Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  They had only to pause for a moment with their elbows on an ebony balustrade to realize what a sublime achievement this Metropolis of Atlantis was. The wonder was not only in the fact that its stairways and bridges and great squares and vast marketplaces were supported by the same colossal pillars, as the towering temples, which themselves, in their turn, were over-topped by yet more bridges, bridges above which still mightier and higher platforms had been erected, platforms which had been made the floors for still loftier towers. It was also in the fact that the whole mass of them, yes! the whole volume and weight of all these amazing constructions, were connected with one another, forming, so to speak, one vast musical composition in marble and stone. And if this drowned super-city was indeed by far the most remarkable creation that the world contained, how was it that the human race could calmly look on while some Titan built and some Olympian drowned its sublime structure? How was it that no desperate prayers to Atropos, who was the oldest and wisest even if she was the smallest and the most easily exhausted of the three Fates who govern the affairs of men and of nations, were not uplifted by the prophets of the people? But it now seemed to both the father and the son as they contemplated this spectacle, leaning upon that ebony balustrade with its summit disappearing in the salt water above them and the foundation disappearing in the salt water beneath them, that they really could hear the terrifying twang of the bow-string of Orion.

  But Odysseus wasn’t one to remain paralysed and confounded even though in the presence of a menace from Orion on one side and from Typhon on the other. “If that’s the Hunter,” he remarked quietly, “that is, without question,” and he jerked his beard in the opposite direction, “the breathing of the Monster. So I suppose we’d better leave this point of vantage and swing round again, whether eastward or westward, or northward or southward; for I have now absolutely lost all sense of direction, and I expect you have too, my son! But I know we were just now following that damned Dragon, so, if I’m right to assume from the noise I can hear that the brute’s coming back this way we’ve got to return to our first direction, sonny, which was certainly directly opposite our present one.”

  They turned their backs therefore to the still faint but extremely unpleasant sounds of which they both were now fully aware, and made their way, the father with Herakles’ club and the son with Zeuks’ double-edged dagger, back once more in the direction from which they had just been hastening.

  “Was it an omen, my father, both of us thinking of Orion at the same time?” enquired Nisos rather timidly, for he was not sure, as nobody who knew Odysseus ever could be really sure, what his precise reaction would be to any question that had a mystical or religious over-tone.

  In one sense this famous hero’s character was abnormally simple, as simple, you might almost say, as that of an animal, in another sense it was unpredictable, yes! not so much complicated, or subtle, as wholly unpredictable. Even here it might have been argued that there was something animal-like, although to anyone who has a long experience of any particular species of animal the absolutely incalculable never occurs.

  But it was precisely this, the absolute incalculable, that did occur with Odysseus; and it was upon this peculiarity that the popular idea of his wiliness and cunning rested. Human cunning, like human honesty, is one of the hardest of all qualities to catch, isolate, hold, and clearly define, especially so when we agitate our measuring scales by the introduction of our moral emotions. Odysseus’ unpredictableness resembled in fact both the unpredictableness of the sort of super-animal we call “good”, like Pegasos, and the unpredictableness of the sort of super-animal we call “bad”, like Typhon.

  But now to his son’s question about Orion the old man’s reply was both very gentle and very definite. “I have noticed,” he said, “that the intimation of a great friend’s approach or of a great enemy’s approach reaches us through the intervening space much more quickly and much more unmistakably when the personage arriving finds us entirely alone and with nothing around us and about us except the elemental, the mineral, the vegetable forms of existence. Get away, you little idiots!” and he brushed aside with his left hand a shoal of tiny fish who had evidently mistaken his projecting beard for a growth of the sort of seaweed that might be expected to harbour the particular kind of small creatures that were to these scaly little mouths and distended gills a veritable heaven of feasting. “Of course in this case, my dear child‚” Odysseus went on, “you and I, since we have the same friends and enemies, can well, for the argument’s sake, count as one person. To both of us, therefore, the presence of Orion down here at the bottom of the sea, exploring the metropolis of Atlantis, just as we are doing ourselves, is without question a menace to you and me. That he is, no doubt, much more of a menace to our enemy Typhon makes no difference to us. It is known that Orion was blinded for ravishing his mother and only restored to sight by the power of the Dawn. It is known that he has an insane passion for killing anything and everything with bow and arrow and that on one occasion he set out to destroy in this manner the whole human race. Whether he is here as a friend or as an enemy of the Being who rules this place and whose mysterious countenance our ship carries as her figure-head is completely unknown to us.

  “Whether this mysterious Being to whose machinations, directed against the Son of Kronos, Atlantis owes her drowning, has the power to dominate Orion I have not the remotest idea. I can only assure you that when I saw Orion in Hades after my vision of Minos judging the Dead I felt very hostile to him. Ghost himself, he was killing for the second time, and for an everlasting Second Death, every creature he could discover, in a blind ecstasy of universal murder.

  “Thus, my dear boy, when I hear you ask me whether the fact that the image or the eidolon or the actual living form of Orion coming into our two minds at the same moment when he is stalking through these deserted buildings in one of his insane murdering fits, is an omen, I can only answer, emphatically and definitely, no!

  “No! It is no more an omen than when Polyphemos killed my companions and tried to kill me. It is a struggle, a battle, a contest, my little son. It is a fight! And everything in life is a fight, Nisos my friend, everything! That the idea of this savage Hunter, this madman, who some say raped his own mother, and whose very name means ‘to pour out semen’, and who others say had neither father nor mother, but was born of the semen of Zeus and Poseidon deliberately thrust into the hide of some slaughtered beast, and left to ferment there for the necessary nine or ten months, came into our minds at the same moment only shows how the eidola of dangerous men, who are threatening us, can pass through air and water and earth and fire till they fling themselves upon us like horrible projected shadows, warning us that very shortly the men themselves in their own flesh and blood will be upon us!

  “Omens? It is the fight for life, the fight in life, the fight of life, and, by all the gods! the fight with life! But what we must set ourselves to do now is to discover the palace, the dwelling, the temple, the throne, the hiding-place of the Being who rules this place.”

  He gathered up his own trailing cord of the Helmet of Proteus more effectively round his head and watched his son do the same for himself and also for the club of Herakles; and once more they went on with their exploratory journey. But their quest was soon at its end. Without warning, without the faintest hint of premonition, they were suddenly standing on a platform of green marble, marble that through all this water had itself the look of water and of water in motion too; while in front of them, but to their surprise not on the tremendous and awe-inspiring throne they were expecting and looking for, but on a heap of long-dead, long-decayed, long-rotted, long-dissolved, long-degenerated, filthily-stinking, foully-crumbling, horribly-putrifying mass of sea-weeds in accumulated decomposition, reclined, or rather sprawled, the god-titan, or goddess-titan, for this horrific and terrifying rebel against all Deities was completely bi-sexual and androgynous, who was by reason of his, or of her, or of its defiance of Zeus and of Poseidon and o
f Aidoneus, those three Olympian Rulers of Sky and Sea and Hades, responsible for the drowning of Atlantis.

  This mysterious Being, whose physical appearance struck Nisos as more shocking and also more feminine than human words could convey, fixed her eyes upon the young man as he stared in stupefied horror and made with outstretched and inwardly curved fingers a series of gestures, of a dangerously magnetic nature, compelling him to approach her. This summoning gesture he felt unable to resist, and first with one of his feet and then with the other—and as each foot advanced he felt himself forced to move his arms, in a fumbling and groping manner, mechanically forward—he slowly and steadily, while he trembled from head to foot at what he was doing, advanced towards this indescribable creature’s embrace.

  And then, evidently as much to the surprise of this terrifying Being as to that of its intended victim, Odysseus calmly stepped forward and stood between them with his broad back towards his son and his face towards the Being crouching on that pile of rotting seaweed.

  Nisos experienced an extremely odd sensation as he allowed his right hand grasping his two-edged weapon to sink down by his side and contemplated the broad back in front of him. It was to him a completely new sensation and one which made him feel a little foolish. He liked to be the active one, the most active one, in any group or in any company. He had been brought up to feel it his duty to serve, guard, protect, and defend his parents; and also to serve, guard, protect, and defend his King; and furthermore to help, aid, sustain and champion the very old.

  And here he was standing weakly, feebly, passively, stupidly, behind the back of a person who was both his Father and his King and at the same was a very old man. Used to analysing his feelings he found it more than a little difficult to decide whether it was better to submit and obey on this occasion, when so old a man who was both his father and his king placed himself between him and the present danger and did so too without uttering a single word, did so in fact purely by the silent and practical and significant action of facing this appalling Being himself and turning his back upon the child of his loins, or whether he ought, with one desperate leap and a wild rush, to fling the old man aside, raise high his own arm, and plunge Zeuks’ deadly double-edged dagger again and again into what he could only pray would prove to be the heart of this living Mystery of Horror.

  Why he thought of her, what put her into his head, what power concealed in the depths of his own nature called upon her for help, Nisos could no more tell than he could tell whether she would have been, in any case and entirely independent of both Odysseus and himself, exploring, as many another powerful Deity might well want to do, the deserted Metropolis of a drowned world, but she who now came suddenly into our friend’s head was none other than Atropos herself, the oldest and the smallest, but far the most powerful, of the three Goddesses of Fate.

  “O Atropos, O Atropos!” Nisos prayed in his heart. “Great Goddess of Fate! Thou who once didst let me struggle with Gorgons and Furies on thy behalf, help Odysseus and help me against this Horror!”

  He had no sooner uttered this prayer than he was aware of a curious hush in the humming and murmuring waters around them. He shuffled sideways just a little; in fact just enough to be able to choose to see or to choose not to see, according to his wish, the magnetic eyes of the Being reclining on that foul heap of stinking seaweed. From this position he could see that the Being in front of him had got its eyes fixed steadily upon the face of Odysseus and was still making with its semi-human, semi-vulture-like finger-claws a monotonous, repetitive, ritualistic pantomime of silent motions, which clearly gesticulated what in words would have been: “Come to me! Come to me! Come to me! You and I, when once we are one, will conquer the universe!”

  The Creature’s “Come to me!” was repeated over and over and while this appalling sorcery of repetition went on Nisos’ glance wandered to a half-revealed object that lay amid that rotting dark-brown seaweed. What it was, when once he caught sight of it, was evident enough, though the seaweed in which it was entangled covered many portions of it. It was the skeleton of a man or woman. Nisos didn’t know enough about anatomy to know to which of the sexes it had belonged, and the light that shone from the couple of swaying cords that emanated from the Helmet of Proteus was not strong enough to reveal with certainty whether the owner of the flesh that had once covered that skeleton was a tall or a short person; but those white bones entwined with dusky seaweed made him, as the Helmet’s flickering light fell upon them, wonder why he had never asked the all-knowing old hero how it was that considering the thousands of people who must have been drowned in that sunken city he hadn’t seen until this moment a single dead man or woman. Anyone would certainly have supposed that if the thunder-loving Son of Kronos had caused the sinking of a crowded city like this as a punishment for impiety the whole place would be full of dead people caught and drowned without warning in the midst of their daily business and profane pleasures.

  If only he had the power of reading the thoughts that were passing to and fro within the living skull of Odysseus under that fantastic Helmet! What could the old hero be doing with his mind and his will to counter this gesticulated spell by which the Ruler of Atlantis was seeking to enthral him?

  It was hard enough for Nisos to take his eyes away from those twining and twisting fingers, but he was too scared as well as too prudent to risk more than a series of snatching, switching, twitching glances at the appalling beauty and over-mastering power of the face above those flickering hands and that androgynous breast.

  What on earth would the old hero decide to do? It was certainly a weird state of things for a person as inexperienced as he himself was to have to face. But here was his father facing it in deadly silence; and he told himself that if he intended to be a prophet when he grew older he must force himself to face what was happening now. He must in fact force himself to see himself cowering behind his father who held the Heraklean Club but who could do nothing in the presence of this Being but simply stand his ground, while round about them both, wandering up and down these towering bridges and triumphant bastions and tessellated battlements roamed the titanic Dragon-Monster Typhon who had shaken a whole Sicilian mountain from off his shoulders and who breathed such fire from his belly that no mortal man could face him, and yet, huger than he, and armed with a club not of wood, but of bronze, here also was the greatest of all the Hunters of the world, enormous Orion, threatening not only Typhon but all that lived and moved upon the earth and all that lived and moved beneath the waters! And here was he, Nisos, cowering behind the back of his father. But he must, he must without shirking his own shame, force himself to visualize this living group of heterogeneous Beings, human and divine and demonic and bestial, isolated there in drowned Atlantis, but as compared with the infinite extension of the sky, and the infinite extension of time, of no more importance or significance than if it had been a group of toads and tadpoles and newts and stickle-backs and dragonfly-grubs in the minute estuary of a small pond.

  His half-conscious pride in being clever enough to think thus of himself and of the rest of them lifted his spirits considerably and once again, and this time with more faith and hope than before, he prayed to Atropos, the oldest and smallest, but by far the most powerful, of the Three Fates.

  And lo! such was the regard which this aged directress of mortal lives had for our young friend, and whether he knew it or not this personal link with the old lady was the best omen and the deepest intimation that could possibly have reached him that one day he really might prove to be a prophet to the people of Hellas,—lo! there suddenly swam past them, following a straight line between Odysseus and the god-demon of the drowned City, a large and peculiarly handsome Dolphin, upon whose back, and clinging to him with a certain nervous intensity, was Atropos herself!

  She gave our friend as she passed, and she looked at nobody else and took no notice of anybody else, a look he would live to remember all his days, and probably would recall on the day of his death. It wa
s then that Odysseus swung round at last, turning his back upon the god-demon, as if the ripples made by the passing of that Dolphin had broken, independently of any effort he had to make for himself, the whole of the spell which was now in the process of being thrown over him by the twining and twisting of those appalling fingers.

  But when, in the radiation of each of the Helmet’s hollow cords that gave to the calm old hero and his agitated son all their light and all their air, Nisos looked at his father’s face he was surprised to see upon it an expression quite different from the expression he expected; for what he saw was not satisfaction over something that had just happened but expectation of something that was just going to happen.

  And this became yet more evident when the old man held up before his son, in the full light and air of both those hollow cords that sprang from the crazy-looking object upon his head and went wavering upwards till they reached ocean’s surface, his wooden Heraklean club.

  “Expectation’s acting true to his name, eh, sonny?” murmured the old man, speaking as quietly as if in place of a glowering horror there was nobody present but Tis and his faithful cow.

  Nisos looked at the life-crack in the great weapon’s bosom. Yes! There, as of old, was the big head and staring black eyes of the scientific fly; and there were the wavering antennae of the mystical moth!

  To the son’s astonishment the old hero begged him to enquire from the fly if the Sixth Pillar at home could still hold converse with “Expectation”, and, in case it could, had it any news for them at the bottom of the deep sea? Nisos, though in his nervousness he felt as if the weaving fingers and the appallingly dominant eyes of the Being behind his father were keeping up a threat that nothing could dispel, gathered about him, as if it were the aegis of Athene herself, that look of Atropos and implored the fly to tell him the news.