Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  Drawn back in a second were the quivering antennae of the moth, evidently under her friend’s pressure, while with all his usual adverbial emphasis, the fly announced that the essential drift of the Sixth Pillar’s news was that all the dimensions and all the elements of nature were at that moment waiting in an hushed and awestruck suspense the result of an ocean-deep contest between the immortal hunter Orion and the creator and survivor of Atlantis.

  “The fly,” Nisos continued, translating the insect language as carefully as he could, for like all very ancient classic tongues this insect one, which was far older than any of those used either among the defenders or the destroyers of Ilium, was full of subtle shades of meaning, “the fly tells me that the Pillar is at this moment warning its friend the wooden club that the club carried by Orion is made of something heavier than wood. It is in fact made of bronze. And the fly is now telling me all that the Pillar says about it to the club. I beg you, my father, to listen for a second to the voice of the fly, so that you can see, but if anybody in the world knows that already, it’s you, what a grand teacher our goddess was when she put into my head, on the day the the Harpies attacked that stone with their nails, the trick of understanding this insect-tongue.

  “Anyway, from what the fly says I gather that the Pillar has been assuring the Club that in the hands of wisdom wood can beat bronze, and that——”

  But Odysseus interrupted him at this point with a violent movement, a movement that flung them both down upon the ground. Then in a hoarse whisper the old hero bade Nisos help him, covering both of them with as much seaweed as they could gather up and strew over themselves, as they lay where they were with the club between them.

  “Is it Typhon or Orion?” whispered the son. “Both of them!” groaned the father. And then with a sound that was half a curse and half a chuckle: “But its worse for this Atlantis-Bitch than for us!”

  Vain and useless as he well knew such trifling things as double-edged daggers were in the presence of such Beings as he now peered at from under his heap of seaweed and across the heap that hid his begetter, Nisos couldn’t help clutching his only weapon, such as it was, and he couldn’t help feeling relieved when he saw by the light from the two Protean cords that swayed above their heaps of seaweed that his father had a tight grip upon their only real weapon, the club that in its day had drunk of the blood of the Nemean Lion, the club that sometimes bore the name of “Dokeesis”, “Seeming”, and sometimes the still simpler name of “Expectation”.

  “Both of them!” Odysseus had gasped, with that queer sound that might have been a groan and might have been a chuckle; and as Nisos, feeling a human superiority to the fly, as the fly in his turn had felt a metaphysical superiority to the moth, peered out from under one heap of seaweed and across another, he did indeed behold “both of them”. And they were a really overwhelming sight. Typhon, the largest living creature ever born on land or in sea or air or fire, Typhon of whom even his mother the Earth was afraid, Typhon who had come so near to defeating Zeus that Zeus was only saved by a trick that was not a trick of his own, now approached from the South, breathing fire upon the spot where the Creator of Atlantis sprawled on her seaweed throne and where the son as well as the grandson of Laertes crouched at her feet as if within two seaweed graves.

  The fortunate thing for our seaweed-hidden humanity just then was the fact that this colossal Monster with the arms, head, breast, hips and belly of a man, had, in place of the legs of man or beast, the terrific, curving, twisting, writhing, scale-covered tail of a dragon. Typhon’s hands were garnished with the most vulpine and vulturine claws that were ever seen before, or during, or after the Great Flood that drowned Atlantis; while the gleam of the flame and the reek of the smoke that poured at all times from his throat in place of air kept making this ocean-deep water, through which he was now moving, steam and bubble round his too-human mouth, in a fashion that was as fascinatingly weird as it was, in some other queer way, disturbingly shocking.

  But if the physical appearance of Typhon not only terrified but attracted Nisos after some mad and inexplicable fashion, the appearance of Orion, the greatest Hunter there has ever been, or ever will be, caused him to shiver under his rank-stinking shroud of slippery-slimy sea-refuse with a much more definite tug-of-war sensation between two conflicting emotions than he felt about the fugitive from beneath Etna.

  It was indeed a certain concentrated, absolutely absorbed, gravely exultant enjoyment, held back as if by a leash just this side of ecstasy, which he read in the almost touchingly boyish features of the great Hunter that tore his sympathy into two halves of almost equally intense repercussion. O how he wanted to see that vast bow the Giant carried in his left hand bent for a shot and strung with one of those deadly arrows he wore in his belt! O how he longed to see that huge bronze club he swung in his right hand brought crashing down on the fire-breathing, water-bubbling visage of this Monster, who awaited his approach without a trace of perturbation!

  So completely capable did Typhon evidently feel himself to be of clawing to death, or crushing to death, or squeezing to death, or burning to death with his fiery breath, or biting the head off any pursuer who dared approach him that Nisos was scarcely surprised to see him presently curl his gigantic tail in a vast circle round his ophidian loins and, deliberately clutching with outstretched human fingers handfuls of shells and pebbles and seaweed and sand, squat down in relaxed ease with his back against one of the colossal ammonites of which there are many in that deep bosom of the ocean.

  What struck our young watcher, in spite of his boyish sympathy with every variety of hunter, as a really sublime spectacle of indifference in the hunted as to the final issue of the hunt, was the placid position in which the fire-breathing refugee from his living grave beneath Etna awaited the terrific Orion.

  And like a mountain of submarine marble that has been washed smooth by the waves till it resembles a block of rainbow-gleaming ice, the great Hunter was now exposed to the petrified stare of our young friend under his counterpane of striking sea-weed. The tremendous figure in the foreground was engaged, it was plain to see, in adjusting an arrow to the string.

  Through the wavering atmospheric lustre that emanated from the fantastic object on his father’s head the whole spectacle struck the prostrate lad with a strange sense of some vast world-history reaching some long-prognosticated moment, where life in its mysterious essence, human, sub-human, super-human, cosmic, and astronomic, had arrived at some pivotal point where the whole business, inscrutable, unspeakable, absolutely real, but beyond both mind and matter, gathers itself together to become something for which naturally enough there is as yet no name.

  Then he saw Orion draw the arrow back on its quivering bow-string against his naked breast and let it fly. It flew with a reverberating directness straight towards the reclining Typhon and past the very feet of the recumbent Creator of Atlantis. It passed clean through one of the outstretched hands of the Man-Dragon, nailing it to the ground; and Orion perceiving this and glorying in it had the same look upon his face as when with his arrows he drove the Pleiades into the sky, and again when he came at last upon the sun-god Helios newly-risen over the edge of the world and was cured of his blindness.

  But the latest and greatest of the primeval children of our Mother the Earth was not overcome by this shock. He didn’t roar, nor did he howl; he didn’t shriek, nor did he bellow: he didn’t curse nor wail, nor yell, nor rumble, nor weep, nor moan. He only lifted as high as he could his right shoulder, for it was his left hand that had been hit, swung his right arm downward across his bent torso, seized the arrow and struggled to pull it out. The arrow, however, after piercing his hand, had gone deep into a very obstinate piece of rock, and pull as he might with that powerful arm and that powerful shoulder he couldn’t pull it out.

  While he struggled with it Nisos could see the vast figure of Orion approaching with long strides and brandishing his bronze club. At that particular sight the young man’s mind m
oved very fast. He recalled what his father, lying now by his side, had told him, and how the words he used had of their own accord, so he declared, taken upon them the rhythm of poetry. In fact simultaneously with the approach of that tall terrifying figure, Nisos seemed to catch again the very syllables of what the old warrior had muttered at that moment.

  “Tonde met’ Orionay pelorion eisenoeesa.”

  “Chersin echone rapalon panchalkeon aien aages.”

  What astonished the young man most in himself at that crucial second was that in spite of all tradition, convention, propriety, decency, law, order, education, custom, and harmonious necessity, he found that his sympathy was with the hunted and not the hunter, with the ugly and not the beautiful, with the Monster, and not the destroyer of Monsters, and he suddenly felt in himself a mad, wicked, rebellious, reckless impulse to jump up from the side of Odysseus, clutch the double-edged dagger that had belonged to the son of Arcadian Pan, leap on the shoulder of this god-defying Man-Dragon, and spur him on with a mocking and resounding challenge to withstand Orion to the death!

  Odysseus must have become aware, by some psychic vibration passing from one light-giving Proteus-cord to the other, of this rebellious impulse in the life-blood of the child of his loins, for he suddenly handed to him his club, leapt to his feet with astonishing agility, crossed the few yards between them and Typhon in a couple of strides, and kneeling on one knee, and using both hands, pulled out the arrow! Nisos who was instantly at his side gave him back the club and helped him to his feet. But they now found themselves, while they watched Orion’s steady approach, standing so close to the Creator of Atlantis that this incalculable Entity was able to try its dangerous magic upon them both just as it pleased; one deadly-white phosphorescent tentacle of a finger being laid on the shoulder of Odysseus and the other on the shoulder of Nisos.

  All three of them for a brief space, while every pulse-beat of time brought Orion nearer, were in any case reduced to helpless inactivity by the choking cloud of fire and smoke with which Typhon covered his retreat. But a retreat, and a very shrewd and very rapid retreat this enemy of Zeus was able to make under cover of his own fiery breath, so that when Orion, brandishing his club of bronze, arrived on the scene he had not the remotest idea whether his fugitive had fled east or west or north or south.

  Nor did it appear to him that either of the two men he found awaiting him were in a condition capable of replying intelligently to any question he might ask as to the direction of the flight of the Enemy of Heaven. They were both, at least so it seemed to the simple mind of the great Hunter, so confused, so dazed, so numbed, so completely metagrabolized by the leprous white, death-worm-white, sarcophagus-toad-white dead-sea-eel-white fingers that rested upon them that he might equally well make enquiries of a heap of ordure dropped by the fugitive.

  So he addressed himself to the Being who had reduced them to this condition.

  “Tell me, you creator of drowned cities, you hypnotizer of men, whither has that monster whose belly-flame no water can quench and whose bladder-smoke no ocean can quell, shogged off on his wriggling tail?”

  Neither the father with his unbelievable past nor the son with his doubtful future appeared able to utter a word. But the mental vibration between them was so aided by the cords of the Protean Helmet that Odysseus indicated to Nisos in a whisper below a whisper that the club of Herakles had begun to make curious little jerks, abrupt stirrings, and quiverings quite independent of the hand that held it. “Feel him, will you, son?” whispered the old hero, “and tell me what you think!”

  Nisos laid his left hand on the club’s head, just above its life-crack where the hollow cord, clinging closely to it, still protected the sheltering insects from the pressure of the water. “If it wants to act on its own, my king and my father‚” the young man whispered, “I would risk it and let it do so!”

  And the club, whom some called “Expectation”, and others called “Dokeesis”, said to itself: “That bronze affair which Orion is whirling about over our heads may be all right for breaking stones. It is far too unwieldy, mechanical, automatic, and impervious to all suggestion, to crack the skull of a dangerous magician. If I can only make Odysseus give me my complete freedom I’ll show him and this lad too how to deal with wicked and horrible Beings! I came near it at the cave of the Naiads; but this Living Horror lying on that dead seaweed is worse than the oldest natural-born monster. But I, Dokeesis, can deal with it! Only let me go, and you shall see!”

  And then, as his own hand on the club’s head and his father’s hand round the club’s waist relaxed a little, Nisos heard the fly say to the moth: “It’s hard for a thinking person like myself to go on studying life while these gods and men and monsters make such a stir; but I’m at least lucky to have someone like you, not quite indifferent to philosophic conclusions. Before the Pillar stopped talking to the club just now, it revealed the real cause of all this hullabaloo. It said it had learnt from earth and water and air and fire that the death of every deity in the world was at hand. It said that the world, what it always calls ‘the Pillared Firmament’, would outlast every creator that was supposed to have made it. This boy Nisos thinks that our ancient classical language is too adverbial. Adverbial! How else, I should like to know, could any language express how perfectly, beautifully, intelligently, clearly, and completely the club, in whose bosom you and I are at peace, understands our old and subtle tongue? Anyway the Pillar has now revealed that as a result of a spontaneous and natural revolt all over the world against god-worship, all the gods that exist, from Zeus downwards, and all the goddesses that exist from Hera downwards, including Athene herself and Eros and Dionysos and of course including Aidoneus the god of the dead, and Poseidon the god of the sea, are fated to perish. They are not fated to perish rapidly. Some indeed, Athene and Hermes for example, will perish slowly.

  “But perish they all will. And the fatal sickness that must ere long bring them to their end is caused by this growing refusal to worship them. If mortal beings depend on the sun and the rain, immortal beings depend on our worship of them. If we stop worshipping them, the juice, the sap, the pith, the oil, the ichor, the very blood of their life vanishes; and like plants without sun and air, and plants without earth and water, they simply wither away.”

  The fly now became silent; but Nisos heard the moth answering him in her most vehement manner. “I don’t see the use of dead things like sand and rocks and air and water and fire going on when living things like gods and men and insects have vanished away. That would mean that nothing would be left; for if no one knew they were there, there’d be nobody there and everything would be nothing.”

  “Your voice, beautiful one,” said the fly, “sounds as if you’d rather like everything to be nothing.”

  “I would! I would! I would!” cried the moth; “for then the greatest Priest who has ever lived would be right, and the Pillar and the Club and all the rest of you would be wrong!”

  Nisos decided in his own mind that it must have been the abnormal excitement of the club itself that had communicated this tension to its inmates. “Shall I,” he said to himself, “take my hand off its head, and see what happens? My Father’s hardly holding it at all! Suppose I did take my hand off its head would it move of itself? Would it go for this horror?”

  Nisos had never in his life been aware of so many cross-currents of thoughts and intentions, of revelations and counter-revelations, of insurrections and counter-insurrections. He was conscious of feelings that whirled one way and of feelings that whirled exactly the opposite way, through his consciousness. It was like being torn in half. With one part of his soul he longed to lift his hand from the club and see the club plunge itself with all the power that killed Nemean Lion into the face of this Mystery enthroned on this dead seaweed!

  With the other part of his soul he felt that to see the terrible beauty of this majestic face mauled, crushed, churned up, smashed up, beaten up, pounded up, hammered up, reduced to an indistingu
ishable paste of pestilential mud and blood would be to assist at the most savage crime that his wickedest imagination had ever pictured. But there was an “I am I” within him that was deeper than his divided soul; and with this he felt that the only conceivable alternative to letting the club obliterate this Ruler of Atlantis was to let the Horror have its way, to give up himself to it with absolute submission, to give up his father Odysseus to it, to give up his friend Zeuks, the son of Arcadian Pan, to it, and, worst of all, to give up to it his girl Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector of Troy. No, no, no, no! He couldn’t let this Being, whatever the mystery of its creative power, whatever the ineffable beauty of its face, whatever its justification as the archenemy of Olympos, triumph over all he loved, unresisted!

  He felt too agitated, as the quivering of “Expectation” alias “Dokeesis” under the pressure of his hand indicated that at the withdrawal of his hand the club would act on its own and leap at that unspeakably lovely face bending towards them, to have the calm of mind to do what Odysseus was doing at this moment, namely keeping his eye fixed, not on the Creator-Survivor of Atlantis, but on the great Hunter Orion, who, towering above them, was now examining with the utmost nicety each arrow in his quiver, and as he did so kept turning north, south, east, west, and snuffing at the air for the direction of Typhon’s flight.

  But he was absolutely amazed when he heard his father, who like himself was now on his feet, addressing Orion in a calm, quiet, but extremely authoritative voice.

  “We have met without meeting, O mighty Orion, and I must request you to kneel down here for a moment at my side. I must ask you to do so in the name of your island of Chios. I must ask you to do so in the name of Merope. I must ask you to do so for the sake of the hide of that sacrificed bull, filled with the mingled semen of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes, and buried in the earth for ten months, out of which you were born.”