Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “The Atlantean philosopher’s stone may have the power of making the embryo bi-sexual. In which case, as you can well imagine, you warriors of Ithaca, the influence, the renown, the glory and the power of this Sage of Atlantis, not to mention his wealth, would be very great indeed! And naturally enough the high Olympians would hate him. They have always been extremely touchy and sensitive on such points; as they may well be! For doesn’t their authority with all of us ordinary mortals largely depend on their power over birth, and over the various issues of birth?—yes! extremely touchy they have always been about this whole problem of birth and sex; and if I may whisper this in your ears, you brave men and beautiful women of Ithaca, it is by the cunning trick of keeping sex, and birth, the issue of sex, completely under their control, that these Olympian gods retain their power over us.

  “But they can be defied now and again for all that; and very successfully defied. You have only to visit the “Herm” of the great Goddess Themis, within a mile of where we are now, and as you can believe from my devotion to Eros and Dionysos I’m no fanatic champion of propriety and decency, to see the havoc done to her image by the hands of the chaotic Harpies; and yet upon the traditional order maintained by Themis the basic rule of these Olympians is declared by their champions to depend.

  “Whereas I say it depends only on two things—on the Thunder-bolts of Zeus and on the plagues sent by the Queen of Heaven. O my friends! if you would listen to me and boldly defy all these false gods; if you would turn to the only deities and divinities in the whole pantheon of godlike creatures who really have the power of giving us new life—not just murdering us with thunder-bolts and with plagues and famines—but transporting us by mystic ecstasies and paradisic trances into Dimensions of Being, where what here we are deluded into calling reality is seen in its true light, and where nothing, I say again to you, my friends, where nothing is the secret of all the Mysteries beneath and above the Sun and the Moon, beneath and above the divine ether, except the mind that half-creates what it enjoys, except the mind that half-annihilates what it cannot enjoy!”

  When Enorches had finished speaking he showed in the presence of that enormous crowd and in the presence, and before the steady eyes and pointed beard, of the unalterable old king, the same perfectly cool brain and perfectly poised intelligence that he had shown when he began speaking.

  But neither the old king, who now held the awkward form of the daughter of Teiresias firmly by the waist while he slowly and indifferently swung the club of Herakles to and fro with his free hand, nor the agitated crowd of spear-waving men and excited women had time to note this serenity in their orator, for the attention of every person in that oldest portion of the “agora”, including king and crowd and prophet’s daughter, was suddenly and startlingly switched to a completely new occurrence.

  This abrupt jerk to the particular set of nerves in them all that responded to dramatic events included in its field of operations, as may be easily supposed, both the moth and the fly who just then were peering out of the life-crack of the club of Herakles with concentrated interest. It also included the club itself who in following the rush of events at this particular crisis had the advantage of its vibratory contact with the Sixth Pillar in the Corridor of Pillars. This contact, based on a long series of experiences so homely and natural that they might almost be called domestic, was in its way as much of a philosophical discovery as any conceivable one made by the Atlantean sage, and neither the moth, whose silky wings quivered with the agitation of its emotion, nor the fly, whose great black head bulged with the intensity of its rumination, could do more than quietly accept such a verdict when they heard the club murmur aloud to itself what it had just caught from the massive Being that bore the signature of a son of Hephaistos, namely the words: “Hear therefore what the sage saith, “When the messenger flies or gallops, or drives, or runs, hope nothing, fear nothing, expect nothing, talk of nothing, till he’s standing on the ground at your gate.”

  This messenger was indeed running at a speed that made some of the women who watched him fear he would fall dead the moment he delivered his message. And what was his message? This question, which was pulsing and heart-beating in that whole vast mass of people, did not disturb Odysseus in the slightest degree.

  His plan of using the Prophet’s daughter as a shaft of irresistible power resembling the shaft that originally separated the Heavens from the Earth had completely failed. Well! That had failed. That was over and done with. That was finished, closed, shut, settled, rounded off; but in its frustration, in its defeat, in its absolute overness, it left the great battlefield of creation and destruction open for something fresh from the root up!

  Yes! the field was free for something that had not so far crossed the mind of any living creature, whether that creature were a god or a man or a beast or a bird or a fish or a reptile or a worm or an insect! Yes, the greatest gift the Earth had given to Odysseus at his birth was his power of accepting a crushing disaster and of starting freshly again, as the phrase runs, “from scratch”.

  Another great gift from the universal mother of men, who by many among us is called Nature rather than the Earth, of which this old hero was possessed, was the power of detaching himself from the agitations, confusions, emotions, desperations, terrors and exultations that might be absorbing and upsetting his immediate companions and not only of keeping his own spirit in the midst of the craziest hurly-burly and hullabaloo absolutely calm and unmoved, but of being capable under these conditions of so isolating his mind that he could go on coolly planning for the future, and calmly pondering on the future, and amusing himself by imagining what he would like best to happen in the future, with as much serenity as if he’d had nothing but lonely forests and untraversed seas around him for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

  It had become clear to everybody now that behind the man who was running so fast, and who now was near enough to be recognizable as no other than our young friend Nisos, there was another man, quite different in appearance, attired in a manner wholly foreign to Ithaca and even to the main-land of Hellas, who clearly was finding it difficult to keep up with the younger man. Suddenly this first runner—“And it is Nisos!” thought Pontopereia, unable to stop herself from squeezing the king’s arm in her excitement, “and he’s coming straight to us!”—turned, saw how far off the other was, and stood still, so as to be overtaken.

  It was indeed one of those curious occasions when the innate natures of the spectators at an important event reveal themselves to themselves, if not to anyone else, with what sometimes are quite surprising results.

  “Can you see Enorches any longer?” enquired the moth of the fly. “I feel so dreadfully sure that the dear man may be wanting someone like me to make him happy about his beautiful speech and tell him how rich and clear his noble voice sounded.”

  “May the Great Hornet sting your confounded Enorches!” responded the fly crossly. “Why can’t you, you little priest worshipper, look at the drama of life from a scientific distance?”

  There was something so infinitely unpleasant to the moth, and so blighting and bleaching and blistering and blasting to her whole life-instinct, about this appalling “scientific distance” to which the fly was alluding, that she found it hard to be even polite to him.

  “Well, my pretty?” he went on teasingly, for the difference of sex between them put her seriousness into one ballot-box and his into another, “why don’t you answer my plain question about a rational view of life taken from an astronomical scientific distance?”

  This was too much for the moth, and she lost every silken flake of her natural sweet and obedient temper. “Why,” she screamed at him, “don’t I look at life from the view-point of the furthest star in the firmament? I’ll tell you why! I’ll tell you why! I’ll tell you why! Because I happen to be a Living Being on the Earth!”

  The Fly sighed heavily. “How impossible it is,” he thought, “to exchange rational ideas with a female! And yet they are clev
er. It would be absurd to deny it. They are extremely clever. They may even be called wise. But their wisdom follows a completely different track from our wisdom. It skips about from point to point, matching things. We look at life as a whole.”

  “You know exactly where the world comes to an end then?” shrieked the moth, making the fly feel as though she had read his thoughts. “What if it has trailing edges that lead to completely different ends? What if there’s a jumping-off place, from which a person can leap into another world altogether?”

  “Listen, pretty fool!” protested the Fly sternly: and once more there came to their ears the voice of the Sixth Pillar conversing gravely with the club of Herakles; on whose head Odysseus was leaning rather heavily at that moment as he watched Nisos approach with that fantastically attired foreigner.

  “The Sage avers that if the difference between one man and another with regard to their bodies is so great that it passeth understanding, considering that all have a head and a neck and shoulders and trunk and arms and legs and hands and feet and eyes and ears, the difference between them in regard to their minds is so great that it bars any approach to an attempt to understand it.”

  “You heard that, sweetheart?” commented the Fly with satisfaction. “And if we can say as much as that about the difference in body and mind between creatures of the same species, what about the difference when you consider varieties of species? I tell you, little one, there’s no more good in my hoping that out of the various tribes of Flies one will arise destined to conquer the world than in these people here thinking that some Hellenic or Achaian or Bœotian tribe will conquer the world. I tell you, darling little idiot, no species and no portion of a species will ever conquer the world. It’s one of the tricks of Nature to put such ideas into people’s heads so as to make great wars arise between race and race and between species and species. Such wars between one swarm and another swarm are deliberately worked up by Nature so as to thin out earth’s population. Will you never learn, you lovely little goose-girl, that if a moth of your tribe wants her folks to rule the world there is only one thing for her to do?”

  “And what may that be?” responded the moth in a voice so faint with sarcasm that it was hardly audible.

  “Tell yourself a story about it happening,” said the fly, “and die before you get to the last chapter.”

  “I sometimes think,” whispered the moth, “that that’s what I’ve done.”

  When Nisos and his oddly-attired companion reached Odysseus, Pontopereia took care to move aside and to be as inconspicuous a figure in that crowded landscape as was possible for a girl with her strikingly beautiful and intellectual face. Hardly conscious of what she was doing, however, when Nisos did begin to speak she kept on moving nearer and nearer to the old king; but since her reputed mother or at any rate her official guardian, Okyrhöe, also moved nearer, her interest must have seemed to Nisos entirely natural.

  One thing about this new encounter of these two young people certainly showed the daughter of Teiresias in a dignified and admirable light, namely the fact that in her excited interest in what Nisos was telling the old King she forgot completely the shame and humiliation she had herself suffered so short a time before. In fact she forgot, as apparently Odysseus himself had forgotten, what a central dramatic part in turning the tide of popular feeling she had been brought there to play. And now it was all over and done with, as utterly as was the life of the old Dryad and her tree, both of them reduced to dust and ashes.

  “It was when I had only just left the Cave of the Naiads that I first saw it.” And here Nisos made a rather formal and yet quite a dramatic pause; and Pontopereia couldn’t help noticing that the presence of the ornately-dressed, portentous-looking stranger who so punctiliously kept one of his brocaded knees on the ground while he watched the face of Odysseus with obsequious impassivity, did have the effect of stiffening just a little the unconventional naturalness of speech which the direct frankness of their master usually evoked in those who were closest to him.

  And the girl also noticed that the spontaneous island-schoolboy attitude to all the fantastic ceremonials and the symbolic rituals of Persians, Libyans, Phoenicians, Babylonians and Assyrians, which she had marked in most Achaian and Hellenic lads, an attitude partly humorous, and partly fascinated and even a little awed, had resulted in this case in the way in which, though he did not kneel, Nisos stood respectfully before the king with his head bare and his hands clasped behind his back.

  “I knew at once,” the boy went on, “that it was a foreign boat. I knew that by its build and by its curious-looking sail. I knew also that it couldn’t have come from very far away, for it was too small to have crossed such a formidable mass of water as that great Western Ocean in which we are told the gods have drowned the land of Atlantis. Well, O King, I climbed down to the sea’s edge so as to direct them, by waving and shouting, to the estuary where they could lower their sail, fasten up their vessel, and land on our shore. It took a long time to do this for them. I had to scramble over a lot of steep rocks, didn’t I, Euanthos?” And Pontopereia noticed that, instead of turning and giving a responsive smile to the speaker, this palatial individual, with one knee still on the gravelly ground and his submissively reverential gaze still fixed on the king, who by this time was crouching like a somnolent steersman on a rough lichen-covered ledge with the club between his knees, replied to the lad’s appeal by making a solemn little bow, a bow which, in the relative position to which chance had brought them, might have been directed to the four staring eyes of the pair of fascinated insects.

  “But when they were safely landed—when you were landed, Euanthos!” and Pontopereia, not to mention Okyrhöe, who kept edging nearer and nearer, noted a repetition of the same quaint performance—“I soon heard the great news. Thou, O King,”—and it was clear to both those observant ladies that this boy-messenger completely misread the relaxed attitude of the old hero he was addressing, taking his drowsy abstraction as a sign of nonchalant indifference, when all the while it was really an instinctive animal withdrawal into cover, under the mask of which the wily old warrior watched the course of events, noting with shrewd precision the particular direction in which, under the pressure of numberless conflicting entities, the tide of destiny was moving.

  “Thou, O King, art about to be visited by a famous royal Princess from the land of the Phaiakians whose parents and brothers enabled you to sail for home in a ship full of rich gifts.”

  “And what, my young friend,” enquired Odysseus, throwing into his tone, the two ladies decided, a deliberate weariness and tedium, “do those of her court who are with her say is the name by which she is known to her own people and by which she wishes to be known to those other lands whither her ship carries her; for among all men who live by bread there are none to whom their parents do not give names, whether they be rich or poor, slaves or free, tillers of the earth, or wielders of royal sceptres.”

  “The name,” cried Nisos, in a high-pitched excited voice, “of this visitor to the shores of Ithaca is none other than Nausikaa, the daughter of Arete who was the daughter of Rhexenor, and of Alkinoos who was the son of Nausithoos.”

  Neither Okyrhöe nor Pontopereia missed the rather startling swallowing sound, as if he had been munching a too big mouthful of bread and having retained it till it was in an almost liquid form in his mouth had sucked it down in one terrific gulp, which the old man emitted as the word “Nausikaa” reached his ears.

  But Nisos had a still greater shock in store for his king. “From a couch of purple at the bottom of their boat,” he went on, “they helped to land the most noble figure of a man I have ever seen or could ever imagine. His hair was white with age and his shoulders were extremely bent, but the grandeur of his features and the beauty of his form, even in old age, were more like those of a god than of a human creature. I looked at him with awe and reverence, O king, and still more was I reduced to wordless amazement when the stately and distinguished Euanthos here�
�—and once again the two ladies were fascinated to watch this perfect courtier on his bended knee make that same masquerade-like inclination of his head without turning so much as the point of his beak-like nose in the direction of the person whose flattery he was acknowledging—“and I was impressed, O my King, to notice how superior to any of our modern Hellenic or Argive or Pelasgic or Danaan ways were the——”

  “By Kronos, boy, you don’t mean to say the man at the bottom of the boat was Ajax?”

  At the utterance of this name both the ladies gasped audibly, and the elder one, with a shiver that ran clean through her, flung her arms protectively about the younger.

  This time it was the turn of Nisos to nod assent while his gaze remained fixed on a different person from the one to whom he was responding. And at the receipt of this assent Odysseus rose from his seat abruptly.

  “Ajax again!” he muttered. “It must have been a dream then that I saw him among the dead when the spirit of Achilles questioned me and went off with long strides among the rest in his joy that I could assure him his son had won glory! Ajax again! Well, well, well, well! He had Poseidon as his enemy among the Olympians, even as I have! And it may be that as I found help from Circe and Calypso and Leucothea, so he has found it from some great goddess at the bottom of the Sea! Poseidon must have overturned his ship in no ordinary way; not by just a wave out of the deep: very likely by flinging a mountain upon it, as the grandfather of Nausikaa prophesied the sea-god might do one day over their only good harbourage to stop their giving convoy and ships to the enemies of the Olympians.