Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  But what else did the boy see that made him even forget, as he looked, Eione’s danger from the shaggy lasciviousness of the Goat-foot from Arcadia? He distinctly saw, erect on a huge flat stone under a cyclopean arch, the figure of a young girl, a young girl of about the same age as Eione, though she may have been a little taller, and it seemed to him as if, with an outstretched arm, that figure was waving to him; not to the others, but to him—to him alone.

  CHAPTER VI

  “But you don’t answer my question, Pontopereia. Why do you keep climbing the tower and looking inland like that? You’re not up to some game with any of these farm-boys round here, are you? I’ve always told you I wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing; so you’d better not begin it.

  “I don’t mean that you’re not to climb the tower, child; so you needn’t put on that sulky look. I know you like looking out over the bay and counting the sails and watching for foreign ships. I like doing that myself. Yes I’m always ready to play our old game of pretending we’re waiting for the King of the Blameless Ethiopians; and that when his ship shows itself it will have a black sail, so that we shall know it.

  “No, no! You’re not to slip off like that without a word! You’re much too fond of doing that; and I’ve noticed it’s grown on you as a regular habit these Spring days. Of course I know all young girls get Spring-Fever. I used to get it myself. In fact, old as I am, I do still. The wily old Earth-Mother herself must have had it, or something uncommonly like it, when she left her daughter alone with those daffodil-pickers, a proper temptation for the King of Hades. Daffodil-pickers! She had to swallow a few Pomegranate-seeds before she learnt how close lie the borders of Heaven and Hell!

  “But you weren’t looking seaward, or counting ships, or pretending to be waiting for a black sail. You were staring at those fir-trees and at all those half-bare oaks and at that open clearing on the top of the ridge, where on fine days we can see the Rock of the Nymph of Dryops.

  “Have you got into that crazy head of yours that just because I let Eione take you up there when this Moon was young you’ll see that same chit of a dairy-wench waiting for you in the same place now this Moon is old?

  “O yes! and another thing, Pontopereia, while I’ve got you to myself; for I don’t know what Zenios would do if he heard of this little new game of yours. Don’t you ever again—yes, you may well steal into the shadow of that Bust of Kadmos!—but you must listen to me now, though I can see how white your cheeks have gone and how those clumsy great legs of yours are shivering and shaking!—Don’t you ever again, my girl, go into Zenios’ underground treasury! I expect you’ve so often heard me laugh at the old fool about his pride and his miserliness and about all that nonsense of his being the rightful heir to the throne of Thebes, that you’ve begun to fancy you can play any of your wild-girl games upon the old stick-in-the-mud.

  “But I can assure you, my fine girl, that though you may be a prophet’s daughter, and though you may even have prophetic visions of your own, there’s one thing you can’t do, and that is meddle with Zenios’ treasure-shelves! Why, my dear crazy child, if he found me—yes, me, my very, very self!—fumbling and fidgetting, and flopping, and flouncing from shelf to shelf in that treasury of his there’d be a rumpus that would bring Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos up from the fields!

  “And do you think he’d put up with a child like you flibbertigibbetting down there? I don’t like to try even to think of what he might do—yes! do to you and do to me too for not looking after you better!—for I’ve seen him in these furious moods, which is something you, my good child, have never seen, and I can assure you if you had seen him in one of them you’d never again take that silver key from its hook in his bedroom, never again go down those steps to that door.”

  It was clear that Pontopereia would be obedient. But it was absolutely certain also that had the inscrutable Atropos met the eyes of this lovely guardian of a clumsy girl at this particular second the woman’s exultation over her victory would have sunk to the vanishing point.

  “Where is Zenios? Is he coming home to supper?” enquired Pontopereia when she had recovered herself.

  “O yes,” replied Okyrhöe, glancing at the reflection of them both in the big polished shield hanging on the wall over their heads, the shield which Zenios always swore had belonged to Kadmos himself, “he’ll be back all right for supper. In fact he’s got to meet that funny old man Moros, your friend Eione’s father or grandfather. I forget which it is! But he’s a quaint old fellow; and he certainly knows how to flatter. Zenios thinks highly of him since he’s ready to listen without end to endless talk about the great House of Kadmos, whence it came, and whither——”

  “Whither it’ll go when you and I have escaped from it!” interrupted Pontopereia; and though the girl’s eyes were fixed on the arched entrance to the room where they were talking, an entrance which in some incredible antiquity, had been carved out of ten yards of solid rock, Okyrhöe’s eyes were still absorbed in the reflection of the two of them in that great polished shield. And so intense was the power of concentration with which Okyrhöe’s self-interest had endowed her vision that it seemed to her a quite natural yielding to a quite natural impulse when she allowed the young girl to steal from her side and slip away in silence through that low deeply-cut arch into the open air, while she watched herself arrange her hair, arrange the veil that covered her hair, arrange what covered the veil that covered her hair, and, as she did so, permitted herself luxuriously and voluptuously to lie back in her chair and to tell herself, for the thousandth and one time, the thrilling story of her life up to date and all its drastic moves and dramatic crises.

  It must have been her feminine suspicion that Pontopereia had taken advantage of Zenios’ troublesome mania for being flattered to start an amorous affair with some farmer’s son of the neighbourhood, or even to exalt this new friendship with Eione into a romantic attachment, that set her own mind running so recklessly upon her own youth.

  Anyway she let herself recall the time when, being younger than Pontopereia was today, she had been a fellow-attendant along with Arsinöe among the crowd of spirited young girls from every part of the mainland at the court of King Priam in Ilium.

  Her inspiration for these memories came from her own beautiful face; and as at this moment, with Zenios walking to meet his aged flatterer and Pontopereia remorsefully pretending to be looking for a black sail on water that was already too dark to reveal any sail, and with Nemertes, the stalwart mother of their three faithful servants, Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos, yes, with Nemertes, she told herself, now at work in the kitchen preparing a plentiful meal for the three lads and a no less plentiful, but rather more elegant one for Zenios and herself, there was no immediate necessity to leave this shield-mirror, she allowed the motions of her fingers, about her head, her hair, and her perfect throat, to follow the arbitrary motions of her memory.

  And she remembered how her crafty mother from Crete, who had made her change her name from Genetyllis to Okyrhöe, had warned her against making friends with a wild strange girl at the same court whom everyone but the girl herself knew to be a bastard daughter of Hector.

  But with Arsinöe she had insisted on making friends; and had proved her wisdom in this when the crash came and the city was taken, for she succeeded in making Andromache, Hector’s widow, believe that it was she, and not Arsinöe, who had the right to call Hector father, and she had betrayed Arsinöe into the hands of Phoenician merchants bound for Ithaca, and while clinging herself to the ill-starred Andromache, she had succeeded at last in becoming the wife of the miser Zenios, and in aiding him in his flight from Thebes in company with Pontopereia.

  It had only been when Zenios in his craving for masculine society had begun to exercise his hospitable influence on the susceptible Moros that Okyrhöe learnt that Arsinöe like herself was a refugee in Ithaca; and although this piece of news had at first been a considerable shock to Okyrhöe, she was now, as she airily, though by no means absent-min
dedly, practised various expressions in profile, in three-quarters-face, and in full face, telling herself a fine story as to what she would do if by any strange chance she found herself confronting once again her old acquaintance, Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector the son of Priam….

  “Okyrhöe! what do you think? Who do you suppose——” The beautiful lady rose and swung round from her shield-mirror like an indignant sea-mew from the crest of a wave.

  The shock of seeing Pontopereia so quickly again and in such an unaccountable whirl of excitement was as irritating as it was startling. The girl had left her at her shield-mirror. The girl now found her at her shield-mirror. There was something annoying in being thus caught practising seductive expressions and the effective manipulation of dramatic drapery.

  “How often must I tell you, Pontopereia, that I won’t have you calling me Okyrhöe! You must call me Mother.”

  “But you are not——” the girl began; but seeing real anger in the woman’s face she hurriedly broke off. “The King of Ithaca has come, mother! He’s come with a heap of golden treasure to buy me from you and take me away with him!”

  The excitement of Pontopereia was so overwhelming that it seemed to have loosened her hair, enlarged her breasts, increased her height, and transformed her whole being to such an extent that her figure seemed to fill the arched passage that led out into the air. As a growing girl the daughter of Teiresias was at the opposite pole of girlhood from the young Eione: for, while this latter’s face was plain and homely, her limbs were those of a perfect dancer; but while Pontopereia’s limbs were thick, heavy, awkward and unwieldy, her face was moulded with exquisite delicacy as if for the perfect expression of pure inspiration. It was a face that lent itself to be possessed by a power that, even as you watched it, seemed able to change human flesh and blood into some rarer essence, as though air, water, and fire had joined in revolt against the heavier and more substantial fourth element with which they are normally associated.

  But though Okyrhöe had already recovered her composure and was now arranging her drapery round her shoulders with the absolute poise of a complete balance of personal being, as she begged the excited girl to tell her how large a bodyguard Odysseus had brought with him, and as she shifted her position from side to side in attempts to see if any of the royal attendants were visible between the outlet from this sequestered chamber and the curves of the sand-dunes descending to the edge of the sea, it was clear to Pontopereia that she had not yet decided upon her line of action.

  “May I go and bring them in, Mother? And then may I run and tell Zenios who’s come, and bring him back before he’s gone too far? The only danger is that if I do catch up with him—you know what he is, Mother!—he very likely will just come back alone and send me on—miles and miles on very likely!—to tell old Moros that the king has suddenly come to supper and if he comes too there’ll be one too many!”

  The daughter of Teiresias certainly revealed her insight into Okyrhöe’s nature by assuming that when the lovely lady finally decided in what direction her own chief private interests lay she wouldn’t waste a second in making up her mind what she wanted done.

  But what a girl of her age, however great her prophetic inspiration, naturally couldn’t know, was the enormous though imponderable part played in the lives of all grown-up women by that curious sixth sense that can only be clumsily and crudely defined by the words social instinct. Nor could she know that this same “social instinct” resembles pure animal instinct much closer than it resembles anything rational or logical, and, as such, depends to a large extent on sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

  “Can he possibly remember me?” Okyrhöe thought. Then, having dismissed that idea as out of the question—“Never mind,” she said to herself, “whether he does or not, I remember him perfectly well; and I remember that with him, where women are concerned, there are only two things, either simple lust, or simple affection. That being so——” And her train of thought concluded with obscene images.

  Meanwhile Pontopereia was wondering about the blood-stained ichor dripping from the left side of the one-winged horse, wondering about the implacably-pointed beard of Odysseus, pondering on the deeply cracked bosom of the club of Herakles, pondering on the jests and jokes and jibes and jabbering conjurations of the jiggering-juggering Zeuks, and finally seeing again the ever-vigilant Nisos with the gods alone knew what sort of precious treasure done up in a sack that reeked of mysterious far-away harbours.

  But Okyrhöe had already had time to make up her mind. Like the smoke of a burning arsenal her astounding decision filled the room and went eddying forth in spiral circles over the whole of Ornax and over the dark waters of the whole bay.

  “What I’ve got to do is to leave Nemertes to look after Zenios, take Pontopereia with me—by the gods if they want her they shall have us both!—go with them to the palace of Odysseus; and, once there, having got rid of the old man’s old nurse, try my hand at being a combination of Kalypso and Penelope; and, as long as Athene leaves me in peace, that’ll be pretty easy!”

  “No, child,” she commanded in the strong firm tone of a born feminine ruler, “No, child, I’ll come with you to welcome them. Oh no! I can’t possibly spare you to run after Zenios. Let him meet old Moros and bring him back. Nemertes must prepare a really royal meal and when Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos have washed and changed their clothes and had their own supper, they must wait at table! So come on, child, we must tell Nemertes what’s in store for her. It’s lucky we killed that old boar-pig last week; aye! What a piece of luck that is! Nemertes must have enough meat in the larder for three Odysseuses! Well, come along my dear!”

  It is certain that the primeval dining-hall of Ornax had never seen such a satisfying feast as the one with which, only a few hours later, the three gratified guests along with their entertainers were delighting their souls.

  What added an unexpected and quite special interest to this improvised banquet was the fact that, along with old Moros, Zenios had brought back to Ornax none other than Petraia’s sister who after a distressing scene with the Latin Nymph Egeria had embarked frantically for home; and by the aid of a real and not pretended black sail had been brought to this very coast.

  To the complete surprise of their hostess the heart and soul of the whole dinner was Zeuks. Nor was it only Okyrhöe who was astonished at the way this plain rustic Achaean dominated the situation and entertained them all. Nisos was amazed at what he saw and heard. Zenios though he condescended to chuckle now and again, was obviously more interested in a flask of a special kind of wine that Moros had brought for him than in anything else; but the fact that the first Master that Ornax had had for a thousand years, had had indeed since men and Titans were almost indistinguishable in their hostility to the gods, was so abnormally thick-skinned, so self-centred, so toweringly conventional, did undoubtedly contribute to the banquet’s success.

  Zenios was indeed so magnificently stupid as to take it for granted that his being of the same blood as the famous Kadmos and possessing that potentate’s Shield, Drinking-Horn, and Sceptre in the shape of a Thyrsus, were circumstances that did so much honour to any guest that chance might send him that no more was required.

  And no more was required. Zenios’ guests were the luckiest of guests. They were left to entertain themselves. Nor was the fact of Zenios being such an obsessed collector of objects made of gold detrimental to what might be called the pleasant negativeness of his hospitality. His visitors obscurely thought of themselves—so completely did the mania of the born collector dominate the atmosphere of his table—as if they too were rare and precious and had been brought there for that reason.

  Nor was this feeling contradicted by the nature of the locality. Ornax was literally a House of Ruins; but it was not itself a ruin. It had come to be created out of a physical acme of desperate isolation in combination with a psychic acme of impervious conceit. But it had been created by a woman; and thus the newly arisen House of Ornax had adva
ntages, qualities, amenities and conveniences, beyond most of the Kings’ Houses in Hellas.

  In the first place it was divided into five essential structures; the Mirror Room, where hung the Shield of Kadmos; the sleeping Chambers with little stone-passages and wooden doors connecting them; the Dining-Hall, prepared for the reception of about twenty guests with no less than three “guest-thrones”, as well as the permanent host-throne, ensconced in which the greatest of Collectors enjoyed his meat, his wine, and an experimental variety of baked bread and sweet-meat condiments on every night of the year; the underground treasure-chamber, entered by descending quite a long flight of stone steps, at the bottom of which was a low-arched chamber entirely surrounded by extensive shelves scooped out of solid rock and crowded with all manner of ancient vessels and platters and bowls and goblets, things that were by no means all Theban, far less all connected with Kadmos, but things that had been got together by Xenios himself, in his double role as an acquisitive collector and an implacable miser.

  And finally there was the kitchen. This was so large, so ancient, so monumental, that a visitor’s first thought would be that only a goddess could possibly preside over such a place.

  Quite apart from her creation of this ideal abode for herself and Zenios, Okyrhöe had made sure that outside the great Kitchen there was a House of Shelter for Nemertes and her sons. And it was within the entrance to this annexe that a little private chamber had been constructed for Pontopereia and for her alone.

  Okyrhöe had wisely decided, when the three of them first took possession of this long-deserted House by the Sea, that the best part for herself to play was the double one of Zenios’ wife and the bastard daughter of Hector; for this was a role that left her entirely independent and free at any moment to leave both Zenios and Pontopereia for any other human “stepping-stone to higher things” that Fate or Chance might provide. Absolute freedom for herself had been the guiding principle of all her actions since she first heard of Ornax. She had heard of the place from a Tyrian pirate.