Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  When once he was satisfied that the Priest was not playing any wicked game with Pegasos, Nisos gave himself up to the pure fascination of just watching the winged horse, as the creature patiently stood on that top deck of the “Teras”. His length was such that four of him would have reached from figure-head to stern and his width was such that four of him would have reached from the starboard rail to the larboard rail. The rippling flow of the muscles under his skin was apparent with every breath he drew; and as Nisos watched him with increasing wonder and told himself that there weren’t many boys in the world or men either who would ever live to sec such a sight, the divine creature’s grace became yet more astounding as the animal twisted his neck round to see Zeuks lift, first Eione, whose thighs he clearly enjoyed caressing as he assisted her, and then Pontopereia whom he hoisted up bodily by her waist, and who, taking no more notice of him than if he’d been a Mill-wheel or a Wind-mill, fixed her beautiful and intellectual dark eyes upon Nisos and breathed the words, unmistakably audible, though wafted to him on the prematurely engendered twin-sigh of a final farewell: “You are my boy and I love you!”

  Nisos was standing now so close to Odysseus that he could feel the quivering outer edge of the great wave of intense erotic vibration that was passing between the old king of Ithaca and the new Queen of Phaiakia.

  That Odysseus’ emotion was unusually strong could be seen by the manner in which he squeezed the head of “Expectation” alias “Dokeesis”. Herakles himself could have hardly clasped his fingers round that wooden skull with a fiercer clutch. The consequence of this natural action while the lithe and limber, the glossy and sinewy, the delicate and perfectly equiposed body of the most athletic creature in the Cosmos rested on the deck of the “Teras”, was to produce such a vertiginous shock in the interior of the Heraklean Club that the Fly was forced like so many other great scientists to forget himself in his profession, and at once began interpreting, to the Moth and to all the world, in his high-pitched adverbial tongue, the information which the familiar voice of the Sixth Pillar in the old Corridor was conveying to the club.

  “The son of the Midwife’s sister here, she who formerly served the famous ‘Nymph in Antro’ until she was made big with child by that King of the Latins who is building in Italy a New Troy upon Seven Hills, has been weaned from his mother’s breasts and can now be fed by hand. There have been rumours in the Palace that the marriage of the Maiden Leipephile to Agelaos the son of Krateros Naubolides will shortly take place. It is also reported that the other divine horse, the beautifully-maned one who has so often accompanied Pegasos when not using his wings or crossing the sea, has on several occasions been heard exchanging human speech with the Herdsman Tis. This strange event which seems to be unquestionably true has had the effect of greatly increasing the already high esteem with which Herdsman Tis is regarded, not only by Krateros Naubolides and his son Agelaos, but also by Nosodea the mother of both Leipephile and Spartika the Priestess of Athene’s Temple.”

  Here the Fly’s lively rendering of the conversation between the Sixth Pillar and the Club of Herakles was broken up by the Fly himself. As a scientific translator of the measured monotone in which the Sixth Pillar reported to the Heraklean Club the elemental gossip that reached it through earth and air and fire and water the Fly, for all his extravagant “adverbialism”, was intelligible and sensible.

  It was, in the manner of most great scientists, only when he enlarged on his purely personal grievances that his emotions tended to erupt in spasms of disconcerting spleen. “The bitch! The bitch! the bitch! the bitch!” he now buzzed in our friend’s ears.

  “Excuse me, O thou newly-proclaimed son of abysmally-enduring Odysseus, but I must incontinently go to emphatically warn that adulterously-and-slavishly-behaving whore that I’ve got my eye on her!”

  It was indeed clear to Nisos that what the Fly feared was that Pegasos might suddenly spread his tremendous wings and create such a rush of wind that the Moth would be perforce carried off through the air to the land of Phaiakia and that he would never see her again. And as the pair of them, for like other fluttering priest-worshippers the Moth was susceptible to firm handling, returned to the weapon in the old hero’s grasp, it struck the boy’s mind as a topic upon which it was really incumbent upon him to ponder carefully in view of his future as prophet, namely as to what part the material size of a living Being ought to play in diminishing or increasing that Being’s moral responsibility. To put it plainly, should the conscience of an insect be as tender and as quickly touched by remorse as the conscience of a whale?

  A rasping stab in the vitals not so much of his conscience as of his intelligence hit him at that moment; and to the end of his days he always associated it with two things whose logical connection was merely that they belonged to the same animal. Something in the mast or the rigging interfered with the fall of the moonlight upon that glossy-dark supernatural form, whose fibres and muscles and tendons and curving sinews seemed to ripple in their relaxed quiescence not unlike the way the surface of the ocean itself was at that moment faintly stirring, but whatever it was that caused it, some kind of phantom-foam-drop appeared on the left front hoof of Pegasos gleaming with a light which seemed, in spite of it having descended from the full moon, to be an inner light, the light of a mind rather than of any external luminary.

  And what became for Nisos a life-long memory, what became for him yet another symbol of that spoudazo-terpsis, “my whole will to enjoy what happens”, which was now his war-cry, was the strange fact that this inward gleam in the left front hoof of the flying horse corresponded with, and answered to, an inner light in the fathomless depth of the liquid eye which Pegasos turned upon his passengers as he twisted his flexible neck round to see whether everyone was comfortably and securely mounted.

  But no metaphysical war-cries and no mystical symbols can keep certain painful and jarring jolts and jerks from destroying our peace; and the splinter that now pierced our young friend’s ideal chain of reasoning was a teasing and academic kind of question following closely on the childish one he had just asked himself about the conscience of a fly compared with that of a whale.

  And the point was this. How far were the gods, by nature, by tradition, by custom, by international law, and finally by the necessity of the case, exempt from the moral law that all human beings of every tribe in the world feel an instinctive imperative, wherever it comes from, to obey?

  When for instance Zeus swallowed the great prophetess Metis for fear of a fatal rival, was he breaking the moral law? The result, our teachers say, was the birth of Athene from his head. But does that redeem his murder of Metis? Athene was not Metis. To be the daughter of a mother born out of the head of the person who swallowed her does not make you your mother. It makes you a woman with every reason to avenge your mother on the person who swallowed her.

  Themis the Goddess of Order may have been forced to yield to the embraces of Zeus, but it was she who named her daughter Dike, “Just Retribution” and all his thunderings and lightnings cannot save the All-Father from the penalty of his crimes.

  “By Aidoneus, no! When the time comes for me to be a Prophet the great test of my truth and the truth of what I prophesy can be only one thing, whether I do or do not make it clear that not one of the gods—no! not even the Son of Kronos himself—can escape from the Law of Retribution. Shall I really be what I so long to be when I return from this voyage? O Atropos, thou great little goddess of Fate, give me——” His thoughts, and, we are compelled to add, his prayer to Destiny too, were broken off short by seeing Zeuks rush to the stern of the ship and disappear down the ladder. “He is after Arsinöe! He is after my girl!”

  Every muscle in Nisos’ tall slender frame grew stiff and tense. “I forgot her! I forgot her! I forgot her! And he had forgotten her. Hypnotized by the fathomless moon-stone of that unnatural eye in the hoof of the Flying Horse, and quivering with excitement, as indeed was Pegasos himself, in anticipation of the spreading of thos
e tremendous wings and of the immortal creature’s leap upwards into the air, Nisos had not only forgotten his deliberate association of his newly formulated life-logos, spoudazo-terpsis, with Arsinöe rather than with Eione or Pontopereia; but he had completely lost the image—though it now came back with a rush and filled his whole consciousness—of the Trojan maid herself.

  “God! What a ‘kakos’, what a cad I am!” But it was no use dancing a remorse dance, or calling upon Dionysos or Eros. What he had to do, if he had anything left in him but downcast aidos or pure “shame”, was to go after this incorrigible Zeuks and snatch Arsinöe away from him. But how could he, though he was the son of Odysseus and not of Krateros Naubolides, contend with the son of an immortal god, and that god none other than Arcadian Pan, whose passion for girls and obsession by girls amounted to an absolute mania?

  “But you never know,” he told himself.

  “For not only is ‘all fair in love and war’, but in all earthly struggles, whether between races, or persons, or things, it is Chance, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, who changes the wind, and gathers the rain, and loses or saves the day.

  “What a curious nature mine is!” Nisos said to himself, instinctively making use of all the analytical intelligence he had, and he had a good deal more than most young men, to put an end to the smarting sting of self-reproach. “Here I am shivering with intense interest to see Pegasos mount up from the deck of the ‘Teras’ and yet I feel if I am to keep any self-respect at all I ought to invent some excuse, any confounded excuse, such as a desire to use a bucket down below, or to get a weapon from the pile of them in the big cabin, or to ask one of those Libyans to lend me his pocket-knife, and, muttering this same invented excuse, I ought to throw an easy self-contained glance at Odysseus, and slip off past Akron.

  “By the Gods, this is what I will do!” For some reason he thought at this moment of his dead pet sea-hawk whom he would never behold again; and he also thought—it must have been the idea of his own death that brought such things into his mind—of the old dead Dryad about whom nobody any more seemed to give the least thought. Then he moved towards Akron. But what in heaven’s name was the man doing?

  The captain of the “Teras” was indeed acting in a drastic manner. He was slowly and deliberately divesting himself of his clothes, and with the help of Proros and Pontos he was tying round his waist a long rope. Nisos paused for a moment as the East Wind and the Moonlight isolated their intrepid skipper and held him in their crystal embrace, and then to the young man’s spell-bound gaze seemed to plunge with him into the water from a bow-sprit now as bare of ornament as the beard of Odysseus.

  On their naked captain now boldly swimming, with the rope behind him passing, as he swam, through the hands of both Proros and Pontos, Nisos saw Odysseus fix a well-pleased and proudly satisfied look, a look that said: “Well done, faithful one!” But the old man was evidently so certain now of the result that he soon turned his gaze back to Pegasos, and to his silent dialogue with Nausikaa, who was now resting as securely on the divine horse’s back as she would soon be doing on her expectant throne in the land of her fathers. Nisos however kept his eyes steadily on that moon-lit swimmer, kept them there indeed till the “Teras”, quickly enough when the man had once climbed out of the water, was strongly and firmly moored to that human-shaped rock on the island of Wone, about fifteen yards inland, and about the same distance from those primeval Beings, who in their “Arima” of a forgotten Past could remember the days before Zeus and his thunderbolts, or the Titans and their mountains piled on mountains, had begun to disturb the world.

  “I think, my Lord the King,” Nisos now began, edging himself forward between Pontos and Proros, “that I’ll just run down, if I may, and tell Zeuks that our ship is now safely moored.”

  Odysseus however was too absorbed in his final farewell to Nausikaa to hear his youthful adherent’s courteous mutterings; and indeed it was not till Akron was back on the ship and had begun to dress and even to swallow a glass of wine that the casual words: “Just as you like, my son,” came from the old man’s lips.

  As he went off Nisos told himself rather crossly and maliciously that at that moment the man’s beard looked as if it were the horn of a sea-unicorn, an appendage which, in the case of this singular marine beast, protrudes not from the creature’s forehead but from beneath its jaws. The absent-minded permission to be, as children say, “excused”, was however, as can be surmised, enough to send our friend hurrying down two ladders and past four oarsmen. “Suppose,” he said to himself, “Zeuks has taken her into Nausikaa’s cabin and is even now enjoying her in that sumptuous bed.”

  Nisos knew so little about the actual details of sex-adjustment between boys and girls that he was apt to wander off into completely fanciful paths when he thought of such a thing as the ravishing of Arsinöe by Zeuks. “I shall simply,” he told himself, “hit him with all the strength I have, and if I can’t crack his skull I ought to be able to stun him. But perhaps that might excite Arsinöe’s sympathy. God! I don’t know!”

  It happened however, that at the moment when Arsinöe came flying towards him with anything but a desperate cry, with, in fact, a welcoming and laughing salute, he had just bent down to lift up the corner of one of those well-scrubbed planks leading down to the hold; for he had seen a wounded rat with the lower part of its body a mass of crushed flesh and blood feebly moving its front legs down there and making a faint and piteous appeal to an indifferent universe.

  “Nisos! My dear, my dear! What is it? O the poor little thing!” And once having embraced the situation she not only allowed Zeuks to overtake her and with some trepidation to salute his rival but she gripped that rival’s arm, and, stooping down beside him, snatched up a piece of broken pottery that some sailor had dropped a minute ago, and in a few well-directed strokes sent the soul of the rat to the kingdom of Aidoneus.

  Was it the royal blood of the House of Priam in her veins, pulsing through the cells of her brain, that gave Arsinöe on this occasion so much more spontaneous grace of gesture and so much more swiftness of mental apprehension than was possessed by either the Son of Arcadian Pan or the son of Odysseus, or was it a new feeling in her own heart? Anyway, the rat having been disposed of, there passed between Arsinöe and Nisos, almost as if the dead creature’s blood had brought it about, a strangely swift understanding. This understanding was so deep and complete that our friend Zeuks, while he grew aware of it, found himself, in a manner which if it had been less complete he could never have attained, able to disregard it.

  “Excuse me, you two,” he ejaculated casually and carelessly, “if you don’t mind, I’ll rush up now and see what’s been happening. You can follow as leisurely as you like.”

  The daughter of Hector smiled at the son of Odysseus; for since a couple of Libyan lads had just scrambled hurriedly past them on the way up, and three elderly sailors had shuffled uneasily past them on the way down, it was clear that however strong their instinct might be to snatch a moment of quiescence at this crisis in their lives, this particular cross-road corner, dominated by the mutilated rat and the piece of broken pottery that had ended its misery, was not a good place to stand aside in out of the mid-current of events.

  Arsinöe felt a sensitive woman’s natural reluctance to confuse the background of one man’s love-making with the background of another man’s love-making, so she hesitated about letting Nisos lead her back into the cabin of Eione and Pontopereia, while the one where Nausikaa had recently given herself to the old king struck the Trojan imagination of Hector’s daughter as already dedicated to the heir of the Latin ruler whose New Troy was even then rising upon its Seven Hills.

  Thus it was that driven by her own sensitivity to the particular background of any sexual emotion she automatically steered the ardent Nisos towards the ladder leading up to the seats of the oarsmen; and it was upon the oarsmen’s deck, as far as they could withdraw themselves from the great motionle
ss oars of the four rowers, that they threw their arms round each other.

  Never in his life had Nisos felt as he did now after they had unclasped their arms and had sunk back against the side of the vessel. He held her by her two hands and with their knees touching he stared at her with vibrant intensity but as if from a tremendous distance. What he was really beginning to approach at that moment was simply and solely the everlasting mystery of the feminine.

  And what struck him above everything else in this connection was the fact of the unfathomable and impassable gulf between the whole being of a man and the whole being of a woman. Her bodily life and its particular quality, the physical, chemical, elemental nature of her flesh and blood, was as different from his as was the substance of a fallen star or a meteorite from the stalk of a burdock. “The extraordinary thing about it,” he told himself, “is that this femininity exists in exactly the same things, like hair, and finger-knuckles, and veins, where veins are apparent, and the bones of wrists, and the rounded bones of knee-caps and the curving bones of chin and of jaw, and the more remarkable curves of shoulders, yes! in exactly the same things that in a corresponding manner exist in our male bodies as when I look at Zeuks or Akron or at my own reflection! And yet there is this startling, upsetting, disturbing difference between us!

  “And all this is quite apart from the fatal, everlasting, tragic difference in bodily shape, which has to do with a girl’s breasts and hips and all her softer and more undulating curves.” So Nisos thought; and the more he gazed at her in this curious, special way the more did this mystery of her femininity grow upon him and envelope him. “What is it? What is it? What is it?” The spirit within him called aloud. But as he gave himself up to her he ceased to look at her. What he was now looking at were not the round knee-caps against which his own hard bare knees were pressed, but what seemed in that dim light to be a small ivory box or bottle—he couldn’t be quite sure which it was, but he leaned to the view that it was an ivory box—out of which Euros kept shaking certain small, pearly shells upon a square wooden tray and examining them with extreme care as they lay side by side, before he gathered them up and shovelled them back into their glittering container.