Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “Well, I wouldn’t deny, my dear lad,” replied Akron, the ship’s master, “that sometimes, now and then, I have that feeling, just as we all have when a spear or an arrow comes too close to our head! I get it, for instance, when I see the spouting of a whale, or catch sight of one of those great sharks, or one of those terrifying Hekatoncheiroi, such as Briareos must have looked when he smuggled down in the throne of the heavenly father and spread out on all sides his appalling suckers, each one of which would be capable of squeezing to death a man like you or me.

  “But I really think I’ve got over those first sensations of what you might call pure elemental panic. I think I’ve come to be more or less reconciled to there being, as you say, Nisos, so much water under us and so much air above us! But such a lot of water and such an immensity of empty air does make a person feel small.”

  “I don’t think,” Nisos went on in a meditative tone, “that its exactly the mass of water, or the infinity of air, that makes us feel small. I think it is the ceasing of accustomed labour and the idleness that leaves the mind free to follow its fancies.”

  The ship’s master watched his young passenger with a shrewd eye as he talked in this way. He thought Nisos was trying to make him believe that he was analysing his feelings with the utmost calm, like an experienced traveller recording his reactions when the most dangerous and agitating moments of what he was going through had arrived and passed.

  “The kid would like me to think,” he told himself, “that he accepts these monstrous enormities of air and water without one single natural shiver.”

  Their ship was named the “Teras” or the “Prodigy” and its master with whom Nisos had already made friends was a man called Akron who came from Lilaia, a town in Phokis, and was of a reserved and reticent but of a decidedly philosophical turn of mind. Akron came, like Tis, of farming stock, and although his father had kept an Inn in the main street of Lilaia, he had a great-uncle, of about the same age as old Moros, who continued running the family farm.

  The second officer, whose name was Thon, had quite a different temperament from Akron and a very different bringing-up. He came of an old military family in Phrygia with a long and turbulent history. The “Teras” had two decks below the top one on which Nisos was standing as he talked with Akron. It was from the upper one of these that the four long oars projected that kept the “Teras” moving when the wind failed.

  The mast was fixed in the keel of the vessel and reached up through both the two lower decks to where, on the top-deck, quite close to the spot on which our friend was now talking with Akron, the huge sail, made of the same sort of cloth that Odysseus had tried so desperately to obtain in Ithaca, was now carrying the “Teras” over the waves in a style that must have delighted every true sailor’s heart on board.

  The way the vessel was behaving at this moment in a wind almost straight from the South-East, was certainly especially pleasing to the two men who just then were supervising the “protonoi” or “forestays”, the “kaloi” or “halliards”, and the “huperoi” or “braces”. These men were a pair of brothers, whose names, Pontos and Proros, were enough in themselves to suggest seafaring ability, but whose home-harbour, Skandeia in Kythera, was known over all Hellas to breed the best deck-hands in the world.

  As he listened attentively and politely, though it must be confessed just a little cynically, to our friend Nisos’ rather prolonged but eloquent discourse on what particular feelings, whether enjoyable or the reverse, were aroused in him by air and water, Akron remained, according to the custom then prevalent in that best of all sea-going Hellenic circles, quietly, though not unsympathetically, detached from the chatter that was proceeding so happily between Pontos and Proros.

  Both the brothers from Kythera were small in regard to their bodily form but they were smaller still in regard to the size of their skulls. Indeed so diminutive were these Kytharean craniums that the most studious and experienced of phrenologists would have been puzzled to say where there was room for any sort of bump of worship or for any sort of bump of mathematics or for any sort of bump of metaphysics in these quaint little rondures that resembled a couple of oak-apples as they kept bobbing up and down, rallying each other and making sport of the entire universe.

  The oarsmen in the second deck, above sea-level, were not at that moment using their long, thick, heavy oars, which were the largest oars to be seen at that epoch in any harbour in the world, but had pulled them out of the water and were holding them across their knees while they themselves leant back in their seats, talking, or throwing “astragaloi”, the special kind of dice that sailors preferred, or just settling themselves to sleep. There were four of these oarsmen, a couple for each side of the “Teras” as she breasted the waves, Klytos and Teknon on her starboard side, and Euros and Halios on her port side.

  All these four men came from the immediate vicinity of the palace of Nausikaa’s parents and their families were personally well-known to her. It was down on the third deck that the passengers’ cabins were situated; and the present possessors of these cabins had to be selected without any exhausting consideration of personal feelings. One of them for instance was shared between Nausikaa and Okyrhöe; and another between Pontopereia and Eione; while a third was given up entirely to Odysseus.

  The most striking thing about the “Teras” however was not the number of her decks nor the number of her cabins. It was her Figure-Head. If the beard of Odysseus, which already had played its part in one of the queerest palace-plots ever revealed by a chronicler, bore, as has already been noted, a strong resemblance to a ship’s bowsprit, the real bowsprit of the “Teras’, had no sooner entered the harbours of the world than it was recognized as the most striking of all figure-heads known to civilization. It represented a unique creature whose form and shape had been invented by the Ruler of Lost Atlantis who had concluded the work by placing on the creature’s scaly neck his or her own head with all its striking features.

  The name of this Ruler was unknown and the peculiarity of its unusual head was that it was hard to imagine it as the head of any mortal or immortal man, and still harder to accept it as the head of a god or head of the horribly scaly neck to which it was and is attached. This mysterious Being, whose extraordinary features were not those of a man or a god or a beast or a monster, was the author of a long poem about the beginning and the end of everything, a poem which still remains the greatest oracle of man’s destiny existing upon the earth.

  The unfortunate thing about this tremendous hieroglyph is that by reason of the drowning of the continent that produced it, and by reason of its being chained with golden chains to the altar of the Hundred and Twenty-Five Gods of that sunken continent, only those who were permitted to read it before the waves covered the altar to which it was bound know anything of its secret; and among these only the Seven Wise Men of Italy have so much as begun to penetrate its contents; and these have only revealed the fact that it is landscape superimposed upon landscape rather than rhythm upon rhythm that is the method of its message.

  Since, however, when any of these Seven Wise Men perish the remaining ones appoint successors there is still a hope that in spite of the punishment inflicted by Zeus, the wisdom of Atlantis-will never be entirely lost.

  While Nisos was struggling to be as prophetic as he could in his talk to the Master of the “Teras”, Pontopereia, the daughter of a prophet, was doing the same sort of thing, only with more subtlety, in regard to Eione, as the two girls sipped the well-made red wine, mixed with plenty of pure spring-water, with which Nausikaa’s stores provided them, not to mention nibbling a few particularly well-spiced biscuits from Arabia, a taste for which the princess inherited from her mother.

  “Oh don’t say that, darling Eione! I know so well the feeling you have that drives you to say it; but we women really must learn to slip under or slip over these crude urges of Nature that lift us off our feet and force us to utter things like that! The great thing is, I know I’m right in that a
nyway, the great thing is always to have two lives going; one of them the life we share with our friends, and the other the life we enjoy with our own mind and with our own senses.

  “To keep this secret second life going, even while we are living the other to the full, is the supreme trick of existence for girls such as you and I.”

  Eione lifted up her shapely legs from the couch where hitherto the two girls had been lying face to face, each pair of bare feet resting motionless against the neck of the owner of the other pair. But the easy nonchalance of that chaste yet familiar position was completely broken up by this provocative movement on the part of Tis’s sister. Their position blotted out from the daughter of Teiresias all view of her companion’s face. All she could see of her now was a couple of white shins and the extremely intimate shadows and outlines between them.

  “When you talk of the life we ‘share with our friends’,” enquired a girlish voice from behind these uplifted knees, “do you mean our lovers?”

  “Certainly I do,” replied Pontopereia almost sharply, “if we have such idiots; but what was in my mind was nothing as sexual as that.”

  “Would you advocate living this double life even after marriage?”

  “Most certainly I would! Don’t you see, my sweet, it is only after the actual moment of union has been consummated by the loss of our virginity that men, and women, can make love, as people call it, on equal terms. But does the ecstasy of such embraces so absorb us both as to completely blot out and obliterate our separate identities? Don’t you suppose, my lovely one, that we still go on—I won’t say thinking thoughts that have have no connection with the passionate pleasure we’re enjoying, but thinking such a thought as—‘oh how utterly and entirely this heavenly, this divine sensation beats all other sensations I’ve ever known!’”

  “But,” came the voice from behind the upraised legs, that is to say from behind the whole of Eione from the waist down, “but doesn’t what you’re now saying, my friend, reduce the passion of love to an extremity of purely selfish sensation?”

  Pontopereia at this drew up her own legs with an abrupt jerk; but straightened her back as she did so, and leaned forward, sitting on her heels, and resting the palms of both her hands upon the uplifted knees of the girl before her.

  “I confess, my dear,” she said, “that I’m talking of something of which I’ve had no experience. But surely if this ecstasy of love’s embrace, of which such a lot is made, is as transporting and enthralling as we’re always being told it is, neither of the parties concerned can possibly have the detachment of consciousness left inside them to say anything to themselves around or about or above or beneath the absolutely absorbing sensation they are caught up in and which is blinding them to all else?”

  A sudden outburst of silvery laughter came from the girlish face upon which, with her hands on the young creature’s knees, Pontopereia now gazed with unpretended admiration.

  “Aren’t you confusing,” were the words that issued from that radiant but extremely simple countenance, “what we feel when we’re imagining a love-ecstasy in some hot exciting trance of deliciousness when alone by ourselves with what we feel in our first real love-night?”

  “You mean, Eione darling, that when we’re in the act of making love we think more of our lover and more of his feelings than of our own?”

  “The gods forbid!” cried the excited girl. “Did I hear you utter the word ‘more’? Of course we think ‘more’ of his feelings for us than of ours for him! Isn’t it the delicious heat of his feelings for us that rouses ours and that alone has the power to arouse ours?” Pontopereia perceived that she had indeed entered a sphere of philosophic analysis where more intimate experience than had yet been hers was required if she were to see the thing in proper perspective.

  So with a view to changing the subject she changed her physical position and sliding both her own feet to the floor she edged herself along the side of the bed, till bending down above her friend she was able to smooth the girl’s fair hair from her forehead.

  “You haven’t half told me, you know, what happened after you rode off with Arcadian Pan and with Eurybia and Echidna. Where on earth did those two leave you? What happened to the horse with the flowing mane? Did Pan himself go down under the waves when you got to the place where the land of Atlantis had been drowned?”

  Before beginning any answer to all this Eione thrust her friend’s hand away. “Don’t do that! It makes me nervous! It’s what Thrasonika our school-teacher used to do.”

  Pontopereia hurriedly withdrew her hand. She had received such a shock that, hardly aware of what she was doing, she licked the longest finger of the hand that had not been to blame and with it gently stroked the erring hand as if to cure it of its impetuosity.

  “I can tell you of course,” went on Eione, seized by a sudden gust of confidential school-girlishness, “because you weren’t at school in Ithaca. But it was because of Thrasonica going on stroking her hair that Amaryllis Leporides drowned herself.”

  Pontopereia’s face expressed all the astonishment she felt, though by no means all the moral indignation she felt. Eione nodded vigorously. “Nobody but the three youngest of us know,” she repeated; throwing into her tone the implication that in Ithaca a girl’s sophistication decreased rather than increased as she grew up.

  And indeed this was a view of insular as compared with continental education which struck Pontopereia as entirely correct.

  “Nisos told me,” announced Pontopereia, standing on her feet now, and sufficiently disturbed by the rebuff Eione had given her to hit back—woman versus woman—by dragging in Nisos, “that the great Epic Poem about the Beginning of All Things by the Ruler of Atlantis brings in the little island where Arcadian Pan must have given you the Helmet of Proteus and told Pegasos to carry you to Odysseus! But Nisos tells me this little island, which he says is called ‘Wone’ and must be pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘tone’ is really the top of the tallest of the mountains of drowned Atlantis, a mountain which used to be called Kunthorax and whose foot-hills rose from a vast fir-forest which was only a couple of days’ ride from the great city of Gom which was—and I suppose still is, only it’s under the water—the capital of Atlantis.”

  Eione had listened to all this with her eyes tightly shut and her whole face quiescent, as if, though perhaps not actually asleep, the treatment of this crucial subject by her philosophic friend had a somnolent effect upon her. But she was compelled to open her eyes, and open them pretty wide too, when Pontopereia seized the pole, with which they regulated the sky-light to the deck above, the sky-light from which came most of their air and, when they hadn’t lit their oil-lamp, all their light, and opening it wider than they had ever done before, shouted in a shrill voice: “Is Nisos Naubolides up there? If he is, for the sake of all the gods tell him to come down here for a moment!”

  So loudly did the youthful voice of the daughter of Teiresias ring through the whole interior of the “Teras” that it crossed the mind of Odysseus as he swung himself backwards and forwards in his cabin that it was possible that one of these two young creatures might have tried to put an end to the life of the other; and vaguely endeavouring to allow this imaginary supposition its full weight the old adventurer caused his hammock of small cords to swing rhythmically backwards and forwards to a sort of musical argument in favour of the advantage of being alive compared with the advantage of being dead.

  The four oarsmen who while so fresh a wind filled the great sail were able to take their pleasure with their special dice or “astragaloi”, and had just decided that until supper-time they would make the game more lively by making it less individualistic, turning it in fact into a battle between the starboard and larboard oarsmen of the “Teras”, with Teknon and Klytos on the starboard side, and Euros and Halios on the larboard or port side; and it was this new and more communal game that was broken up by Pontopereia’s cry.

  Having put its violent lid upon the dicing of these astragolo
i-players the girl’s quivering cry rang from end to end of the top-most deck where Proros and Pontos, who were managing the ropes which held the great bulging sail upon whose one, taut, open curve their speed and safety of their speed entirely depended, repeated the cry at once, and not content with repeating it, they both imitated it, and did this so successfully that the first officer, Thon, who by general consent rather than by professional succession had become the outlookman of the “Teras”, ransacked the sea’s surface with his eyes in search of some broken-winged siren before he made it known to Akron the ship’s master, that the young man to whom that same skipper was courteously listening was wanted below.

  “Better go down at once, my boy! There’s some serious trouble among your women-folk! I pray it’s between those young ones, and not between those older ones! Down with you, my son! Down with you! No! no! Don’t wait a second, lad! These troubles inside the ship are far more serious than anything that goes on in the City of Gom or at the top of Kunthorax; or on the Island of Wone. Oh, you’ll settle this trouble, my lad, whatever it is! You’ve got the look of an ambassador. Down with you now; and quick about it!”

  But it was several minutes before Nisos, buoyed up by feeling that it was especially exciting to be called upon to decide a quarrel between the daughter of Teiresias and the sister of Tis, managed to reach even the second deck of the “Teras”; and it was perhaps just because he kept telling himself that it was so quaint that a son of Krateros and Pandea should be the one destined by Atropos to hold these uncertain scales that he didn’t clamber down the ship’s first ladder with more headlong speed.