Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  And she had scarcely heard of it before she persuaded Zenios to secure the services not only of the man and his ship but of the man’s sister Nemertes, the murder of whose builder-husband she contrived on their way, for it can be imagined how soon she made the ship’s master her accomplice; and indeed the man was well advised by his sister to weigh anchor and clear off while the going was good.

  Old Moros had never seen in all his days on earth anything so memorable as what he saw at this banquet. He was a kind-hearted man, however. Kind-heartedness had indeed been his chief handicap in life. He always found it difficult not to identify his feelings with the feelings of every person, man, woman or child, whom he came across. Each personality old Moros encountered impinged upon the personality of old Moros more than in her ordinary, rough-and-ready rules for human existence Nature had altogether allowed for. Thus while he watched the famous King Odysseus with awe and reverence, and stole as many infatuated glances as he dared at their enthralling hostess, he couldn’t help again and again and again, casting a sympathetic, protective, and even paternal look at the newly-landed sister of Petraia, who sat by his side, while their far-sighted hostess was thinking, “I must keep those two together till Moros gets so concerned about her that he fetches a cart to carry her home.” For the obvious truth was that Petraia’s sister was pregnant.

  How far gone was her pregnancy old Moros was not experienced enough in the child-bearing of ladies to have the least idea; but he saw enough for his habitual sympathy to beset him. Most tenderly he warded off the excess of wine offered the woman by the tallest of the three sons of Nemertes. All the three were attired in some exquisitely-washed white stuff that somehow gave old Moros the feeling that he was surrounded by male Sirens in the depths of the sea, who were always wanting to refill both his own and his neighbour’s wine-cup, the neighbour for whose sake, so as to keep her repeated refusals from being observed, for luckily the wine did not incommode his own stomach, he succeeded in keeping their two glasses on his side of her plate.

  “For the third time!” cried Zeuks, rising to his feet and striking the black bull’s horn, rimmed with massive silver, from which he was drinking, against the golden goblet that had been so carefully chosen by Okyrhöe for Odysseus, “I call upon you all to join with me in defeating the ultimate design of this Monster, Enorches, who has dared to wrench half the life from these two celestial Horses!

  “What is it I heard you say in your heart just now, great king, that you want us all to do? I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you now, and I’ll tell you once and for all!

  “Yes, yes! You can look at me with that everlasting look of yours, which says to the entire universe ‘Stop this business of acceptance as if there were no such thing as choice. Come! come! Do something about it!’ That’s what your pointed beard, sticking out like the sword of a sword-fish is forever saying: ‘For the sake of all the gods in the sky do something about it!’

  “But when we ordinary people want ‘to do something about it, we simply don’t know what to try to do!’ Listen, therefore, O great king, to the word of one of the humblest of your subjects, and stick your beard into me when I go wrong in what I say!

  “What we all want in our hearts, men and women alike, is a peaceful and at the same time an active life. There are too many prophets and oracles too, who always tell us to crown some king, to obey some law, to follow some hero, to embrace some system, to accept some philosophy, to invade some country, to sack some city!

  “Well then, O great King, well then, dear Lords and Ladies, what happens? We burn that city, we over-run that country, we change our name, our language, our manners, our dress, our habits. But what is the result? Are we any happier? Not a bit of it! Are we any richer? Not by a farthing! Are we any wiser? Ask our wives and children! Are we honester, nobler, braver, kinder, tenderer, more sympathetic, more long-suffering, more enduring, more unconquerable, more impregnable? We are not!

  “And yet we have invaded Persia, sacked Ecbatana, gutted Syracuse, burnt Troy! And yet we have accepted the philosophy of Parmenides. We have offered sacrifice to the God of Israel. We have bowed our heads in the Temple of Baal. We have given our maidens to Pan and our boys to Moloch. And are we the happier for it? Are we the wiser for it?

  “Not a jot! Our eyes still weep salt tears! Our slaves still sweat blood! Our women still bear abortions! Our grapes are still sour! Our hives still lack honey! Our figs still lack sweetness! Our fountains are still slow to run, and our streams still sink in the same sand and dry in the same desert!

  “What therefore is the word for the unenlightened and the sign for the uninspired? What is the clue for the lost in the wilderness; and the secret of recovery for the heavy of heart? Is it what Enorches calls the Mystery of Love that will save us? Is it the holy ecstasy of Dionysos that will set us straight in the path of happiness?

  “Never on your life, great King! Never on your lives, my lovely companions! The only thing that can set us on the path of happiness is to create carvers of joy in our own secret selves and moulders of delight in our own hidden souls. And we must do it by the countering and confounding of the most extreme contradictions.

  “We can’t do it, I tell you, by trying to mingle these opposites in confused conglomeration! No! we must keep our lives in natural advances and retreats, in ebb and flow, in up and down, in pull devil and pull tailor, till the end of the only round we know in this crazy planetary game! Shall I tell you O great King, shall I tell you most sweet and beautiful ladies, what, in spite of this Priest of Orpheus with his Eros and his Dionysus, is the real secret of the whole of life, of the whole of experience, of the whole of existence, of the whole of everything?

  “I mean of course the secret of it for each and every one of us? I mean the ultimate word that eventually, when we have all been dead for a hundred-thousand years, will still describe the idea, the feeling, the emotion for every single consciousness possessed of what we call life? I have decided to announce to you tonight a word of my own which at least expresses one aspect of the complicated meaning that some magic word must eventually possess, when in a hundred-thousand years it is invented. My poor word is a common and an extremely simple word. It is—do not smile, most grave King!

  “Yes! I will boldly utter it!—It is the word ‘Prokleesis’. And now I must struggle to make clear some of the beautiful, terrible, stirring, satisfying, comforting, restoring, consoling, redeeming, creating meanings that I have put into this natural and simple word, Prokleesis! For I do here and now, O great King! I do here and now, most lovely ladies! I do here and now, Moros my old friend, Nisos my young friend, and you three, heroic sons of the lady Nemertes, who is the friend of all of us, as indeed this banquet, which is the grandest banquet I have ever enjoyed, proves up to the hilt, I do here and now proclaim, to all living creatures in all the innumerable worlds, that for each and every one of us, whether human, super-human, or sub-human, whether male or female, whether old or young, that the word Prokleesis whose simplest meaning is a ‘defiance’ or ‘challenge’ is the best clue to life we can have!

  “Yes, Prokleesis is the word. We must ‘challenge’ life from our childhood to our old age! We must ‘defy’ life to quench our spirit and to beat us down! We must ‘challenge’ it, whatever it may be, to a fight to the finish! Don’t you see, O great King, don’t you see, my sweet friends, how the crafty and wicked Enorches is really advocating an escape into death in place of a battle with life? His Eros and his Dionysos are both different names for the same plunge into the same Nothingness.

  “One is a plunge into it by way of love, and the other by way of drink. Whatever else to be alive upon earth, or above earth, or under earth, may mean to those who are landed in it or sunk in it or confronted by it, it is clear that it means a challenge to a battle! O my friends, my friends, we have not got the secret of life, I mean the secret of our experience of life for ourselves, till we’ve defied it to make us cry, ‘Hold! Enough!’ This challenge, this ‘P
rokleesis,’ is the secret of life for us.

  “As to what the secret of life is for life itself, who can answer such a question? We can only answer for ourselves. The animals and birds and fishes can only answer for themselves. Whatever it is that calls itself the cause of life, or imagines itself to be the cause of life, or is supposed to be the cause of life by the tribal tradition of this race or that race, or by the geographical tradition of Northern or Southern life, or of Eastern or Western life, or Middle-Eastern life, or of life at the bottom of the ocean, or of life among the Gods in the sky, or of life among the Titans in Tartaros, or of life among the ghosts of Hades—if Ghosts have any life and if there are any ghosts left there now; for the story runs that they have all escaped, even as this wise lady here has come back to her own from the Latin cavern of the Nymph Egeria!

  “No, we have not the faintest idea as to how this world of colour and form, and of solid and watery and airy and fiery substance ever appeared before us or ever inspired its favourite champions with the overpowering suggestion that we ourselves are nothing but transitory and dreamlike portions of its evanescent mirage!

  “Let us suppose that at this very moment there suddenly crowded into this beautiful dining-hall twenty murderous pirates, from an unknown land beyond Ultima Thule, and carrying ropes woven of a breakable hemp! And let us imagine these pirates bind each of us, men and women alike, with their ropes, and deliberately begin chopping us to bits with their sharp knives! Call up such a scene, O great King, thou who hast known in thy vast travels worse scenes than this! Call up such a scene, sweet ladies! Call up such a scene, brave men!

  “Now be absolutely honest with yourselves, every one of you here and tell yourselves, not aloud to the rest of us, but in silence, each heart to heart alone, exactly how you would feel as you watched what was going on and saw your own turn coming nearer and nearer, and heard the shrieks and groans of each particular victim.”

  As Zeuks spoke in this way it was very clear what the feelings of Omphos and Kissos and Sykos would have been under the conditions he described as from behind the chair of Zenios they listened with awestruck attention. It was also clear that the three young men’s interest in what Zeuks was saying displeased their mistress Okyrhöe; for she promptly gave them a peremptory signal to go and help their mother in the kitchen; but as they discreetly followed one another out of the hall they received from Zeuks just as if they had been relatives of Zenios, and not servants at all, an extremely friendly and fraternal smile of recognizance.

  Zenios himself, still absorbed in what remained on his large antique Babylonian plate, evidently considered that this drunken babbling horse-stealing bastard from a remote farm at the other end of the island whose future destiny even Atropos, unless the old lady had Anangke, or Necessity at one elbow, and Tyche, or Chance, at the other, would have been puzzled to predict, though he might propitiate a poverty-stricken king like Odysseus by his antics, was not the sort of person to interest a rich frequenter of the Bazaars and Markets of Thebes!

  But Zeuks had not failed to notice that although the old King was too absorbed in his own thoughts to pay much attention to what was going on round him, there had come a moment, the same moment no doubt when the speaker had caught that response in the faces of the three sons of Nemertes, at which the old hero’s pointed beard had suddenly jerked itself up in an automatic call to battle.

  It was as if the bones of his jaw had answered a physiological summons independently of his mind. And this automatic jerk of the well-trimmed beard of the blinder of Polyphemus in some profoundly subtle way so completely satisfied the kidnapper of Pegasos that he suddenly became, at least in the eyes of Nisos who was watching him carefully a completely different person.

  That curious appearance of being unnaturally bloated, as if his outer skin, like a leather bottle whereof the contents had become, by reason of some sort of spiritual fermentation, too powerful to be contained in such a prison had been replaced by a singular toughening, at least that is what appeared to have occurred, of the actual flesh of his face; and the result of this was to make the expression of his face harder, firmer, and though no less humorous, much more formidable in the nature of its humour.

  Nisos noticed, something else too, though if he’d tried to describe it to his brother or his parents or even to his friend Tis, he would probably have become tongue-tied and might even have retreated into that quite special silence which we associate with idiots; but what he would have wanted to explain about this more powerful humour in Zeuks’ expressive countenance was that in its inherent nature it was not proud or vain or conceited, nor did it, like almost all so-called “prophets” and “thinkers”, shut all doors but the one it came in by, and close all windows but the one it looked out of!

  By this time all their eyes were fixed upon Zeuks. The large platter upon which Zenios had been concentrating was now as empty as if that insatiable collector of every possible species of plate that the artists among men have ever carved and moulded in precious metal had licked it clean that night of every stain it had acquired while the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Rising carried it beneath the earth to the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Setting!

  Odysseus himself had allowed his wandering mind to return to the immediate situation; and he was now watching Zeuks with the sort of steady, quiet, amused, contemplative interest that the master of a Circus of performing animals would display in the unexpected arrival of a caravan of freshly-caught creatures from the Mountains of the Moon.

  As for Okyrhöe, she had very quickly decided that Zeuks was a person who had to be treated on completely different lines from any of the other original personalities she had hitherto succeeded in dominating.

  “I must take him,” she told herself, “by a direct attack. It would be no good to try to get round him.”

  Old Moros was watching Zeuks very much as Tis would have done. Indeed Nisos, as he glanced at him to see how he received this unexpected oration from a plain farmer from Cuckoo-Hill, was struck by the almost exact parallel in the old man’s features to the way Tis would open his mouth wider and wider as his wonder increased at the eloquence to which he was listening.

  “He can’t follow a word,” Nisos told himself. “It’s the man’s power of stringing the words together that strikes him as the marvel!”

  As for the fugitive from the Cave of Egeria, Nisos was still young enough to feel an intense discomfort every time she caught his attention, a discomfort which so far he had managed to ward off by repeating mechanically a little prayer to Hera about birth that Petraia had taught him in his childhood; but since by this time he had come to regard Zeuks as his fellow-adventurer and even had begun to tell himself an extremely romantic story of their more and more intimate association as in the wake of their heroic king they would trace in the unrevealing face of the waters the grave of lost Atlantis, it annoyed him to notice that whenever the pregnant woman looked at Zeuks she gave a queer kind of involuntary shudder, as if something about this startling apparition of a neatly-attired farmer of middle height, moderate good looks, and respectfully conventional manner, abandoning himself to an obscure thaumaturgic incantation for the redemption of the world, gave her a weird shock and made her feel that she must escape such a spectacle or her pains might begin without warning.

  Nisos himself as he leant forward with his elbows on the wine-spilt-board, dug the fingers of his right hand into a new loaf from Nemertes’ oven, while in his left hand he clutched tightly a small gourd. Little trickles of wine kept dripping from this latter object every time in his excitement he turned it upside-down; while fragments of sweet-smelling crust fell with almost equal frequency as he squeezed the loaf. The boy was in a queer mood; for although the immediate hoof-beat of each galloping moment of time thudded rough-shod, as you might say, over the fore-front of his consciousness, behind it there kept humming and drumming a troubled comparison, of which he felt heartily ashamed, and yet in which he was unable to stop indulging, a com
parison between the daughter of Teiresias, who kept meeting his eyes and who was clearly studying him with interest, and his friend Eione, the youngest sister of Tis, the vision of whose exquisite limbs as she bent to re-arrange the folds of her dress had grown all the more vivid to him since his disturbing encounter with the goat-foot Pan.

  But Eione’s childish features were unquestionably plain and homely; whereas, as he was now at such close quarters with Pontopereia he could dwell for steadily increasing spaces of time upon her beautiful and subtly intellectual face.

  Ironically enough those two troublesome hamperers of the well-governed order of Themis, namely Tyche and Anangke, or chance and necessity, prevented him, though it was only by means of the very edge of the supper-board from noting how totally devoid of lightness and grace were the awkward limbs with which Nature in the reckless scattering of her bounty had burdened the daughter of Teiresias.

  Had the competent and capable Nemertes not been busy in her kitchen preparing a culminating dish of sweet-meats it is quite possible that she would have reacted to the words and behaviour of Zeuks in a manner that would have come nearer to the heart of the utterer than any of the rest.

  As to Odysseus himself, that wily old hero had made it a rule long ago never to waste his energy in redundant reactions. He accepted the message of Zeuks at its purely practical and pragmatic face-value: and since only certain portions of it could fall in with his own purpose, his calm empirical mind had enough to do in isolating these from the rest without getting excited about anything else.

  The moment he entered Okyrhöe’s dining-hall, the shrewd old king saw that it was she and not the collector of images who was responsible for the transformation of the aboriginal Ornax into a contemporary palace far more luxurious than his own; and in his diplomatic brain there began to take shape, as he cast glance after glance at the changing expressions, the lively gestures, the rapid decisive commands, of the lady of the house, the embryo idea that if the soothsaying daughter of a dead prophet was likely to help the advancement of his adventure, this formidable woman, if by any possible compulsion or enticement he could sweep her into his scheme, might turn out an even more effective aid. He hadn’t relinquished his faithful Heraklean club when he crossed the threshold of this complicated group of palatial erections. In fact from where he now sat, while the lady’s airy revelations of her life in the city of Kadmos were interrupted by Zeuks’ reverberating “prokleesis”, he could see the familiar curves of his queer-looking weapon propped against the elbow of a small stone-seat cut in the wall, a seat that would be far too narrow for any contemporary hips, whether male or female.