Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  No smile came to his lips as he realized the direction his thoughts were on the verge of taking, as in spite of himself he listened to Zeuks’ description of the in-rush of the murderous crowd of imaginary pirates and projected himself, for the push of his practical imagination could hardly be described in any other way, into breaking his bonds, scattering the bodies of his enemies, and grasping his club by the middle!

  But if Zeuks’ outburst of “prokleesis” had made even the paramour of the Daughter of the Sun jerk up his trim beard, it can be well understood how it made the two insects inside it jump and cry out. With them, however, the situation was just opposite to what it had been earlier that day; for now it was the fly who was keen to leave their shelter and the moth who was all for restraining him.

  “But, Pyraust darling, I must find out whether the King is sweating under his beard! I know him so well that I know that that is the great sign. If there’s a drop of perspiration under his beard you may depend on it that he’s going to do something serious and do it soon. Please don’t hold me so tight, my sweet friend. I swear I won’t go further than that fold of his chiton. Once there I can crawl perfectly well between a few grey hairs, and soon discover what I want to know.

  “It’ll only be like a microscopic thicket, and you know how good I am at threading my way through olive-branches and rose-bushes! Oh, I’ll find the least drop of sweat if there is one to be found! You see he’s still got that old nurse, Eurycleia, though she must be over a hundred years old, and you may depend on that old lady keeping him clean. You bet your life, my pretty one, I couldn’t settle on Zeuks’ chiton—you must remember, darling, that we house-flies are extremely sensitive to smells.

  “We’re not like carrion-flies or dung-flies who live on filth and naturally seek it out!—no! I couldn’t settle on Zeuks’ chiton, though he’s a self-respecting, decently washed and well-dressed farmer, without being overpowered by the smell of his skin. But Eurycleia uses, though he’s old now, the same unguents and essences that she used for him when he was a child; so that you needn’t be afraid, dear heart, that your crazy Myos will faint from the old man’s stench, and slip down under the fellow’s shirt and be no more seen!

  “Whatever happens, I can assure you, sweetest of Pyrausts, that I shall return safely to this heavenly shelter in the bosom of our Heraklean Club.

  “No? You won’t let go? You won’t let me risk it? All right, I’m not going to break loose by force. So if you won’t let me go, you won’t let me go; and that’s the end of it. Of course some would say I’m taking the opportunity of your prohibition to escape doing what I’m really scared stiff of doing.

  “But I know you don’t think like this; and yours is the only opinion I really value. As I have often confessed to you, there have been occasions in my peaceful life when I have had pleasure with exactly twenty-seven female flies. This I have never concealed from you. But when it becomes——”

  It was at this point that the Moth—who so many times had heard her friend quote the well-known lines from Beelzebelle, the Sappho of Flies, that begin:

  “airy-fairy-flickit-with-Mary” and ends:

  “wagatail-wispy-with-honeymoon-Jane”,

  that there had been moments when she felt that if he didn’t stop before one, two, three more ticks of the clock she would rush straight into the nearest fire—beat a tattoo with her free wing upon the wall of their retreat of so decisive a character that the fly yielded in every sense.

  He left the topic of female flies. He gave up his exploration of the neck of Odysseus for a drop of perspiration. And he replied to the unspoken question that was behind all the moth had been saying, by assuring her that even if there had been no drop of sweat under the king’s beard, and even if they all had to sleep where they were that night, they would without question be making their departure, if not by “Lykophos” or “Wolf’s-light”, certainly by the first streak of red in the sky….

  By this time Zeuks had reached the climax of his singular outburst. He was still on his feet; but he was standing in a manner in which we can be absolutely certain no Grecian orator had ever stood before while addressing a crowd. One foot was on his chair and the other on the floor.

  This sounds harmless and conventional enough; but it only does so because we have not yet realized that owing to Zeuks’ lack of height and his chair’s antique height, his upraised knee was on a level with his chin. Nor was this all; for Zeuks’ incurable indifference to the decencies of human dignity combined with his flagrant and absolutely unashamed fondness for his own physical person from head to foot, resulted in a very quaint issue: for seeing his knee so extremely near his mouth, much nearer than human knees generally are to human lips he clutched it with his two hands and digging his chin into it and pressing his clenched teeth against it he began muttering and murmuring through his teeth, for his teeth being tightly clenched he wasn’t biting his knee, a strange rhapsody of self-enjoyment.

  To all but one of the company then present this curious chant of ecstatic self-possession was inarticulate; but to the club of Herakles it was not only wholly audible but wholly intelligible.

  “At last,” said the Club to himself, “I hear the language uttered, which, if I were the ruler of the world, I would cause to be the language of the world!”

  What the club heard as articulate speech could not be set down in the syllables of any tongue that was spoken then on the surface of the earth or has been spoken since; but it consisted of a groaningly murmured, thickly muttered, grindingly hoarse, creakingly wooden, scrapingly rocky, clangingly metallic, and also, naturally enough considering that our friend was rhapsodizing into the hardness of his own knee, a satisfyingly onomatopaeic paean.

  The drift of what Zeuks was chanting had undoubtedly to do with that same “prokleesis” whose secret he had tried to interpret; only this was an attempt to turn his own body into a drum or trumpet or clarionet, or whatever it might be, that like some vocal sea-shell or land-shell transformed the heavy material sounds of rock against rock, root against root, earth-mass against earth-mass, sea-sand against sea-sand, through which the sixth Pillar from its fixed abode in that old corridor at home was able to communicate with the club of Herakles.

  “Enorches”—Zeuks chanted at last, in a deep, rich, resonant voice, lifting his head from his knee and clasping that symbol of eternal supplication with the fingers of both his hands—“Enorches is the unhappiest man on earth! Anyone who understood to the full the real nature of the unhappiness of Enorches would die of pity. But this much, my friends, it is permitted to me to tell you; and tell it you I must since the knowledge of it is of the very essence of the supreme ‘prokleesis’ you are making with me, or if you prefer, I am making with you, here tonight.

  “Enorches is deliberately lying when he says that Eros and Dionysos together redeem the world. He implies that they do this, one or the other of them, or both together, as the salvation of mankind, by means of mystical love or mystical intoxication. He implies they do it so utterly and completely that ordinary self-control, ordinary kindness, ordinary decency, ordinary honesty, ordinary courtesy, ordinary generosity, are rendered totally and wholly unimportant when these two mystical ecstasies are at work; and that it is in fact as an alternative to the good, the true, and the beautiful, that these celestial manias and heavenly drugs fill the entire stage and obsess the whole nature of man’s consciousness.

  “Now the diabolical lie beneath all this is the implicit assumption that we love to the point of ecstasy and drink to the point of ecstasy in order that life shall go on in the universe indefinitely and without end. Now the real secret purpose and the real secret motive actuating Enorches is the extreme opposite of this.

  “What he really hates with a hatred that is co-existent with his uttermost being and with the uttermost being of what he hates is nothing less than Life itself. His praise of Eros and Dionysos, that is to say his glorification of Love and Intoxication as Substitutes for all other forms of Worship
, is really a grand and supreme indulgence in deliberate lying. The one secret aim and the one final intention of this crafty Priest of Orpheus is to destroy all Life utterly and forever!

  “In the depths of his own being he is so scooped-out by despair, so bled white by abysmal unhappiness that he has only one desire left, the desire that Life once and for all and in every place under the sun and moon, and upon and within and below the earth, should be destroyed and brought to an end forever!

  “Yes, what this Priest of the Mysteries aims at is that there shall no longer be any Mystery—in other words that there should no longer be any life. What he recognizes as the uttermost reality of his own destructive and negative nature is a fathomless, yawning void, an open mouth, a gulf, an abysmal hole; and this in-sucking shaft leads not to any kind of Being, but to that nameless opposite of all existence that can only be called Not-Being.

  “Here, therefore, down in the depths of this priest’s nature, is something much deeper and much nearer an absolute than Death; for Death, after all, implies that something has lived or it could not have died; but in this man’s nature, when we go down to the very depths of it, we find that which can in reality have no ‘nature’ of any sort at all, for it is Nothingness Itself.

  “Yes! What this self-styled Priest of Orpheus really feels, in his absolute and abysmal despair, is that it would have been infinitely better if there had never been any Life at all. But since life has appeared, what this Priest of the Mysteries would wish to see happen would be for the whole miserable mass of it to plunge headlong down and vanish in the Nothingness out of which it ought never to have emerged!”

  While Zeuks let himself go in this sweeping diatribe they all watched him carefully in their different ways—Odysseus watched him as a steersman in dubious weather watches a distant horizon. Nisos watched him as an amorist might watch the eyes of one girl through the transparent body of another. The pregnant woman watched him as if he were a cock crowing on a dung-heap. Old Moros watched him as if he were a dog going too close to a trap that ought long ago to have been sprung. Zenios watched him as if he were an itinerant musician, spoiling an opportunity for a good stroke of business.

  Okyrhöe watched him, thinking: “I must make them stay and I must give him something to lie on in the Mirror-Room.” Pontoporeia watched him, thinking: “Yes, I agree with this absurd ‘prokleesis’ up to a point; but he doesn’t make it personal enough, for it ought to be some way, some mood, some turn of the mind, some twist of the reason, that would help you when you wanted to make friends with a person.”

  And finally, while the club of Herakles, still leaning against the elbow of that narrow seat cut out of the pre-historic wall, watched him, thinking: “how annoying if he starts a vibration that brings me crashing down!” Zeuks felt as if an irresistible unseen power compelled him to fling back his head and to gaze out into the darkness through a half-open door; and though the lights about him made the darkness outside absolute, the same power that compelled him to lift his head forced him to treat that darkness as if it were the whole vast immeasurable bulk of the massed material of the thick-ribbed earth, ridge upon ridge, hill upon hill, mountain upon mountain, towering up in its enormity to a toppling height, high above the encircling ocean that encompasses all, forced him to treat it as if it were this, and at the same time forced him to plunge into it and with his soul gathered together to break through it, to cleave it, to wrench his way through it, until he reached a certain particular spot on the earth’s surface.

  What particular spot? Ah! That’s the point! “That’s what has been”—and it was Zeuks himself who flung this jaggedly-splintered shaft of rending interjection into the thick bulk of that darkness—“What has been led up to in all this”—for the spot he was being forced to visit was nothing less than a stone shed near-by with a massively-closed iron-barred door in which Pegasos had been imprisoned ever since Odysseus released him.

  In this shed, tied by the neck, Pegasos was at that moment groaning piteously and twisting his head from side to side; for the rope that tied him crossed and re-crossed and chafed abominably that raw part of his shoulder from which the wing had been torn and from which even yet dark drops of blood, mingled with ichor, were trickling down.

  Slowly therefore now, in spite of all the eyes that were upon him, Zeuks rose, and deliberately crossing the hall to the open door through which that unknown force had just drawn his soul into the palpable darkness, he resolutely, but still slowly and very quietly, left the company and went out. Once outside and alone in the air it was not nearly so dark, and it didn’t take him long to discover the stone shed where in the haste of their arrival Pegasos had been tied up. It was still necessary, however, to get some kind of torch or lantern; and with this in view he made his way, led by the smell of the fragrant smoke to where Nemertes was already drying, after having cleaned and washed with the exquisite care and nicety exacted by Zenios of all who touched his possessions, the vast array of plates and dishes used at tonight’s supper.

  She certainly was a shrewd and intelligent woman, this mother of Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos; and now when Zeuks entered her domain to get a light so as to deal with Pegasos, and found her directing her three sons in the complicated task of piling up and putting away all this precious crockery, he was conscious of being delivered, merely by drawing her attention to his situation, from a whole load of tiresome responsibility.

  She told him at once to fetch Pegasos out of that cold and dark shed and to bring him into the kitchen; and when he obeyed her and they had tied this mutilated and one-winged creature, who had once flown above the turrets of Arabia and the domes of China and the pyramids of Egypt and had distended its quivering nostrils in its flight to catch the enchanted odours that are wafted down on certain human midnights from the ghostly valleys of the moon, to one of the shadowy meat-hooks that broke the flickering fire-lit surface of those friendly walls, it was easy to see from the immortal animal’s grateful eyes as they were turned first to one and then to another till they finally rested on the woman herself, that the prospect of a night behind the cyclopean pre-historic walls of Ornax after his windy lodging on the outskirts of Cuckoo-Hill was now wholly congenial to him.

  Nemertes hesitated not to take entire possession of Zeuks at once and to tell him exactly what he had better do if he wished his one night in Ornax to be really a pleasant one.

  “You will have to sleep in the porch of the Chamber of the Mirror so as to be a guard for the sleep of the Mistress. This will be the sleeping arrangement with which nothing must interfere; but if you, my Lord Zeuks, and you, my Lord Pegasos, agree to accept this arrangement, it is in my power to give you”—and she turned to Zeuks—“and you”—and she stroked the great free beautiful useless unhurt wing of her animal-visitor which now trailed across a third of the floor, “the peacefullest sleep you’ve ever had in your lives.”

  “Give us this?” enquired Zeuks in his most cheerful and humorous intonation.

  “How will you give us this?” asked Pegasos with his appealing eyes.

  And the woman answered by immediate action. She went to a great brazen receptacle in a corner of the kitchen and scooped up two handfuls of oats which she forthwith presented to the winged horse, who reverently swallowed them. Then she lifted the lid of a substantial chest made of sycamore wood from the main-land and brought out a small loaf. This she deliberately broke into four pieces, one big piece and three small pieces; and handing one of the small pieces to each of her sons who straightway began munching and masticating it with intense satisfaction, she gave the large piece to Zeuks who promptly kissed it and crammed it into his mouth, but allowed half of it to remain in one cheek, and half of it in the other, un-chewed and un-swallowed.

  It was at this point that Zeuks noticed a hurried whispered conversation going on between Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos; and before he had made up his mind whether to ignore what he perceived or to boldly ask them what was the matter, Omphos, the eldest of the three, cr
ossed the kitchen with obvious nervousness, while Pegasos, answering this respectful courtesy with equal consideration, did his best to move his unhurt wing out of the young man’s way.

  When Omphos reached Zeuks he stood in front of him like an earnest-minded school-boy summoned for an oral examination; and Nemertes couldn’t help noting how quaint it was to see the two cheeks of this examiner of young men bulging so auspiciously for his own future enjoyment but rendering him practically inarticulate before an academic questioner.

  But the question asked by Omphos was a simple one. “Could you tell us, my Lord Zeuks, exactly what you thought of when you say we must still practise ‘prokleesis’ though we were soon going to be cut to pieces by those pirates?”

  What Zeuks desired to do at this point was first to use his tongue to push both halves of that delicious little loaf into one bulging cheek, and then with that same tongue to discourse so eloquently on the practice of “prokleesis” when you were watching people tortured or when you were being tortured yourself, that not only Omphos but his sympathetic brothers and possibly even their wise mother would decide to try how it worked in the ordinary vexations of every day.