Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  The eyes of Atropos seemed to hold behind them, when she had done speaking, so much more than the half-named body of a little, fleshless, shrivelled, skinny old woman, that Nisos continued to stare in petrified awe into their singular depths.

  The sensation they gave him was that the sky above Ithaca and indeed above all the isles in all the bays and seas and straits and gulfs of the land of the Achaeans, together with the interiorly receding depths of all that land itself, the depths, in fact, of all the various solid elements that composed the rocks and sand and earth and soil of which that land was composed, had that pair of eyes as their eyes, and were even now, those remotenesses of sky beyond limit, and those staggering recessions of terrestrial matter beyond limit, gazing at him in a positively ghastly intensity while they informed him that the real deciders of his fate and of the fate of the old hero at his side, and of the fate of Eione, the ideal loveliness of whose perfect form had been for him the living background of the whole of this wild ride, were not the Fates nor the Gods nor the sublime obstinacy and cunning of Odysseus, but, as Atropos herself had just admitted, the inescapable pressure of pitiless Necessity and the motiveless antics of causeless Chance.

  The tension, as they thus met once again, between the heart of Nisos and the eyes of Atropos was however soon brought to an end by an abrupt awakening movement in the goat-legged and goat-horned Personage lying in the shadow of that rock. He didn’t wake quickly. He awoke slowly. But no sooner had he lifted a hand, not even to scratch his head but to grope with lecherous fingers amid the foliations of grey lichen that covered the base of the rock than an astonishing thing happened; and what was queerest about this thing was that it was felt by everybody and that it was inescapable.

  Both the animals quite evidently felt it. Odysseus felt it. Nisos felt it. And Zeuks felt it. The fragile old figure beneath the spruce-fir on the top of the rock must at that moment have been occultly, covertly, and peremptorily summoned to some other significant parting of the ways for persons in whose destiny she was interested; for she promptly took advantage of this opportune distraction, and gathering her flimsy garments about her scrambled down from the rock and disappeared among the trees to sea-ward.

  Nisos was amazed at what had begun to happen to him the very first moment that this goat-legged sleeper opened his eyes. He had been so hypnotized into a sort of philosophic acceptance of things he could only half follow, that, when he found himself shaking from head to foot in extreme panic-terror, but without the faintest notion of why the sudden fear had come upon him, he felt as if he were going mad. Was some appalling danger threatening them all, including the animals who had brought them here? And had the oldest and strongest of the Spinners of Destiny come to warn them, and had now gone to ward off from them the approaching danger?

  Nisos felt certain he was not more affected by this sudden and inexplicable panic than were his companions. He could see that the horses were trembling; and indeed he experienced in the teeth of this weird terror a proud satisfaction that his own right arm which, while he was holding his colloquy with Atropos, he had kept stretched out, had not loosened or lessened the pressure of the hand with which he was supporting the great treasure-sack, propt on the back of Pegasos.

  And it was clear to him that the wits of Odysseus were not in any more danger of being lost in this mysterious panic than his own. The old king calmly advanced towards the recumbent goat-man, dragging Arion with him. Nisos noticed too that he held the bridle with his left hand while he advanced, and that he gripped the Heraklean club firmly with his right.

  “Hail to you,” the old king said, “whoever you may be—whether immortal or mortal, whether god or man! And I pray you, if you are a god, to pardon us for disturbing your noon-sleep before natural termination. I am Odysseus and I have come with Nisos Naubolides and with our good friend Zeuks to do honour to the daughter of the great dead Prophet Teiresias whom many-voiced Rumour declares has been brought from Thebes to a dwelling here, hard by the sea. If, therefore, whether you are a god or a man, you will assist us in finding this House, I, Odysseus, son of Laertes, will of my free heart, give you whatever your soul desires of the treasure we carry with us.”

  The prostrate goat-man heard him to the end without stirring. Then he made a very quick movement. He rolled the greenish-black eye-balls of the enormous whites of his nymph-ravishing eyes, and without changing his position, or relaxing his clutch upon the lichen-tuft he was fondling, he took in everything. In fact from the look in those exploring eyes he did more than take in everything. You could have said he devoured, drank up, and erotically possessed everything; not only the old warrior with his bowsprit beard and full-bosomed club advancing upon him, but the half-winged Pegasos, the half-maned Arion, the grave, slender boy Nisos, and every bulge in the choreographic blur which the blazing sun created out of the bucolic features of Zeuks—except the great sack of treasure, across which those rolling eyes flitted without offering it the faintest attention.

  Then the old king spoke again: “Are you prepared to show us the way to the house by the sea, whither these Thebans, if such they are, have brought the daughter of Teiresias?”

  The goat-horned, goat-legged one suddenly leapt to his feet and with a rough and rude gesture pushed past Odysseus and seizing Zeuks by his elbows stared offensively and yet in some queer way possessively and almost paternally into his face. Over the wounded back of Pegasos, which, though still tender to the touch and not by any means healed, had been considerably soothed by its owner’s spittle, it was still possible for Nisos to see Zeuks’ expression, and it was an amazement to him to remark how quietly, and yet with a sort of comical expectation of more dramatic revelations to follow, he took the gross, yet almost cajoling stare of this horned and hairy Being.

  “You are!—you are! And yet you cannot be!” blurted out the puzzled and bewildered God-Beast; and Nisos never forgot the mixture of earthy roguery, rustic guile, spontaneous magical power, along with the professional horned-ram propitiation of a cunning old shepherd, in the goat-legged creature’s tone.

  But the capturer and dominator of Pegasos and Arion, the man who was more than a match for the Priest of the Mysteries, was once again completely master of the situation. With an easy assumption of authority—and yet our clever young Nisos didn’t miss the shade of something that resembled a curious spasm of play-acting in his tone—Zeuks freed himself from the God-Beast’s hold and turned to Odysseus.

  “We are in the presence, O King,” he blurted out with an irresponsible chuckle, while the goat-horned creature leaned his chin upon the head of Pegasos and began whispering in one of the flying horse’s nervous and twitching ears, “of none other than the great god Pan himself. For some curious reason that I cannot explain to you, O king, this great and most benevolent deity has, ever since he first appeared to me on my farm, confused me with a lad he knew on the farm of farmer Dryops, whose favourite Nymph was Erikepaia, though we ignorant farm-labourers persisted in calling her Dryope or Dryopea, but who rejoiced to share Pan’s bed in the moss and ferns of this farmer Dryops’ Arcadian inheritance.

  “Unlike the jealous and tyrannical Dryops, whose despotic arms Erikepaia joyfully exchanged for those of this famous god who fills the udders of Arcadian cattle with the richest milk and the hives of Arcadian bees with the sweetest honey, I have been proud, though she was loved by this kindly god, to have myself loved the lovely Erikepaia long and loyally, and long after she grew too old for a god’s embraces I loved her. I loved her when she grew old with the oak of her adoption, which she and I together dug up from that Arcadian valley and planted here, here by the side of this rock, here where thou, O great Pan, whether thou knewest it or not, wast sleeping a moment ago.

  “Her oak has fallen into dust and Erikepaia with it; but never once did the Nymph who had been loved by Pan or the farmer, my poor self, who loved the Nymph that had been loved by Pan, ever think of him save with true worship.”

  It was only when Zeuks had finis
hed speaking that the last thing anyone of them expected happened.

  The goat-legged Being swung away from Pegasos and approached Odysseus. Then with a movement so swift and yet so gentle that Nisos imagined he was lifting the hero’s hand to his lips as a sign that he would himself be his guide to the house of the fugitives from Thebes he bit the king’s hand with such sudden and vicious force that the old man dropped his club to the ground.

  In an instant the god was upon the back of Arion, who with mildly startled up-tossed head tore his bridle from Odysseus, and, while what was left of his beautiful black mane was tossed across his rider’s lean, goat-hairy shanks, set off at a gallop in the direction from which they had all just come; but as he rode away, the god of milk and butter and honey looked back over his shoulder at Nisos, as if deliberately wishing to include him also among the victims of his mischievous and shameless amorousness.

  “Pegasos has told me,” he cried, “that you’ve left at the palace a sweet little shepherdess called Eione who is just made to delight my simple taste. She’ll suit me better, I fancy, than any prophetic daughter of Teiresias!”

  Horse and rider, they were soon out of sight; but the shrewd Zeuks had not missed a swift instinctive move towards Pegasos made by Nisos the moment the goat-horned one flung out that word: “Eione”.

  “No, no, my dear boy!” he cried sharply. “’Twould be crazy to try to catch them! And what could you do if you did catch them? All the while I lodged—and in this very place—with Erikepaia, she never once told me of any occasion during the time she was loved by Pan when he made her jealous of a mortal maid.”

  He turned to Odysseus with a look of whimsical appeal, which, though it had something at once gravely conspiring and gaily mischievous, contained also an immediate and extremely practical warning. And then, while he kept one hand in kindly restraint on the boy’s shoulder, he boldly laid the other on the Club of Herakles which the king, having picked it up from the ground, had carefully balanced, too absorbed to give it more than a secondary place in his mind, on the unwounded portion of the back of Pegasos.

  “Our young friend here, O great king,” protested Zeuks; “is impatient for our return so that he can protect his girl from the advances of this amorous goat-foot; but I tell him that, though, we can wound these immortal creatures and even draw ichor from their veins till they are too weak to move, we cannot plunge them as they can plunge us into that vast company of spirits beyond counting, such as have lately, the rumour runs, broken loose from Hades—into the company of those who can only fly like the flight of birds where no birds are and can only cry like the echoes of voices where no voices are, until the end of time.”

  “Let us, O great Master,” begged Nisos, who for all Zeuks’ words could not help vividly visualizing the white soft body of Eione helplessly yielded up to those lean hairy shanks and to those gross bristly lips of the immortal Goat-foot, “pray desperately to Atropos that fate may conquer both necessity and chance and bring us quick, quick, quick, to that House by the Sea whence without delay we can return home! O dear master, O great king, this, I swear, is what Pegasos wants, for I can feel him trembling and quivering under our hands!”

  All the while the boy was making this appeal he was working hard with both his hands to get the great sack of treasure nearer the horse’s tail and further away from its shoulders.

  “But, my friends,” groaned Odysseus, raising his bowsprit beard and drawing in his breath towards the four quarters of the horizon one by one. “How, in the name of Pallas Athene, are we to know in what direction this accurst place lies? If only we could hear the sea; that would be a surer help than any praying to any goddess of fate.”

  For a moment they were all three silent. Then the two men became aware of unrestrained sobs breaking from the throat of Nisos. And for another moment, however intently they listened, that was the only sound.

  Suddenly Odysseus murmured, as if thinking aloud: “I have felt this happen before, once, twice, three times before! There may be nothing in it; but, on the other hand, it may be—We must doubt everything—including doubt. Yes, there! There it is again! So be it. I can only try.” He lifted the club an inch or two, held it very lightly, and waited again. He held it as if he were testing its weight. He held it so that in its whole length it was removed from contact with the back of Pegasos. Then, still holding it lightly with his right hand, but grasping the horse’s bridle with his left, he began walking rapidly straight past the rock and into what looked like the thickest part of the fir-forest that completely surrounded them. Nisos, lifting his head now, thought silently: “He is making the club lead us! O Atropos, let us get back in time to save her!” The path by which they had come had vanished; and now indeed there was no path at all. But Odysseus led them forward without the faintest hesitation, nor was there any hesitation in the manner in which Pegasos followed, the treasure-sack propt on his rump, and Nisos keeping it from falling, while Zeuks with a large fern in his hand followed close behind, driving the flies from the raw on the horse’s back whence Enorches had wrenched the wing.

  Thus they steadily advanced, weaving their way in and out among the closely-growing fir-trees, and every now and then ascending and descending some small eminence usually of a circular shape and not unfrequently crowned with incredibly ancient stones of a kind totally different from any the island itself supplied, and in some cases, Nisos noticed as they passed, engraved with hieroglyphs not one letter of which he could recognize as Achaean or Hellenic.

  And as they went on it was still the club of Herakles who led them; and Nisos often wondered whether he himself or Zeuks could have possibly caught, just through the palm of their hand, that subtle, illusive, delicate quiver, like the faint ripple of water seeking its level, by which the club conveyed its intimation of direction to the hand that had blinded Polyphemos.

  Meanwhile within his “life-crack”, as to himself the club called their refuge, the silky wings of Pyraust, the brown moth, were fluttering with a desperate desire to fly homewards in the track of Arion and Pan.

  “You shan’t! You shan’t! You shan’t!” shrilled the black fly in its highest-pitched voice. “I’d perish before I’d let you do anything so crazy! Don’t you see, you sweet, delectable, adorable, little fool, that the trees are already throwing long shadows, and didn’t you notice that on the crest of that last little hill we crossed the tree-trunks had a golden glow on their bark?”

  The lovely little moth hurried to retort to this in an ironic assumption of pitiful weakness and naive innocence that not only made the fly feel a complete fool but removed from his proud heart every drop of that sweet metheglin of male superiority with which he had been intoxicating himself as he pictured their flight home together side by side in the “Wolf-Light” of the early dawn.

  “Oh I know, I know,” cried the brown moth, “how lazy and luxurious it is of me to think of flying in the dark. But O it’s so nice, though I know it’s naughty of me to enjoy such a thing, to feel the great big strong black night holding me up on every side and whispering to me all the time: ‘Lean on me and you’ll be absolutely safe! Spread out your beautiful wings under me and you’ll see how soon you’ll learn to swim with me, ride with me, float with me, yes! you darling little moth, till I fill every nerve beneath your skin, and every pore in your skin, and every cavity in your lovely and trembling form with my calm and cool support!’

  “Thus whispers the black night; and nobody can ever know,” continued the subtle and teasing moth, “all that the darkness of night means to me!”

  The fly gave such a jerk of metaphysical excitement at this speech that the club’s consciousness of a shock in the “life-crack” of his honeysuckle-twisted or ivy-twisted bosom very nearly disturbed the whole piloting of their cortège.

  “Why then, O most lovely and bewitching of self-deceivers, do you always try so desperately to burn yourself to death in any flame of light?”

  The beautiful moth’s answer to this piece of logic h
ad, however, to be postponed; for it was at that very second that they arrived at the end of the wood. There, before them, lay the salt waves with their islands and ships and rocky reefs and wide-stretching curving bays. And there, beyond all these, in far-away, vision-fulfilling, story-ending, mystery-resolving, resting-places for the imagination, the eyes of those three human beings were led further and yet further, to the vast horizons of the encircling sea.

  And the great Club of Herakles ceased its rudder-like quiverings as impelled by an irresistible impulse Odysseus lifted the great weapon high above his head and shook it in the air as if he, a man among men, were taking it on himself to challenge that golden sun-path which, originating behind him, was now flowing across the darkening waters!

  Yes! and to challenge the divine ether itself he lifted it up, the ether under which the sea-spaces before him extended beyond the ships, beyond the islands, beyond the main-land, beyond those far-away Asiatic mountains, on the Eastern verge of the world, where from the image of Niobe, the mother of mankind, fell no longer that ceaseless torrent of tears, and finally to challenge the very trident of Poseidon himself as he strove to dominate the multitudinous waves.

  The two men, the now one-winged horse, the Heraklean club, the two insects, and our young friend Nisos, they were all silent; they were all gazing in front of them. What they saw as they gazed was the ruin of a building so colossal in its pre-historic enormity that the first impression Nisos had of it was that it ought to have sunk down by its own weight thousands of years ago to the very centre of the earth.