Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “Can you catch,” the king was now asking Zeuks, “what this priest of Orpheus is saying as he watches us strike this island?”

  And Zeuks answered: “He is confessing to you and to Eros and to Dionysos and to all those he has drawn after him that he has only used his praise of Love and Drink and his Priesthood of Orpheus and of the Mysteries to conceal his advocacy of universal Death. Life ought never, he says, to have started; and the sooner it sinks back into Nothingness the better for us all!”

  CHAPTER XI

  For all his good seamanship the skipper of the “Teras” or “Prodigy” was at heart, much more than his second-in-command and much more than any of his crew, whether their business was with oar or with sail, a born carpenter.

  Thus it was his, Akron’s, crouching back that was the first object to arrest the attention of our friend Nisos when, not without having to overcome several physical and even a few mental impediments, he reached the bottom of the hold and was separated from the bottom of the sea by nothing but salt water and a double layer of inch-thick planks.

  “More ‘Kolla’ I tell you! I must have a lot more ‘Kolla!’” was the cry that issued from beneath that hunched-over spine. “Glue! More glue!” was in fact the word that in hoarsely groaned accents emerged from that massive head and hooked nose. These were bent so low between the pair of formidable hands now at work squeezing the stuff into place, that the image presented by the red flames beneath the cauldron of melting glue as they flickered over the kneeling man and over the group of dark-skinned boys who were helping him was really like that of a huge Raven, who, with its beak and claws working together, was engaged in the construction of the Gods alone knew what sort of impregnable nest.

  “O it’s you, is it?” Akron cried, straightening his back, though still remaining on his knees. “What I want now is one of those bronze hammers to smash this damned spike of rock! No! No! Heavier, much heavier than that! Go in there, where they are, Nisos, will you, and bring me the heaviest you can find!”

  Nisos looked round him in some bewilderment; for the intense blackness of the shadows, and the red flickerings from the fire under the cauldron that was keeping the glue fluid, made up between them such an Hephaistian Smithy, as might well have been started by an insane as well as a lame god of fire at the bottom of the ocean!

  But one of the black Libyan boys was quick to see his confusion and led him at once to the recess referred to as “in there” out of which he was soon able to extract the sort of long-handled hammer that was the instrument needed. Armed with this he returned to the bent figure of Akron, handed him the huge hammer, and watched eagerly to see what he would do.

  The effect of what he saw at that moment lodged itself in his brain so deeply that always, after that, when he found himself in a place where there was anything to remind him of black protruding shadows and cavities full of whirling tongues of scarlet fire, all the impressions of that moment rushed back upon him.

  It was the presence of that burning fire under the cauldron of melted glue in connection with the bottom of the ocean that hit him so hard. The element of fire, though taking up only so small a space compared with the terrific mass of water that surrounded it, drew into itself and flung out of itself, as it whirled its bloody circles round and round, an essence of existence that was at once absolute and unique.

  But the master of the “Teras” straightened his back, took the long-handed hammer in his hand, and struck that up-thrusting point of rock one—two—three—terrific blows. At the first blow that rough projection of time-crumpled, space-naked rock shivered and cracked. At the second blow a fragment was whirled away. At the third blow the whole piece of rock went crashing off and was sent hurtling through the air to one of the pitch-black corners of the hold. Then there came bursting out of the hole made by that pointed rock a violent spout of sea-water; and down above this jet of brine Akron crouched again, squeezing into that jagged rent handful after handful of “kolla”, or semi-solid glue, snatched out of the cauldron. From a pile of carefully selected narrow slips of wood one of the black Libyan boys now handed Akron several freshly smoothed and rounded-off pieces of wood, by the aid of which, squeezed in with the malleable “kolla” or glue, this dangerous rent in the keel of the “Teras” was soon mended.

  But they were now confronted by the yet more difficult business of getting the ship well away from the dangerous edges of the small island of Wone while they still kept within reach of it. Akron himself hurried to the oarsmen’s deck; for he had already decided that for this particularly ticklish and hazardous undertaking of getting the “Teras” clear of Wone and yet circumnavigating the island till they were well to the west of it, they would be better and safer in the hands of their oarsmen than of the men who manipulated their great sail.

  One special advantage which this choice of Akron’s possessed Nisos realized to the full directly the two of them were on the oarsmen deck along with the four rowers. The crucial direction and management of the whole manoeuvre was now free from the presence of Nausikaa and Okyrhöe as well as of Eione and Pontopereia.

  Zeuks however was still there, having deposited Arsinöe in the cabin of Odysseus, doubtless under the vague idea inherited from his immortal begetter, Arcadian Pan, that the only conceivable relation between a captive lady and a great sacker of cities was the sharing of a night’s sleep. Fortunately for the “Teras” and for them all the sharply-pointed rock that had pierced the keel was at the extreme end of a little promontory; so that at the first strong pull of the four long oars the ship swung clear of the island and was in deep water.

  Ordering the four men to go on with an evenly-timed spell of steady rowing, Akron now ran up the ladder to the top-deck followed hurriedly by Nisos; and, once on that deck, instead of approaching the group near the mast where Odysseus was watching events with the detachment of an alert sea-lion, he strode quickly to the ship’s stern to join the helmsman. He didn’t presume himself to touch the “Teras’s” helm, as the business of steering a ship as big as she was was no light task, and required a man not only with a special training but with special endowments.

  But it had been to Akron himself, who had spent a day and a night in his younger days voyaging to Kephallenia to find Eumolpos and persuade him to join them, that the “Teras” owed her incomparable steersman. It was fascinating to Nisos to see the reverential respect with which the Master of the “Teras” followed now every faintest movement of the rudder by an expert in that difficult art.

  The rudder was made of a young fir-trunk, peeled smooth and white; and, by its exquisite pressure upon the carefully squared and polished piece of wood directing the ship’s course beneath the water, it caused the “Teras” to obey the firm unswerving hands of Eumolpos of Kephallenia with a perfection that was indeed awe-inspiring.

  Nisos edged himself as far back into the stern as he possibly could, so far indeed that the round pole of the rudder pressed against his left thigh. But from this position he was able to get an unforgettable view of the whole spectacle. The moon was obviously full that night and its lustre flooded everything with a liquid luminosity that had nothing ghostly or spectral about it and yet was decidedly unearthly.

  The Island of Wone, when once they had got the “Teras” off that sharp-jutting rock, by no means towered above them. Its structure was indeed that of a flat table-land raised only three or four feet above the surface of the sea; and the single mast of the “Teras” rose so high into the air as to quite out-top the two weird Divinities from Arima, Eurybia and Echidna, who, as they had done from time immeasurable, were still arguing with each other in a tireless monotonous dialogue.

  The object upon which Nisos finally fixed his attention was the neck of the terrific Figure-Head of the “Teras”, which he had been assured he must regard as terminating in the actual head and features of its super-human designer.

  These monumental features were at this very moment, so he had been solemnly told, no different from what they had be
en a hundred-thousand years ago and no different from what they would be a hundred-thousand years hence. “Had this supreme enemy of the everlasting gods,” he asked himself, “been able to invent a way of surviving beneath a volume of water half-a-mile deep?”

  And what had happened to that fire-breathing monster Typhon? Had he been, as it had been said, “intercepted”, on his way to join the infernal foes of the gods who live forever? Nisos had been hearing, ever since he first came on board, extraordinary stories about this super-human Being whose features—and the legend ran that the Personage Itself had carved its own features—were neither divine nor human, neither of any conceivable Past or conceivable Future, but totally outside and beyond all we have heard, seen, remembered, imagined, dreamed, feared or hoped!

  “It seems strange,” he said to himself, “that I, Nisos, the son of Pandea the wife of Krateros Naubolides, should be squatting by this helmsman, staring at the curving neck of this creature beyond all creatures, created by this creator beyond all creators, whose dragon-swan neck ends in some ultimate vision, the vision of a Being that is both more Divine and more Titanic than anything we know, that is in fact outside all we know. And isn’t it an unusually queer chance,” Nisos now asked himself, “that I should know not one single person, except I suppose the men of the ship, who has ever seen the mysterious face with which the Figure-Head of the ‘Teras’ terminates?

  “When this ship first entered the harbour of Ithaca was there not one single soul who saw her? When she was anchored in the harbour of Ithaca did no barge or boat or canoe or raft pass in front of her? Did no swimmer, swimming round her, look up at that face? Why haven’t I asked this question of Odysseus, of Zeuks, of Princess Nausikaa herself to whom the ship belongs? There is certainly something queer about all this.”

  Nisos shuffled his uncomfortable body a little further still to the rear, until his back was pressed against the actual jet-black cross-bar of the ship’s stern, in which position every time Eumolpos of Kephallenia gave the rudder the particular push that swung the “Teras” prow to the North our friend’s thigh received something of a shock.

  At one point indeed Eumolpos became aware of some sort of obstacle at the extreme reach of his helm’s thrust, and turning his head for, as a man of good stock in Kephallenia, he was naturally courteous, he murmured an apology.

  “O that’s all right!” cried our friend. “It’s only that I’m so unused to a ship. All I can do is to follow the master around.”

  But his word with the helmsman gave him the required incentive to put to Akron the question that was seething in his mind.

  “By the way, Master, I suppose you’ve often examined the face of your ship’s figure-head? Does it look like the face of a great philosopher, or like the face of a great poet, or like the face of a great scientist?”

  Akron didn’t even turn his head. “If I answered him properly you might never be able, aye, Eumolpos, to steer a ship again, all your days? But come along, Nisos! You said just now you were following me around! Well, I’ve got a bit of a job for you now.”

  Nisos disengaged himself from his cramped observation-post at the extreme stern of the “Teras” and followed Akron forward.

  “No, seriously, my dear boy,” the skipper said quietly, as they approached Odysseus, “it would never have done to start on all that business just then. The truth of it is that there’s something funny about the whole thing.” He grasped Nisos by the arm and they stood side by side for a minute, both of them watching, while he spoke, the wild half-naked figure of Enorches, the Priest, who was clearly haranguing the old king about something; something that made it necessary for Odysseus to sit down again on his coiled ropes.

  “He wants me,” said Akron, “to put the Island of Wone well behind us before night. His hope is that a cloud may cover up this confounded Moon before dawn and leave us free to get a good vision of the special stars by which he wants us to sail or to row—whichever may be necessary—due West. No, my dear boy, we of the ‘Teras’ have a natural instinct against talking about that matter of which you enquired just now; I mean about the face of our Figure-Head. The truth of it is there has been ‘borne in upon us’, as one of us called it the other night, an absolute conviction that only someone who in everything else was so simple, so much of an innocent that people felt they must treat him as if he were a vegetable or an animal or a fish of some kind or an inanimate thing, would be able to face that face without ‘getting’, as we say, ‘the horrors’.

  “If you were such an animal-like innocent I’d let you, if we had our anchor out, swim backwards and forward in front of our bows till you could look face to face at this enemy of the Olympians; but you my dear boy are anything but an innocent! On the contrary in most things you’re a damned lot cleverer than I am or any of the rest of us who run this old ship.”

  “What kind of horrors would come upon anyone who wasn’t an innocent, and who dared to face the face?”

  “Do you want a straight answer, lad?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, as it happens, I, who now am talking with you, can tell you of one case.”

  “O quick, quick, captain! Tell me, before that face, scaring the gulls, gets round the next rock!”

  The master didn’t turn his eyes away from their steadily advancing mast, with all its ropes in order, though without a sail, but as he spoke it was clear to Nisos that ninety per cent of his consciousness was at that moment in his words.

  “It was the officer I had before we got Thuon. Poor old Thuon can’t bear even to look at the thing’s neck from this side after what he’s been told. The man’s name was Teterix and he came from Zante and it was while I let them cast anchor for a while to catch some fish that this randy fool of a Zante-man began playing his games and swimming round the prow. I’d told him he weren’t to do it, but he wanted to show off to the others; so as he swam he not only stared at the face but made faces at the face: and, in no time at all, there he was, climbing up on deck and dancing about in front of us with all his fingers pointing at his head. And such was the power of the horror on him that he forced us to see him as he saw himself and as he felt himself; that is to say with no human head at all, but with a raw bleeding neck out of which three bloated worms hung down who swayed to and fro and kept turning and twisting round.

  “After this had gone on for several minutes the unfortunate Zante-man uttered one last piercing shriek, ran to the side of the ship and dived into the sea. So strong was the wretch’s conviction that for a neck he had nothing but a gaping bloody hole with three bloated worms hanging out of it that it infected most of us who watched his dive; so that what we saw when he disappeared—and nothing of him ever reappeared—was a pool of blood on the water, with what looked like a blur of red worms squirming about within it.”

  “And you really and truly saw all that?”

  “I really and truly saw all that,” replied Akron.

  Then it was that they both saw Odysseus beckoning to them and when they reached him they were, for the twentieth time that eventful evening, impressed to the depths of their souls by the old wanderer’s self-control.

  The excited priest of Orpheus, now entirely naked, was waving his long thin white arms, on which there was not a single black hair and which the moon seemed determined to turn to ivory. The madman was calling upon the whole universe to join him in his desperate incantation to Nothingness!

  Not all the words of the priest’s incantation reached Nisos; but those that did so sounded to him somewhat like this:

  “Nothing! O Nothing! Thou god of all gods, thou creator of Silence!

  God of all gods, and creator of Silence, thy daughter!

  Nothing! O holy Nothing! O sacred Nothing, and Silence!

  Swallow, great Nothing, all else but thyself and thy daughter!

  Swallow air, swallow water, swallow fire, swallow earth and her children!

  Swallow land, swallow sea, swallow all that in land and sea dwelleth!

>   Let the whole world be empty of all but thyself and thy daughter

  Empty of all but thyself and thy daughter and darling!

  Let nothing move in the height or the depth or the length or the breadth,

  Save only thyself, great Nothing, thyself and thy daughter,

  Only thyself and Silence, thy daughter and darling.

  Let nothing sound in the earth or the air or the water or fire;

  Let the whole world be empty of all but thyself and thy daughter,

  All but thyself and Silence thy daughter and darling.”

  Nisos expected that Odysseus would react in some definite way to this nihilistic incantation; but he behaved as if he had not heard a word of what the Priest had been chanting, and as soon as Enorches realized that he was totally alone in his worship of Non-Existence he clung to the mast and became absolutely silent and still.

  Meanwhile Odysseus had begun a long geological rigmarole on the chemical constituents of various kinds of scoriae substance; and he did this, Nisos decided, so as to reduce Enorches to the Nothingness he worshipped.

  “It is an up-thrusting, up-pointing rock‚” Odysseus concluded, “a rock of black basalt, or of some blue-black adamantine stone, Master Akron. Have you heard what I’ve been saying in all this breaking of waves and splashing of water?”

  Akron, followed closely by Nisos, who gave a grave little bow when he met the king’s glance, declared that he’d heard perfectly every word.

  “How well he lies!” thought Nisos. “I couldn’t have done better myself. But no! He must have heard. What an ear he’s got!”

  “Yes, O great King,” said Akron firmly. “You’ve said that we shall soon reach an up-pointing black rock, about a dozen feet inland from the island’s edge, and that it is to this rock that you wish me to make fast the ship with our newest and strongest length of rope; for it is from there when this curst moonlight—have mercy on me, Selene!—is driven from the heaven by the sun, that you wish, my king, to make your first experimental dive with the Helmet of Proteus. Have I got your command clear, my lord Odysseus?” And the king murmured that he had. It struck Nisos however that the royal voice had grown perceptibly weaker since Pegasos had come and gone; but as the old man, after haying risen to his feet for some minutes, had now re-seated himself on his pile of ropes, this change of tone may have been without any special significance.