest depths of Tartaros to the highest peaks of Olympos a great revolt is in progress which if successful will change the world. But it is a revolt against Fate Itself, as well as against the Will of the All-Father, a will that always bows to Fate and then pretends to be what the All-Father Himself would instinctively will, which of course really and truly it isn’t, only All-Father Zeus can’t and daren’t do what he’d like to do!

  “Those who attacked that Figure of Themis were entirely justified in so doing. The Harpies, or ‘Snatchers’, as our enemies call them, are women like us, like me! They are women, and they are maids, and they are not only old maids, they are immortal maids! And they have joined the great revolt that began before dawn this night, this night that has now become day, the first day of the greatest event in the history of all days!

  “Need your old nurse tell her babe what that event is? It is the Revolt of Women! Yes, of the Women-Slaves of the entire universe! Yes, Nisos, nothing less than that, the revolt of all Females in the cosmos against the tyranny of all Males in the cosmos! Themis, the goddess of Custom and Habit and Tradition, has always been unfair to us women, always trying to force us back into slavery to men whenever we’ve tried to escape. And, as with Themis, so with the Fates. They too are against us. They too want to hold us down to the laws, ways, manners, morals, usages, privileges, conventions, institutions, organizations, founded upon male stupidity and bigotry!

  “But our maiden goddess will be on our side; yes! she will lead us! She——” And then suddenly, after a terrifying pause, the boy heard Petraia utter a ghastly groan, followed by a horrible shriek. “She’s gone, gone, gone, gone! She’s left me! She’s deserted me! Athene! Athene! Athene! Where art thou, Athene?”

  Nisos looked in positive fear at the woman. Her whole countenance was convulsed, distorted, twisted awry; while her eyes, enlarged and deepened into the most beautiful and most terrible eyes Nisos had ever seen in his short life, gave him the feeling, as they turned on him, as if his whole nature were being summed up and weighed and analysed and judged by the central nerve of the entire universe!

  “What’s the matter, nurse?” he gasped in a low voice. At his question her gaze of terrible insight changed into one of contemptuous irritation.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! Nothing’s ‘the matter’! What could be ‘the matter’? A person may be allowed, I take it, to change colour for a second when the goddess she has been serving for forty years begins inspiring her with the deepest secrets of life in one blob, one blur, one blot, one gobbet of prophetic truth; and then, just as a person’s in the act of expressing it glides off, glides away, glides into thin air, glides back to her grove or her grotto or her shrine leaving the person, leaving me, to be nothing but the silly, speechless idiot I always have been!”

  Petraia stopped speaking and covered her contorted face with her two hands, while the boy noticed how big the tears were that forced themselves between those thin fingers and ran down between those wrinkled knuckles as the tall figure swayed and shook with her dreadful sobs.

  Nisos was staggered. All he felt was awe and wonder; awe in the presence of such human emotion, and wonder that so wise a goddess could treat a faithful servant so unkindly and ungratefully. If only Petraia had been less upset she would have remained in touch with her twin-sister who in Aricia was at that very moment struggling desperately to convey to her by vibrations of pure thought that in this cosmic revolt on behalf of women, though the Fates and the All-Father and Themis might be against them, they had on their side the terrible Avengers of Blood, the Erinyes, who, according to Egeria, the Nymph in the Cave, could bring with them to the battle the Graiai, the Gorgons, the Sirens, and even the Nymphs of the Hesperides!

  Had the woman only possessed the power to visualize the scene at that moment in the cave of Egeria, where the twin-sister on her knees with her long bare arms outstretched and her face transformed by an ecstasy of worship was invoking all the Chthonian deities on behalf of Petraia herself, that crazed creature might have been checked in her bitter wrath. As it was, she left Nisos without a word more; and the boy heard her as she went off talking blasphemously to herself about her service of the great goddess and how on this day of days the goddess had deserted her.

  “So my life is to repeat itself, is it?” the boy heard her mutter, as she went up the slope with the particular aberrations of her way of moving when she was excited, which might be described as a limp and a jerk followed by a hop, exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, “always to repeat itself, is it? And there’s never, never, never, never to be anything the matter! What’s the matter? O I’ll go and see if anything’s the matter! The matter with my knees perhaps as I pray to you! With my voice perhaps as I sing hymns to you! With the floor of your shrine perhaps, with the echo of your arches perhaps, with the smoke of your incense perhaps? Or could it possibly be, that what the matter is, that you aren’t in your temple at all? Just somewhere else!”

  Muttering and babbling in this blasphemous way Patraia stumbled up the slope towards the temple and vanished from his view among the many marble buildings that surrounded the central shrine. Left alone without the fly, or the moth, or the old midwife, or, for all he felt of her presence, the Goddess either, Nisos himself began slowly ascending the slope. Strange thoughts flitted through his head as placing one foot carefully and pensively in front of the other, and then the other in front of it, and then repeating the process, he mounted that grassy hill.

  Since it was not the time for any particular celebration, or for the performance of any particular ritual, this ascent to the Temple and to its agglomeration of marble buildings, interspersed by the wooden houses of the priests and the still rougher and cruder hovels, mostly constructed of tattered sail-cloth and twisted withy-twigs of the slaves of the priests, was at that moment almost entirely deserted.

  Surrounded therefore by an atmosphere of consecrated silence our young friend had one of those opportunities that come to us all at rare moments of really “collecting”, as we have come to call it, his wandering thoughts; and, as often happened when he was alone, his mind journeyed into a cloudy realm composed of an entirely imaginary circle of things and people.

  This circle, person by person, and background by background, was his future, that far-off future, into which by the help of what he felt so strongly within him, what to himself he always called his “cleverness”, he was certain he would one day come.

  Where many island children watching their companions being scolded for behaving badly would say to themselves: “I am good, I am!” Nisos would say to himself: “I am clever, I am!” and he had an absolute faith that, if he didn’t die by a violent death, he would one day be the memorable figure of his epoch. He never defined, or tried to analyse precisely, of what the power within him which he called his “cleverness” consisted.

  His mother always told her neighbour, the lady of Druinos, that it consisted of a gift for subtle flattery and of a genius for propitiating older and wiser people. But of his real secret ambition he never spoke to his mother. The only person who had the faintest inkling of what it was, for nothing would have induced him to talk to Petraia about it, was his friend Tis, the herdsman.r />
  But what in his hidden heart he actually imagined himself becoming was an inspired prophet. If Petraia could be so upset by the idea of their goddess deserting her and not speaking through her as Apollo did through the oracular woman at Delphi and as the Nymph Egeria did through Petraia’s twin-sister in Aricia, why shouldn’t he become the voice of some Divine Being, and win respect and esteem for himself for all time by expounding that Being’s philosophy?

  He began to wonder what kind of divinity he would be most fitted to represent, and most happy in representing. And as he pondered on this important point he found himself staring at one particular blade of grass the top of which, the point as it were, of this brightly green dagger, had turned into a pale brown colour. The point had not shrivelled or crumpled in this transformation. It was still as smooth as the rest of that leaf of grass; but it was discoloured.

  Something had bitten it or the excretion of some poisonous creature had sucked the life-blood from it; or, for all Nisos knew, this single grass-leaf with all the consciousness it possessed had uttered a curse against Zeus himself, the lord of high heaven, and had thus drawn upon itself an individual flash, especially adapted to a small object, of celestial lightning.

  At first Nisos couldn’t help associating this discoloured point with Petraia’s unseemly outburst; but as he went on staring at it his secret dream about his own future on this island stirred within him.

  “Yes, by Aidoneus,” he thought, “I know what special kind of prophet I’ll be, a kind that has never existed in the world before! I’ll not be a prophet to the clever who are weak and timid and nervous like me. I’ll be a prophet to the strong who have been hurt in some way. Yes, I’ll be a prophet to the healthy and strong who are like this leaf of grass with a brown tip.”

  “Listen to me,” I’ll cry, “all you who are strong but yet are stupid; you who are hurt and hit without knowing why! Listen to me!” He stood still, imagining himself a man with a long flowing beard, taller than he was now, much more distinguished than he was now, and possessed of philosophical secrets known to no other sage in Hellas. He glanced casually up the slope in front of him. All those glittering marble buildings he knew so well were hidden by the grassy ridge at the top of the ascent and he noticed that Petraia had entirely vanished.

  “She must be visiting Stratonika,” he said to himself. “Yes,” he thought, “I’ll be a Prophet to the strong who’ve been hurt, and the healthy who’ve fallen sick! The half-dead ones, the tortured ones, the mad ones, the diseased ones have all got prophets; but strong, stupid, silly things, like this blade of grass with a brown tip, who just stares back at a person, think they don’t want a prophet; but they do! O yes! you do, stupid grass, whatever you think! You wait till I’m older and cleverer and have a beard; and you’ll soon see! It’s the stupid things that need the clever prophets!”

  Having decided on his future in general, Nisos now felt a need for beginning to practise the art of prophecy in a more special and particular manner; so he began plodding steadily on, with drops of sweat falling from his forehead and his eyes upon his sandals which were discoloured by pollen-dust and rabbit-dung.

  Suddenly he turned his attention, drawn by an impulse for which he couldn’t account, away from the ridge in front of him to a clump of trees on his extreme left; and he even began walking hurriedly towards it. The trees were only a portion of the group of natural objects that was now his objective. In the blazing sun and against all this greenery the many-coloured mound he was aiming for had almost a purple look.

  Nisos knew the place well. It was of natural rather than artificial origin, formed by the intermingling of three separate things, a rather oddly scrawled rock, the stump of an oak, and the twisted root of an ash. Over this dusky excrescence there grew a mass of waving ferns and thick clumps of a specially dark moss; and as Nisos now advanced towards it its queer purpureal tint appeared to be spotted by blood-red patches which glowered like raw wounds in that burning sun.

  Everyone who knew Ithaca knew this spot and it was locally called Lykophos or “Wolf’s Light,” a name which implied that faint grey light before dawn that was more suitable to eyes of wolves than of men. The Lykophos-Mound seemed especially prominent at this moment. Its queerly scrawled rock, its oak-stump, its ash-root, together with the sap-filled living energy of its ferns and moss and honeysuckle, and its minutely delicate early Spring flowers and their clambering foliage, accentuated just then something about it, some powerful atmospheric emanation, that always made it an object towards which certain living people and certain living creatures gravitated with magnetic or hypnotic attraction but from which others shrank away with instinctive dread.

  Nisos himself was one of the former sort; but his friend Tis, the herdsman, though he used simpler words, had given the boy the impression that to him there were always shocking blood-drops oozing out of that rock; while, for all its ferns and mosses and small spring-flowers and spreading foliage, there were always raw skinless hollows between its hieroglyphic surfaces and its leaf-mould ledges that suggested festering wounds and pus-exuding sores.

  Among our other friends from the porch of the palace the black house-fly was repelled much in the same way as Tis. What the fly felt every time it flew near the Lykophos-Mound was an aching void in the pit of its stomach; as if some poisonous-looking meat-cover of brassy gauze had suddenly been precipitated out of the air to surround every half-crumb of edible farinaceousness and every half-drop of absorbable stickiness in the entire world.

  It was however quite calmly and thoughtfully, and yet rather doggedly, for he was anxious to pick up for his extremely human Mummy a few fragments of more ordinary, more domestic, more everyday news than had recently been bewildering him from so many thaumaturgical if not supernatural directions, that our young friend was approaching the Lykophos-Mound, when he heard in the air above his head the strangest combination of startling, terrifying, and unbelievable sounds that he’d ever heard in his life.

  And as, trembling with pure terror, he looked up, he saw a sight that froze his blood. What he saw gave him the impression that he was in the midst of a nightmare and that if he burst into a wild cry himself, these other cries, together with the incredible shapes that were descending from out of the air, would cease and dissolve and sink away, shaken into nothingness by his mother’s approach as she answered his frantic screams.

  But not for nothing had he been brought up by a mother like Pandea and a nurse like Petraia. Not for nothing had he listened as intently as that wicked old toad of a grandfather, Damnos Geraios himself, to the tales exchanged between his mother and her grand gossip, the mother of Leipephile and Stratonika. Above all it hadn’t been for nothing that he had done housework for the aged lady who had been the nurse of three generations of royalty. As, half-petrified with terror, he gazed upward at what he saw, these two wide-winged female Horrors, uttering these appalling screeches as they flapped down towards the Lykophos-Mound in the half-circle of a raven-like swoop upon their prey, he knew at once who they were. One was an Erinys, one of the Avengers of Blood or Furies, and the other was a Gorgon.

  Talking about it later with the old palace-nurse he came to the conclusion that the particular Erinys who made this attack must have been Allekto, whose name means “the never-ending” and that the Gorgon who tried to help her in this attack was Euryale whose name means “the wide sea”.

  But at the actual moment he had this appalling experience he only knew that without question one of them was most certainly an “Erinys” or “Fury” and the other was most certainly a Gorgon. The pair were clearly much too absorbed in catching their victim off-guard to notice Nisos at all. In fact they behaved as if he were a short, branchless tree, devoid of all sensibility save of a passive vegetative kind.

  He was not, however, so paralysed with terror that he couldn’t stagger to the trunk of the nearest spruce-fir; from which vantage-point, and clinging to this friendly tree with both his arms, he recovered a sufficient amount
of “cleverness” to begin to take careful and detailed note of this whole amazing event. Amazing it certainly was: so much so that even the tree he was so desperately clutching, with some childish idea of taking refuge from the enemies of the gods with the daughters of the earth, displayed an unmistakable sign of being troubled in its quietude; for it exuded such a large drop of sticky tar that it tickled a nerve in the boy’s smooth cheek. But in spite of his trembling legs and the tickling in his cheek he didn’t fail to notice that the whole being of this pursuing Fury, whom he later discovered to be Allekto, “the never-ending”, was so lost, diffused, absorbed, mania-mazed and blood-crazed, in its mad punishment-lust that though at this moment she was flying, the wings she flew with were feathered with the smoke of burning carrion, while from her mouth there issued, along with a stream of poisonous saliva, such a horrible alternation of bellowing and barking and such an appalling mixture of the stench of decomposition with the stench of excremental filth that the boy, though his stomach was empty, was unable to resist the motion of vomiting; and no! never for one moment did he fail to notice that everything about her had simply become one single rushing wind of all-devouring, all-consuming vengeance.

  The creature whom Allekto was half-carrying through the air with her was also a female Being, and although it was not till later that Nisos learnt that she must have been Euryale or a daughter of “the wide sea”, and in fact that she was a progeny of the sea monster Keto himself, he already knew, from her tusks like those of a wild pig, and her claws of brass, and the serpents that were a living portion of her flesh and blood, and above all from that unspeakable and utterly indescribable look in her eyes that made it impossible for any other living child of the earth or of the heavens to face her glance without at least the risk of being frozen into stone with sheer terror, that she was one of the Gorgons, an immortal sister of the mortal Medusa.