Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  Then he straightened himself. “Well!” he muttered: “I must have a good bath and a mighty meal and a lordly action of the bowels; and I must get hold of Nisos, and, if I can do it without scaring any of them, discuss with him and with Tis and Eione at what hour we’d better make our visit to Ornax; and whether, we’d better assume, and I fancy Eione will be our best advisor on that point, that these mysterious strangers, Zenios and Okyrhöe, have come to Ithaca from Thebes and belong to the House of Kadmos, and that they have been within their legal right according to our Hellenic tradition in possessing themselves of the person of Pontopereia, the daughter of Teiresias.

  “But you are the only one, I swear to you, Kleta darling, who have given me the true clue to my fate at this supreme crisis in my turbulent life; add thus while the Sun, once more Helios Hyperion, freed forever from the yoke of Apollo, looks down upon me, and the Moon, once more the virgin Selene, freed forever from the yoke of Artemis, looks down upon me, as, in this stick-house of a stable for immortal horses, I carry on my haggling with Zeuks—not with Zeus on the top of Gargaros in Ida, but with Zeuks on the top of Kokkys-Thronax in Ithaca—what I shall have in my heart will be neither the tricks of Zenios of Ornax, nor the wiles of Zeuks of Agdos, but the wisdom of the Dryad whose garden was the cradle of Odysseus.”

  With these words the crafty hero did what even his father had never done—if Laertes was his father rather than that “Father of Lies”, the great Hermes himself—he flung his arms about the old creature’s neck and kissed her with such dexterity that the protruding point of his bowsprit beard rested tenderly upon the curve of her left shoulder.

  He never knew, nor did any of his household ever know, far less any of the city-dwellers between the walls, or any vineyard-owners outside the walls, what the old Dryad did when in silence he had released her, in silence had turned his back upon her, in silence had re-mounted the steps to his bedroom; but the scattered offscourings of dismembered vegetation, the sheddings from dead leaves, the tiny bits of dead sticks, the half-stripped feathers, the empty husks of grass-seed, the pale straw-heads of withered stalks, not to mention the almost invisible insects for whom these minute objects were as stately avenues of cyclopean ruins, in fact all the unconsidered and unrecorded things that in their infinite multitude made up her “garden”, accepted the opinion of a small black slug who assured its neighbour, a still smaller beetle, that the gods had turned their Dryad, as they had once turned Niobe, the ancestress of the human race, into a fountain of tears.

  But the sun mounted up, steadily and ever more steadily, into the heavens, until he reached a point when the phantom moon that floated opposite to his rising, seemed to be drifting so aimlessly in a sky which was incapable of doing justice to more than one great luminary at the same time, that she looked as if nothing could hold her back from sliding down in an utter dive of helplessness into whatever element of complete extinction awaited such as sank and sank and sank, till they reached the nadir of the universe.

  None of the three women, however, who poured first cold, then tepid, then pleasantly warm water, over the king in his bath, had the faintest resemblance in her mood just then to the moon in her vanishing. They were all indeed, although each in her different manner, far too intensely interested in the problem with which Odysseus had just confronted them to think of anything else. This was the question as to what special treasure or treasures he and Nisos had better take with them to Kokkys-Thronax if they were to be in any sort of secure position in bargaining with this madman, Zeuks.

  Bargain with the fellow it was clear they had to; and from what the Dryad had said it was also clear that he was likely to prove an extremely shrewd bargainer. It did cross the cunning old hero’s mind that it might be possible to take a band of men up there, surround this homestead called Agdos, and carry off that immortal pair of horses by force; but the more he thought of such a violent and arbitrary way of going to work the less he liked it.

  His one fixed idea, the one final purpose of all this planning and scheming was to hoist sail once more. What in every bone of his body, what in every pulse of his blood, what in every centre of his complicated nerves, he longed for was simply to sail again into the unknown. He couldn’t explain this urge, even to himself. It was deeper than any ordinary desire or intention.

  His old friend the Dryad could have explained it to him. It was an obsession, like the migratory passion in birds and fish and insects and even in the spawn of eels!

  In his old age it had become the final impulse of his energy, of his sex, of his fight for life, of his deepest secretive struggle, of his struggle, not so much to obey a destiny imposed upon by fate, as to create his own destiny. All he wanted now was to hoist sail once more; and, when he had hoisted sail, to sail! It was not that he cared greatly whither he sailed, or to what end; but since he knew more about the coasts of the “blameless Ethiopians”,—for such was the name he had been brought up to use for the dwellers on both extremities of the earth—to the East than to the West, it must be to the “blameless Ethiopians” of the West that he would sail.

  Yes, he would sail West. And if to touch the limits of the earth in that direction and to reach the “blameless Ethiopians” who dwelt at those limits, that is to say where the Sun, who could travel a thousand times faster than any other living thing, was wont to rise, after traversing, swifter than the wind, the lower regions beneath the earth, was his destiny he would fulfil it.

  Odysseus was impelled all the more strongly to make the supreme voyage of his life a voyage towards the West, because, if these late wild rumours told the truth, the whole of the continent of Atlantis had been sunk to the bottom of the sea. From his childhood he had been hearing tales of this mysterious continent, and now to learn that it had been forever submerged, in fact that it existed no longer, made the sort of impression on his peculiar mind, a mind at once obstinately and implacably adventurous, and yet craftily empirical and practical, such as a high-spirited boy would receive who suddenly learnt that what he had been taught were stars floating in space were really tiny holes in the arch of a colossal dome; an impression of which the practical effect was to strengthen his decision that at all cost this ultimate voyage of his must be to the West.

  “I shall sail,” he told himself, “over the waves under which lies Atlantis!”

  And it was extraordinarily exciting to the peculiar temperament of this insatiable adventurer to think of reaching some unknown archipelago of islands, on the Western side, that is to say the further side, of a sunk continent.

  Such were the old wanderer’s thoughts as the three women gave him his bath in the upper chamber. While he was eating his breakfast, however, not only the three women to whom he was accustomed were called for consultation, but the little new-comer Eione was also brought in. It became indeed, before it ended, this breakfast of Odysseus on the morning of his encounter with Zeuks, what might be called a Council of State, for our young friend Nisos, now past his seventeenth birthday, stood proudly and demurely at the foot of the table from whose silver plates and flagons and salvers the well-browned, savoury-smelling hogsflesh and the barley-bread and the creamy milk and the fragrant red wine were soon, it was clear to all, putting the old hero into an especially good mood.

  Among the women it was Leipephile who, for all her simplicity, watched the king of Ithaca with the most anxious expression. She could not quite understand her own feelings in the matter, but she had learnt enough from the teasing replies of Nisos and from certain rough and casual words dropped here and there by Tis to make her feel that the expedition which was now being planned had something at the back of it that was inimical to Agelaos her betrothed, something that not only her own mother Nosodea but Agelaos’ mother Pandea would most certainly regard with serious concern and alarm.

  As for the Trojan girl, or rather the Trojan woman, her bewildered resentment bred from years of captivity and always seething in her veins was now assuming, as it had never done before, a definite pers
onal apprehension. They were discussing what particular treasure had better be brought up from the subterranean vaults beneath the palace and it naturally entered the Trojan prisoner’s head that some golden object from the world-famous arms of Achilles that by the secret aid of Athene had been awarded to Odysseus instead of to the more daring, more fool-hardy, and far more powerful Ajax, might occur to the crafty old king as a more tempting exchange for the winged Gorgonian steed and the black-maned abortion of the great Mother than any vase or goblet or jug or cup among the rare gifts brought by Odysseus from the palace of Alcinous, the father of that young Nausikaa who had fixed upon the wanderer the first-love of a romantic maiden.

  This armour of Achilles, as the Trojan captive well knew, had been brought to Ithaca in one of the ships of Menelaos long before the winner of it had himself got home: and what if it now occurred to Eurycleia his aged nurse, if not to the old king himself, to descend to that secretest chamber of all in the caves beneath the palace only to find it empty? Arsinöe had never been greatly worried at the thought of anybody finding her graven image of Hector, now so glittering in the armour of his slayer, within the haunted purlieus of Arima, since she knew that where abode those two terrible Phantasms, Eurybia the sister of the monstrous Keto, and Echidna, Keto’s daughter, and where Odysseus himself never dared to go, it was unlikely that anyone, even if they risked it, would reveal to a soul where they had been or what they had seen there.

  But to descend to that lowest of all the treasure-caves beneath the palace with the idea of finding something wherewith to bargain with this crazy Zeuks, that was quite a possible move. But even if the old man or this handsome boy-pet of Eurycleia’s did find that chamber empty, was it likely that anyone would accuse her? Who would guess she had learnt the art of carving? Who would suppose she had ever lived closely enough to Hector to recall his features so well as to be able to carve them?

  The aged Eurycleia was the only one during that quaintly palatial and yet so wholly domestic council of war to guess the meaning of the gloomy prognostication lowering in the frowning brow of Agelaos’ simple betrothed, or to puzzle over the furtive glances now at the king, now at Nisos, now at Tis, by which were revealed the nervous apprehensions of Arsinöe. The final issue of the discussion had probably been foreseen all along by the shrewd old nurse, who was, though she would have vigorously denied it, quite as “polumetis”, or full of the wisdom that wrestles with life’s realities, as was Odysseus himself.

  It was in fact decided that Nisos should carry over his shoulder in a capacious sack, as he followed closely behind Odysseus, three precious objects, a golden Tripod, a golden Mixing-Bowl, and a golden Flagon. The two first of these came from the Phaeacian palace; while the third had been brought to Ithaca by Anticleia, the mother of Odysseus; and it was a marriage-gift to her from her own father Autolycos who all his days had been a great collector of such treasures. Wherever he went he found them; and whenever he found them he saw to it that they were not left behind when he moved on.

  And now that these royal domestic female advisers had concluded their deliberations, while their chief was still devouring his meat and drinking his wine, it can easily be imagined in what high spirits our young friend Nisos was when he set off, brimfull of every kind of ambition to follow his aged hero and king on the first really official adventure, as you might put it, of his life.

  Odysseus explained at the start to his excited follower that he had decided to avoid both the Temple and the City in approaching the homestead of Zeuks; so that their progress was less rapid than it would have been had they followed the various main thoroughfares.

  Odysseus carried no weapon except our old acquaintance the club of Herakles, while Nisos, walking with a rhythmic swing of his whole body, balanced on his shoulders an enormous sack, to which, first on the right hand and then on the left, he kept lifting a hand, or, sometimes it might be, only a few fingers, to steady the thing’s weight under the shocks of the way.

  The first thing they both realized when they crossed the border of Zeuks’ farm was the fact that for all the precautions they had taken to reach the place un-heralded there was already quite a gathering of Zeuks’ neighbours, small farmers with their wives and children, clearly collected there to get the thrill of an immensely grotesque and wildly comic, if not a shockingly startling, encounter.

  Odysseus quickly understood that the half had not been told him of the fantastic personality he was now to meet for the first time. Into his mind, and indeed into the mind of his youthful attendant too, as they now both looked round at the faces about them, there entered the suspicion that this little crowd of men, women, and children, gathered on this level expanse of rough grass with lichen-covered rocks and a sprinkling of spring flowers, was anticipating an extremely dramatic scene, but was prepared to feel no particular sympathy for either side.

  Evidently something beyond all ordinary events was going to happen, for the children kept whispering to one another, while the younger among them lifted puzzled and rather frightened eyes to the faces of their mothers; and indeed it was plain that what everybody expected was that their old, weak, deserted, and poverty-stricken king was now going to be completely outmatched, out-witted, and rendered helpless if not ridiculous, by this famous country-side clown whom none of their richest farmers could tame. “They are all thinking,” Nisos told himself, “that the old man must be in his dotage if he fancies he can cope with such a crazy rebel against all established authority as this weird creature Zeuks.

  “And everybody here must feel,” the boy’s thoughts ran on, “that the moment the king really sinks into the helpless silliness of old age, the House of Naubolides will assert its claim to rule; and to rule not only Ithaca but all the neighbouring islands as well.”

  For a moment, as he rested his heavy sack upon a rock and automatically jerked his body so that the knife in the leather belt which his mother had given him on the day he was seventeen might fall into the precise place most convenient for clutching it at any sudden necessity, he felt a shiver of family-pride rushing through him, and of thankfulness to the Fates, the oldest of whom he had so recently defended, that he was different from the farmers’ boys of his own age in this crowd whose eyes he could see were fixed on him, he hoped with envy, though in one case he fancied he caught a couple of them laughing at him.

  But if the king’s armour-bearer, or more strictly his currency-bearer, for it was purely in preparation for a shrewd piece of trading that the boy carried that heavy sack, had his own private thoughts created by the general atmosphere around him, the old hero was not without his own sharp-edged reactions to this highly-charged occasion. What he, from old experience of the moods of flexible-susceptible human beings, suddenly felt now was a complete surprise to himself. He felt that his own encounter with this queer personage who had the audacity, as well as the subtle cunning, to steal, by the aid of heaven knows what irresistible spell, the actual winged horse sprung from the blood of Medusa was not the sole cause of the crowd’s excitement.

  He couldn’t help noticing that in place of staring eagerly and excitedly in the direction of the outbuildings and barns of the homestead called Agdos, the eyes of most of the people assembled here kept turning to the circuitous upland track by which he and Nisos had reached this flat expanse of level grass and evenly strewn gravel, just as if they expected a considerable rear-guard of well-armed soldiers to be following him!

  “Surely they cannot,” he thought, “really imagine that I’ve got a body-guard of Ithacan warriors ready, like those who arose from the sowing of the dragon’s teeth, to fight to the death wherever I lead them!”

  But he quickly gave this mental question a physical rebuff with his broad shoulders, sharp-projecting chin and massive skull; and was prepared as he used to be, day following day, twenty years ago, for whatever ambush of his enemies was to burst out from round the next corner.

  Odysseus had full need to be thus prepared, for in another second an enmity grea
ter than any searching tentacle of Scylla or any whirling suction of Charybdis revealed itself to them all.

  From the very same path by which the old king and the boy Nisos had just reached this spot came a hurrying figure of whose identity neither of them had any doubt. It was Enorches, the priest of Orpheus!

  A curious shudder of supernatural awe ran through that whole crowd. The younger children clung to their mothers’ hands and garments whilst the men bit their lips, tightened their belts, and looked anxiously at one another. Nobody turned to the well-roofed sheds of Agdos, whence the mocking clown who called himself Zeuks was awaiting his turn on that typically Hellenic stage, which seemed, as was always happening in the midst of those eternally contesting islands and cities and races and cults and political parties, to have been called into existence, for some malicious purpose of its own, at that particular moment, by some invisible master of ceremonies.

  At first glance Nisos simply could not resist the childish impulse of pure panic which caused him to heave up his sack once more on his shoulders and retreat before that advancing figure till he was a few paces to the rear of Odysseus, though he kept his head sufficiently to restrain himself from crouching, precious bundle and all, actually behind those broad shoulders.

  As he watched Enorches advance straight towards them, evidently prepared to speak face to face with Ithaca’s king, it was only by an intense effort that he forced himself to do what even his encounter with the oldest and most powerful of the Fates had not enabled him to do, namely look the man in the face.

  But the boy did manage to do this; and no action in all the years of his life was destined to be more momentous, and this purely in its effect upon himself, than his action in this case. And Nisos not only looked straight into Enorches’ face. He quite deliberately forced his mind into its fullest, clearest consciousness as he did so; though the effort he had to make to do it was an extreme one, almost as if he had to embrace a boy or a girl with whom he was in love but whose body was hung with glittering sharp-edged and even pointed ornaments that hurt him as he pressed them with his arms and hands and naked skin.