Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  The point he was considering now was simply this. Why should his natural awe and pious dread in the presence of the oldest of the Fates have produced in him no shrinking at all but on the contrary an indignant protectiveness and an unbounded respect, while the mere touch of this Priest of Orpheus, not to speak of the appalling disgust roused by the thought of seeing his face, made him shiver all over? Without having to separate either of his heels again, remove either of his feet from that weirdly coloured stone floor, Nisos decided that what really made the difference was that Atropos, like the Goddess Athene, had been well known to him from babyhood. His cradle so to speak had been rocked to the rhythm of the Three Fates and to the Rhythm of Athene’s name. He didn’t put it to himself in those exact words; but that was the substance of what he now thought.

  But there was more in it than that. There was something else that was much harder to put into words, whether only to clear it up for himself, or to explain it, if he had to explain it later, to his mother. The oldest of the Fates was in reality much more like himself than this terrible priest of none knew what. She fought for her friends as he did. She felt pity for that poor old Zeus left lonely on the peak of Gargaros without his thunder-bolts, just as, if he ever thought of the All-Father at all, he would have felt pity himself.

  And the same with Pallas Athene. She was one for telling huge palpable lies. And he had to do that himself. That was necessary in life’s ups and downs. He had to do it every day! When he became the Prophet of the strong and healthy who have been hurt and hit in some way, he would show them the importance of being clever! But when this Priest talked of reverence it was clear he meant something quite different from proper piety.

  Did these “Orphic Mysteries” which this weird new kind of Priest celebrated mean some blasphemous and horrible change in the proper manner of worship? Once again Nisos lifted up his right foot and stood on one leg thinking hard, like a young sand-piper pretending to be a heron.

  “This must be,” he said to himself, “one of those moments in the life of a clever prophet when he has to think about thinking. What the teachers at School say is always: ‘Think, Nisos! Think, Kasi! Think, Agelaos!’ But if you’re going to be a prophet—you’ve got to do more than think. Any fool can think. You’ve got to think about thinking.”

  Finding however that the position in which a person thinks about thinking has an appreciable effect on his thought Nisos returned his right foot to that queerly-coloured floor with some violence. “We can’t think properly about thinking,” he thought, “without bringing in ourselves. Atropos has to be Fate unswerving or she cannot think. Athene has to be the natural daughter of Zeus’ brain or she cannot think. Was this new kind of priest not thinking of himself at all but, busy in the establishment of some Secret Society, or Holy Cause, or Community Conspiracy, compared with whose dark and inhuman and impersonal purpose, he himself, the man Enorches, was as nothing?

  “When I think,” the embryo prophet now told himself, “I think like Athene and like Atropos and like the old Odysseus, from myself outwards. But I have a revolting suspicion that, when this horrible Orpheus-man thinks, he thinks towards himself inwards.”

  It may have been partly due to the queerly-coloured stone-work of this square cell, but our young friend’s mind at this point turned, as if automatically, to an interior vision of those two letters carved upon the oldest Pillar in the Porch of the Palace. He felt, as he thought of those letters, as if they were engraved upon the substance of his own soul.

  “From now on,” he told himself, “I shall dodge, avoid, and undermine in every way I possibly can, these infernal ‘Mysteries of Orpheus’.” Having decided this point the youthful challenger looked round him more carefully than he had done before. Yes, this chamber into which that man had thrust him was certainly a naked one! It was as if he were imprisoned inside a hard, square, semi-precious stone: a stone that, with him inside, might have been worn by some tremendous titanic giant, a giant as big as Atlas who was reported to hold up the sky.

  The boy had been thinking too hard, thinking with a cleverness that had become a strain. His nerves now began to behave as if they might in a little while make the sound of popping, after the manner of certain seed-pods. In pure nervousness he began to do funny things. He went up to the wall directly under a little square hole, that let in all the light the place had, and began to scrabble at it with his nails; at nothing in particular, just at the wall.

  But this silliness was brought to an end by his wondering if it were possible that there might be—but this was probably only a little less silly—any scratches on these walls that resembled that “U” and that “H” on the base of the Pillar in the Palace-Porch. “Apparently,” he thought, as he looked carefully about him, “to escape in soul from a Priest of Orpheus is easier than to escape in body!”

  But he set himself the task of examining his prison in the manner in which he fancied his old friend, Myos the fly, would have examined it if he had been the one to show scant reverence to Orpheus. In his nervous excitement Nisos almost laughed aloud when he imagined Pyraust, the moth-girl, asking Myos to tell her who Orpheus was, and the fly describing him to the moth as the first original spider.

  But he now meticulously examined every one of these four walls dutifully thanking as he did so the sky-god Ouranos, Zeus’ grandfather, for the light that came from a small half-a-foot-square window near the top of one of them. He was growing nervous again now. With his birthday in sight, for he would be seventeen in a few days, he felt he must hurry up with his mental development if he were to be recognized by the whole Island as the Prophet to the strong by the time his brother, duly married to Leipephile Pheresides, had inherited their father’s claim to be king in succession to Odysseus or even—here he looked round in real apprehension now; for where, in the name of Zeus, was the door through which he’d been thrust into this place?—even instead of Odysseus!

  “Oh popoi!” he groaned. “Was there ever such a fool as I am? Of course it’s to stop Odysseus from hoisting sail like a real king and to keep him petering out in his palace till he dies of idleness, or what Mummy calls ‘malakia’ or some such word, that Dad and Agelaos have been hiding up for years all the ‘othonia’ or sail-cloth they can get hold of!

  “If ever,” Nisos thought, “there has been a fool in Ithaca I am that fool!” But he had no sooner “given himself to the crows”, as the island saying had it, as the greatest fool among all the “kasis” or class-mates of his age from coast to coast, than he suddenly become certain he had caught sight of the Pillar’s “U” and “H”.

  Madly he rushed towards those scratches and pressed against them with both his bare hands. By Zeus, the Pillar had saved him! A great stone in the wall moved outwards, fell silently on a bed of moss outside, and lay there motionless. In the sun that stone took to itself a completely different colour from the one that had characterized it within those walls.

  It struck the boy, as he jumped upon it, and jumped away from it, and ran off free, that that heavy stone looked as if it were drinking in, in that one second, enough air and sun to give it a new colour for a thousand years!

  CHAPTER IV

  A few days after the momentous encounter between the oldest but far the most powerful of the Three Fates and the boy Nisos who had now reached the age of seventeen, the hero Odysseus awoke in the grey “wolf-light” of the pre-dawn, and, with nothing on but his blanket, his sandals, and his broad ox-hide belt, scrambled down the ladder and shuffled across the intervening space to the Dryad’s hollow tree.

  It must be confessed that on this occasion the old king was the awakener of the old Dryad, and not the other way round. It gave Odysseus indeed something of a shock when, in that pallid “wolf-light”, with one hand on the soft-crumbling edge of the phantom-grey orifice, he peeped down upon the crumpled heap of faded substances, patches of linen, pieces of cloth, bits of bone, fragments of withered flesh, tangled twists of lichen-coloured female hair, in fact all the acce
ssories and visible appendages of what might well have been an aged human female’s bed, including the old lady herself reposing within it.

  The patches of linen and cloth were so pitiably the kind of objects that a wandering female beggar would have picked up in her capricious travels that Odysseus drew back with that sort of instinctive reluctance to disconcert a sleeping female that any male householder might feel who finds such an one slumbering in one of his out-houses.

  But, along with this feeling, another and a very different one came over him as once more he thrust his bowsprit beard and his massive almost bald skull over the edge of that crumbling orifice.

  This was a much more intimate and personal feeling, though sex and sex-shyness entered into it. It was indeed the sort of self-restrained courtesy on the relations between the sexes such as Odysseus had learnt as a child from his mother, Anticleia, the sophisticated daughter of the crafty and mischievously magnanimous Autolycus. In an island-palace such as theirs, crowded with alien visitors from half the coasts of Hellas, some kind of calculated refinement in ordinary personal contact was essential; and it was the dignified reserve of such well-brought-up behaviour that the old man felt he had outraged by peering down upon this sleeping old woman, as she lay half-naked amid her long-accumulated bits of human finery like some moribund forest-fungus that had just managed to survive the winter.

  “I must wake the old creature somehow,” he thought, “for if I’m to carry through this touchy business of appealing to the people in open ‘agora’ I must find out more about these strangers from Thebes who’ve got the daughter of Teiresias in their keeping, and the Dryad is the only one who can help me.”

  He turned his pointed beard to the West without getting any inspiration. Then he turned it to the East and despatched across all the forests and mountains and seas and swamps and deserts that separated him from the land of the blameless Ethopians what he felt to be the swiftest kind of prayer. “What actually is it that I have done,” he asked himself, “to vex her as much as this?” And he drew a sigh that really came without any pretence from the very bottom of his being, “I’ve prayed to her as if my prayer were a wave, a wave that must bring her back. Yes, I’ve sent a wave to the Eastern edge of the world! It’s a wave of the sea I’ve sent; only it’s not merely making a furrow of sea-water; it’s making a furrow of earth-mould, a furrow of broken branches, a furrow through all the forests of the Mainland till the Mainland itself reaches the edge of the earth!”

  The old man’s pointed beard seemed to follow his thought as if it possessed the power of transforming itself into the wave its owner was imagining. “But what sort of thing is the edge of the earth,” Odysseus wondered; “and do the blameless Ethiopians peep over that edge as I peeped just now at the sleep of the Dryad?”

  As he pondered on this, he saw in his mind a terrific chasm of absolute darkness along the fringe of which hung suspended gigantic smoke-blackened shapeless rocks, beneath which there was nothing but a hollow bottomless abyss. And then it seemed to the king, as he imagined himself lying on his stomach on one of these blackened rocks and staring down into the abyss, that he saw the sun coming up out of that unspeakable gulf.

  “Do the blameless Ethiopians,” he wondered, “ever fall over that frightful edge?” He imagined the great goddess who was his friend, standing there in all her divine beauty, with the terrible Aegis-shield on her arm, its magic tassels dark with the darkness of the gulf of Erebos, while from her breastplate glared forth upon all who dared approach her the dreadful head of Medusa, the dead Gorgon, with the still living hair of its twining serpents feeding on the obscure mystery of its human fate.

  Standing motionless the old man gazed for a long moment over that imaginary world’s edge. “She would be with me if she could,” he murmured aloud; and then shrugged his shoulders. “The gods with me or the gods against me,” he thought, “I shall do what I shall do; and what will come of it will be what will come of it!”

  He then swung round but instead of leaning against the uneven edge of crumbling and rotten wood and peering down at the sleeping old creature as he had done at first, he now proceeded to call upon her by name; thus giving her an opportunity to arrange her appearance a little before presenting herself. There was enough light to catch her expression fully and clearly when, after a couple of minutes delay, she appeared at the entrance to her hollow tree.

  “What—is—it?” she groaned hoarsely. “Has Krateros Naubolides attacked the Palace?”

  The old king smiled under cover of his beard. “Not yet, my friend, not quite yet. But no doubt if the Palace doesn’t take precautions and take them quickly too he will attack us before we know where we are. And that, my dear old friend, is precisely why I have come to disturb you so early. I feel ashamed of myself for breaking up your dream but there’s something I’m very anxious to know, and you are the only mortal or immortal, the only Nymph of land or sea, who can help me to attain this knowledge.”

  Never in all his days had the crafty old wanderer seen such a look of unmitigated beatitude as rushed into the haggard face of Dryad! “O my dear child!” she cried, “I never thought the Olympians would give me a chance to”—Here the ancient creature had to struggle grimly with a rush of up-surging sobs—“to help the son of Laertes at a real crisis in his life. And I never would have presumed to push myself forward, whatever knowledge I might happen to have, without some sign, some invitation, some request, at least some permission, some opportunity, some door ajar. But now that you yourself have spoken, my dear lord, and have as the Persians say, stretched out your sceptre towards me, I can tell you all I know.”

  “Tell me, old friend, tell me quick; so that I can act at once. It has become fatally clear to me at last, though it took many days to make me believe it, that my wise goddess and ever-faithful protectress must have hurried away in anger and contempt from our wretched and ignoble quarrels and from this ‘complicated world-crisis’ as our more pompous contemporaries will love to call it, though of course, as you and I know well, if every battle between Gods and Titans is a ‘world-crisis’ our poor old world has never been free from one. Yes, it is natural enough that she should do what our great Olympians have always done at a crisis, gone off; gone off to recover her faith in the natural piety of humanity by enjoying for a while the innocent worship of these guileless races. And so, my dear friend, I’ll put to you without further delay, the question I should have implored our great Goddess to answer. It is this.

  “I have been assured by Eurycleia that the maiden Eione who has lately come to serve in our household, and who is, she herself declared, when I found her in the Cave of the Naiads, a sister of our excellent herdsman Tis, has revealed in recent conversations the discovery of an extremely important secret.

  “It was to reveal this discovery to her faithful brother Tis that Eione came here from the opposite end of Ithaca. Eurycleia indeed assures me that Moros, who is Eione’s grandfather and also the grandfather of our faithful Tis, has discovered that there is a formidable pair of foreigners, calling themselves Zenios and Okyrhöe, who have occupied for several years—nobody seems to know exactly for how long—a lonely and desolate farm-house on the extreme sea-verge of a rocky headland that has been deserted for generations and left to fall into ruin. There are springs of fresh water in that lonely place, there are remains of several walls and even the remnants of a few wooden fences but the ground that was once protected by these things has been so blighted by sea-winds that it is doubtful if any grain would grow there now; and, if it did, it is certain its chance of its surviving the depredations of beasts and birds would be small.

  “But grand-dad Moros swore to Eione—you’re listening to me, aren’t you, old friend?—that this queer foreign couple came here from Thebes after the death of Cadmus and that they brought with them enough treasure to keep them for a hundred years. And grand-dad Moros declares further that he has spoken with both Zenios and Okyrhöe and has learnt from them that they have under their
protection in their half-ruined dwelling a young maiden who is the living daughter of the great prophet Teiresias.

  “Eione’s grand-dad swears he has been told by this couple, who have several times welcomed him to a lavish meal in their lonely refuge, whose local name is Ornax, that this young daughter of Teiresias, who has inherited from her father a startling amount of his prophetic inspiration, declares that if Odysseus does not sail from Ithaca this Spring on his last voyage he will die miserably in his bed, yes! in his bed in his ancient palace, of an ignoble disease flung upon him out of the deep sea by his deadly enemy Poseidon. Unlike other youthful prophets this young girl has never once contradicted, never once altered by a single breath, this terrible prediction. Her protectors Zenios and Okyrhöe swore to old Moros again and again, so Eione tells Eurycleia, that if ever Teiresias’ daughter whose name, it seems is Pontopereia, came here, with this prophecy of hers, she would inevitably convince us all of its truth.”

  The aged Dryad gave two or three jerky hops forward till she stood on a heap of last year’s dead oak-leaves. Here she became more erect than Odysseus had ever seen her; and raising her withered arms above her head she began clasping and unclasping her gnarled fingers tightly round the back of her neck.

  “O my child, my child,” she murmured. “Say the words, only say the words, and I will help you to the limit of my power and—and——” Here the old lady broke off, under the strength of her emotion. “——and beyond the limit!” she added in a gasping whisper.

  “You mean, my dear friend,” said Odysseus quietly, “that by the laws of decency and order that the world owes to Themis and to which Zeus himself bows, it would be improper for you, a mortal Nymph, to help me, a mortal man, before I had prayed and implored you to do so?”