Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  It was at this point that Nisos fancying he saw Arsinöe, still in the arms of the now soundly sleeping Zeuks, throw him an understanding if not a companionable smile, replied to her by kissing his hand.

  “I can’t help liking this Trojan girl,” he said to himself; and then, as his gaze returned to Eurybia and Echidna, and from them wandered back to the coast of Wone, and from thence to the moonlight on the ocean, there rushed through his mind like jaggedly forked lightning a startling philosophical speculation.

  “Does everything come round in circles and repeat itself? Was there, when people first invented boats and ships, some boy like me ten thousand years ago who lay on a ship’s deck, such as ships were in those days, with only one deck, and only a couple of oarsmen, and a sail made of the skins of seals and wild goats, and said to himself, just as I am saying now: ‘I don’t want to go back to mother and father. I want to serve my King. I want to make love to that girl I saw on that wharf where we moored yesterday!’

  “And will there be a boy like me ten thousand years hence who will lie on a much grander deck than this and say to himself: ‘I don’t want to go back to my mother and father! I want to sail round all the known West to the Isles of the Blest!’ That boy who was like me; and this boy who will be like me, shall we three meet in the kingdom of Aidoneus?”

  Nisos had only just begun to turn his mind away from thinking about boys like himself ten thousand years before and ten thousand years after, when he saw Arsinöe open her beautiful eyes very wide indeed and give a start that would have waked from sleep anyone in the world save the son of Arcadian Pan who was holding her on his knee.

  At the same time Nisos felt himself touched on the shoulder. He twisted his head round, and there before him in the moonlight stood the figure of Odysseus!

  “Hush!” whispered the old hero while his bowsprit beard tickled Nisos’ chin: “get up as quietly as you can, my boy, and take a step with me!”

  It was a comfort to Nisos to notice when he was on his feet that his friend Arsinöe had been shrewd enough to shut her eyes and pretend to surrender herself to what certainly looked like a sleep as deep as Zeuks’ own.

  “I won’t take you with me just now further than the ladder, my boy,” said Odysseus still speaking very quietly. “I came to fetch ‘Expectation’, my most valued weapon, with which, as you know, Herakles killed the Nemean lion. But I also came to tell you what my intention is. I have already told Akron, who is at this moment informing the oarsmen what I have in mind, and I have already told Eumolpos the helmsman. My intention is this. My son Telemachos received, when he visited the yellow-haired Menelaos, as a guest-gift from Helen herself, a little phial of Nepenthe which was given to her by the King of Egypt.

  “When even a few drops of this divine Nepenthe, the enemy of all suffering, are dropped into wine, the wine into which the Nepenthe has been poured, takes away all thoughts that bring anxiety or pain or fear or doubt or suspicion or grief or envy or hatred or terror; and in place of these a beatific happiness fills our souls to the brim.

  “A little of this precious Nepenthe goes a very long way; and I have brought some of it with me to this ship. Now what I propose to do is to put a few drops of this divine drug into the wine which our four Ladies, together with Nausikaa’s official Herald, will presently be drinking in my cabin. You and I, however—and for heaven’s sake, child, don’t you go and get caught by the fragrance of the wine or lured into letting the least drop of it touch your tongue!—as soon as we see that the four ladies and Nausikaa’s Herald have fallen asleep and are deep sunk in this blessed Elysium of happy visions, having taken good care—and don’t you forget that part of it, my son!—to eat enough to last us, if need be, for a whole night and day, we, I say, will leave that lower deck and come up here, to be ready for, well, for whatever fate may bring!”

  They had by this time reached the ladder which descended to the deck of the rowers, and it was not until Odysseus was half-way down that the necessity of asking him a most drastic and necessary question forced Nisos to make the old man turn round and lift up his head towards him. Never did the lad, through all the rest of his mortal days, forget the impression he received at that second as the unearthly luminosity of that night’s omniscient moonlight poured down upon that old upturned face with that crazy “Helmet of Proteus” twisted about it, whereof the absurdly trailing “thusanoi”, or “tassels” looked in that silvery gleaming as if they were the “tassels” of Athene’s “aegis” transformed into long, slenderly-coiling, silvery worms.

  “Do you wish me, my king,” Nisos enquired, getting the words out with a gasping rush of breath, “to inform Zeuks of your intention? Is he to share your Nepenthe with the Herald and the four ladies? Or shall I tell him of your intention and recommend him to bring down the Trojan maid Arsinöe to wait on the four ladies and to share their supper and the sleep-giving wine?”

  “You have done well in thinking as you have,” answered the voice of the king from the white face above that moonlit beard. “Bring them both down to my cabin. We’ll let them both sleep the sleep of Nepenthe. After all it was the gift of Helen.”

  A couple of minutes later, Nisos was standing close to what clearly had become an extremely agitating game of contending figurines above whose “Pessoi”, or “inanimate men-at-arms”, Pontos and Proros were now bending in intense concentration.

  But Nisos was too occupied just then in obeying Odysseus to feel the faintest desire to “pessenize”. “Arsinöe!” he called out in a clear though not a loud voice. The girl heard him at once. “What’s the matter?” she asked, disengaging herself from the knees of the son of Pan and rising to her feet.

  “You must wake him now,” our friend answered, “for the king wants him at their supper.”

  And then he added hurriedly, catching a rather pathetic look of bewilderment on her face, “And you too, Arsinöe my dear, I expect they’ll all be glad to have you down there; for if I’m not mistaken there’ll be more good wine than good manners at this precious supper of theirs!”

  The girl bent down over Zeuks and shook him by the right shoulder. His body was squeezed between the metallic base of the famous figure-head which was at that point wrought into a number of shell-curved, beautifully carved dragon-scales, and the narrowing rondure of the rail of the ship’s prow. Zeuks opened his left eye, gave both the girl and Nisos a glance that partook of the nature of a humorous wink and closed it again.

  “Do wake him for heaven’s sake, my dear!” repeated Nisos. “I’d do it myself,” he went on, “only if I touched him he might fly into a passion and start hitting me; and that would probably set me off too and there’d be a fine row!”

  Nisos felt deep in his soul that he wouldn’t mind at all if there was a murderous row; but as he stared ahead he realized that the “Teras” had actually now reached the point at which not so far inland arose that nameless sharp-pointed rock to which their ship was to be roped. It certainly was a curiously shaped rock, like a tall lean man with a fantastically long neck and an unnaturally large head; and our friend began wondering just from where upon the “Teras” the rope would have to be conveyed to that figure and attached to it.

  His speculations about the securing of their vessel were broken up by some change in the wind that brought to his ears—and apparently to Arsinöe’s too, for she let Zeuks’ head sink down again—what was unmistakably the culminating point of the unending dispute between Eurybia and Echidna.

  Both Nisos and Arsinöe soon realized from the weird words they heard that Eurybia had finished her murmured contention that the reeling and rocking of the cosmos that was now the chief topic of what might be called the elemental gossip of the universe was due to a revolt of the whole Feminine Half of the world against the eternal Male; and that Echidna was now defending her notion of what was happening, which certainly was a startling and terrifying one, and entirely different from that of her sister phantom of this Arima in the midst of the ocean.

 
The gist of Echidna’s view of what was occurring was that it was a grand revolt of the Titans, and, with the Titans of all those Giants and Dragons and Super-Animals and Super-Birds and Super-Fishes and Super-Reptiles and ancient long-forgotten insular divinities, such as Eurybia and herself, who, in comparison with the proud Olympians, must seem to some—“indeed” thought Nisos, “they seem to me”—hideous monsters and wicked antiquities—in universal conspiracy against the thunder-wielding All-Father, Zeus.

  But what was probably to our friend Nisos’ ears, and certainly to those of Arsinöe, who was doing her best to disturb the sleepy head of the unconscionable son of Pan, the most alarming part of this victory-chant of the Antediluvians was that it concluded with a phantasmagoric wail of prediction, prophesying—“falsely, O falsely! let us pray!” cried the look that was being at that second exchanged between our young armour-bearer of the King of Ithaca and the daughter of Hector—that the revolt of the Titans and the Monsters was destined to prevail!

  And as the prophetic hiss of Echidna, the Snake-Goddess, floated away on the moonlight, it came with a considerable shock into Nisos’ mind that it was no other than Arcadian Pan himself, the rustic god who had the horns and legs of a goat, who had carried off from Arima these two weird Beings who were like the ghosts of forgotten island Deities and had carried off Tis’s little sister Eione as well, Eione, who was now safe in the king’s cabin and would be shortly drinking the wine that contained Helen’s Egyptian Nepenthe, carried them all off together on those two immortal horses.

  “Whither now, then,” the lad asked himself, “had Arcadian Pan gone? Had he dived down under the waters into the streets and temples and markets and shops and brothels of the metropolis of Atlantis? Impossible! Impossible! Who could imagine the goat-god of Arcadia playing on his flute in the fish-frequented streets of that drowned city? Impossible! Impossible! He must have made that other divine horse, the one whose mane was up-rooted by this naked wretch lying here now, dead-drunk in his blankets, under the ship’s bulwark, carry him over sea and land home to his sheep-folds!”

  As these thoughts crowded, like a swarm of small gnats, into our young friend’s head he noticed that Akron, the ship’s captain, was approaching them. This fact reached his intelligence indirectly but very quickly; for he saw all those little bits of wood that Pontos and Proros had been using as toy soldiers in their game of “Pesseia” disappear with a scraping and scuffling sound into the capacious folds of their tunics.

  The unavoidable though quite faint sound made by these stalwart sailors as they disposed of so many handfuls of toy-soldiers made it clear to Nisos that the natural human passion for playing games was stronger than any intellectual interest in drowned cities or in the past or future of scientific civilizations. Pontos and Proros were ready for anything; but they did not want to see their precious “Pessoi” or draughtsmen cast into the sea.

  “Well, my excellent land-lubbers!” exclaimed Akron in his most genial manner. “You’ll soon have a chance to watch a little real seamanship, not un-combined, I hope, with a little unprofessional commonsense! You’ve already noticed, Nisos, my dear boy, that we’ve reached that rock——” Akron lifted his arm and pointed eagerly—“that the king calls the Atlas Rock because, so he informs us, only none of us on this old ship can corroborate his words, it resembles the giant Titan whose head, and shoulders too, you and I must have seen from this very deck beyond the Pillars of Herakles before the ‘Teras’ made for the open sea; and the king swears it does actually resemble the Titan Atlas whom the All-Father punishes forever by making him hold up the sky.

  “The king says that the Titan, though no weakling, lacks the broad shoulders and muscular neck that would render his task agreeable. The king says his shoulders slope like a woman’s just as do those of this damned rock to which we’ve now got to tie up our grand old sea-eagle!”

  It was clear to Nisos, if not to Zeuks, who had at last under the shock of the arrival of the skipper of the “Teras”, shaken off his shameless tendency to respond to any increase in dramatic danger by an increase in undramatic drowsiness, that the four sailors on the deck below had stopped using their oars and that the “Teras” was now doing nothing but obeying the helmsmanship of Eumolpos as she followed the urge of those four men’s final strokes.

  “Odysseus told me”—and Nisos cried out his master’s name with a voice to be heard in competition with the two sounds that just then were most dominant; in the first place with the whistling of the wind in the complicated rigging beneath the mast, rigging which, though doubtless less involved than Pontos’ and Proros’ recent “pessenizing” with soldiers made of splinters and slivers and shavings of wood, would have been enough to puzzle any landsman; and in the second place with the stentorian breathing of the poor blanketed Enorches.

  Nisos must instinctively have said “Odysseus” instead of “the King” because, with this incredible moonlight flooding the rocks and beaches along whose edge they were moving and with that extraordinary rock wearing a human shape and those two phantom goddesses moaning forth into the moonlight their contrarious explanations of the present world-madness, it must have struck him that what was now happening was so dramatic that it lent itself better to the romantic name of the lover of Circe and Calypso than to the clanging monosyllable “King” whose only virtue was that it was the symbol of absolute law and order.

  “Odysseus told me to say that both you yourself, friend Zeuks, and you also, Arsinöe my dear, will be welcome as soon as you can reach it, at the Passengers’ Dining-Table in the King’s cabin, and he told me to accompany you both as soon as——”

  “What’s the matter, baby-boy?” interrupted Zeuks, looking as if he were a human skin on the point of bursting and losing its human shape in one great bubble of laughter: “Have you got a flea in——”

  “I pray it’s not a poisonous fly!” cried Arsinöe, with unmistakable sympathy in her tone. “You may laugh my Lord Zeuks,” the girl went on, coming hurriedly to Nisos’ side and raising both hands to the spot just above his collar-bone where he was now scratching himself with positively vicious intensity, “yes, you may laugh, but there may easily have been a whole swarm of poisonous insects carried from our last ‘port of call’ which was of course your—or I suppose I must now say ‘our’—island harbour.”

  But to the girl’s astonishment, and indeed to the astonishment of both Zeuks and Akron, Nisos thrust away her sympathetic hand, though its delicate fingers were trembling with real concern. But Arsinöe was saved from feeling hurt at his rejection of her help by her amazement at what he proceeded to do when she withdrew her hand. Both Zeuks and Akron were as astonished as she was and all the three of them drew near to watch his antics.

  Even Enorches, clutching his outer blanket with his left hand round his throat and his inner blanket with his right hand round his waist, woke up suddenly from his trance and stared with unglazed absorbed concentrated attention at what Nisos was doing. Nisos had clearly got possession now of whatever creature it was that had caused him to scratch himself to such a tune; and he now held it in his clenched fist close to one of his ears. The only sound that issued from his imprisoning fingers was an irregular buzzing; and Arsinöe smiled at both Zeuks and Akron, who were now openly smiling at each other, while the Priest of Orpheus began muttering the most formidable liturgical prayer he knew by heart that the most mystical swamp in the realm of Aidoneus should receive his purified ghost.

  “You were indeed brave to come all this way from your club-tent, Master Myos,” murmured our young friend; “though I hope your dear companion, the Brown Moth, won’t be too miserable in your absence.”

  “Look at Enorches!” was the Fly’s reply to this; and the moment our friend obeyed him he knew perfectly well that the Moth was anything but miserable; for it was indeed obvious from the beatific smile of paradisal bliss that now radiated from the Priest’s curiously emphatic nose, mouth, eye-sockets, eyebrows, and ears, that the lovely little winged
shadow that now kept hovering under and above and round and beneath the oddly-shaped chin of the oracle of Nothingness was nothing less than the Brown Moth herself playing at burning to death on the altar of truth.

  That neither the worship of Eros nor of Dionysos nor even of Silence herself, oldest of all divinities in the world and the one most likely to outlive them all, could wholly satisfy the Priest’s voracious mystery-maw, Nisos at that moment felt certain. The Orphic Priest could praise Nothingness; but the ecstasy he worshipped was a real, actual, concrete experience, which, if not given him by drink or by lechery, could be given him by the devotion of a disciple.

  “She knows you are here, does she?”

  “Of course. And when she’s finished playing at ‘wings in the candle’ to pluck that poor devil out of his black blot of clotted ink, she’ll come fluttering round us; and then together—‘off we’ll fly to drink with Helen before we die!’”

  “With Helen?”

  “I mean in a metaphysical sense, by sipping her Nepenthe.”

  “It’s wonderful, Master Myos, isn’t it, that I haven’t forgotten your language?”

  “Ah, my friend! Don’t you know why that is?”

  “I can’t say I do.”

  “That’s because”—and the Fly began to grow as academic as he always did with the Moth—“that’s because it was Athene herself who taught you the syntax of it.”

  “You mean the peculiar way you always begin and always end with the adverb?”

  “I mean the way we say: ‘Beautifully fluttered round him the moth symbolically-speaking.’”