Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  If the tone of Odysseus and the substance of his words were an astonishment to Nisos it was a still greater wonder to the boy when the towering giant submissively obeyed and knelt down by their side apparently quite indifferent to the fact that while he, a demi-god, was on his knees, they, a pair of mortal men, were on their feet.

  Nisos now became painfully conscious of what might have been called the psychic helplessness of the four of them, Odysseus, Orion, the Nemean Club, and himself, arranged in a convenient row, as if they were Hesperidean Apples, to be devoured, one after another, by that Being reclining on the dead seaweed. Nor, it appeared, were any of the four of them very surprised by what they heard, though the tone of the Being’s voice when it first came forth might well have pulverized, or, at any rate, petrified, any one of them, caught by it alone.

  It was not only the most scraping and jarring voice that Nisos had ever heard. It was the most mechanical, automatic, and metallic voice. It was a voice like the triumphant screaming of steel when in contact with tin. It was a voice like the voice of every instrument in the Smithy of Hephaistos if they had revolted and taken over for themselves the whole resounding and echoing place. It was not the voice of a god, or a man, or a beast, or a bird, or a reptile, or an insect. It was the voice of a vast reverberating arsenal full of every kind of instrument for every kind of creation and every kind of destruction.

  “From now on, to the end of your lives,” the voice from the Entity reclining on the dead seaweed grimly grated like a wheel, or grievously groaned like a plough-share, “you three migrants to my kingdom, of which, as you know, having once come you are forever the loyal subjects, will go about the world proclaiming my kingdom’s laws. These laws will, in their own time and in due course, become the law of the whole earth, the law of every country and race and tribe and nation and people. This law will be absolutely and entirely scientific. As it is born of science, so it will grow, century by century and aeon by aeon, more purely scientific. Its one and sole purpose will be science for the sake of science. It will care nothing about such trifling, frivolous, unimportant matters as faith, hope and charity. It will care nothing about the happiness of people, or the comfort of people, or the education of people, still less, if that be possible, about the virtue or the righteousness or the compassion or the pity or the sympathy of people.

  “It will use people—that is to say men, women, and children as it uses animals. It will practise upon them and experiment with them, not for their sake, but always purely and solely, as it ought to be, for the only Purpose, the only Religion, the only Object, the only Ideal, the only Patriotism, the only Cause, Reason or Consideration worth anything in the world—to understand everything that exists in every aspect of its existence.

  “For the sake of Science we must create. For the sake of Science we must destroy. For the sake of Science we must go so deeply into the secret of the power of one human mind over another, and of all human minds over the substance of earth, the substance of air, the substance of water, and, above all, the substance of fire, so that in the final event the whole earth will be as completely under control as my ship of state the ‘Teras’. As completely, do I say? O much, much more! For though it will be worked and handled by human beings, just as the ‘Teras’ is worked by Akron and Teknon, and Pontos and Proros, and Klyton and Halios and Euros, they will be scientific human beings, that is to say every man, woman, and child, in the whole world will be dominated absolutely and entirely by me, or by someone appointed by me; and, in this new ‘Teras’ of mine, I shall sail to the furthest limit of the Cosmos carrying my war-cry of ‘Science or Death!’ to the end of Space and Time.”

  “Shut your eyes, darling!” murmured the fly to the moth, “for our ‘cosmos’, or whatever you call our old club, is going to hit this Science-Horror pretty heavily, furiously, bloodily, murderously on the head!”

  Nisos was so close to the “life-crack” within the club’s bosom that in the dead silence following the voice from that terribly beautiful countenance he couldn’t help catching, as the adverb-loaded buzz of the fly ceased, the moth’s contribution to the crisis, which, as can be imagined, was contained in two monosyllabic sighs—“priest”—“death”. But such was his sympathy with the club’s emotion that the boy now deliberately removed his hand. “Like son, like father,” might have been a proverb among flies, for Odysseus also completely relaxed his hold upon the club. Whether the savour of “poisonous brass and metal sick” from the brazen club held by the kneeling Orion, who with his height thus reduced by half was still taller by a head than the father and son who were on their feet, had anything to do with the violence of its wooden rival neither Odysseus or Nisos ever knew; and the bronze and the wooden weapon never met again. But, after a desperate, whirling circle, the self-brandished pine-tree-stump from that Nemean wood crashed down head-foremost full into the forehead of the mysterious Being on that seaweed heap, breaking its skull to bits.

  And, not content with this, the self-moved slayer of the Nemean Lion, just as if a ghost or “eidolon” of Herakles himself, wrenched forth from the dead past of that hero’s madness, had been wielding him, continued to strike at that indescribably beautiful and majestic face, till there was nothing left but a revolting mixture of blood, flesh, bones, seaweed and sand, streaked with filthily bedaubed tufts of hair.

  The whole business was over and the gigantic Orion with his club of bronze was already striding off, without a word to Odysseus, in a south-westerly direction whence he must have caught, on some far-carried stir of the waters, a trailing cloud-wisp of Typhon’s breath, when a couple of Dolphins, a great deal larger than the one that had carried Atropos, but evidently, Nisos quickly told himself, sent to their aid by that timely-interfering Mistress of Particular Destinies, stopped with a slant-sliding pause of their triumphant witchery of movement close by their very side.

  On the backs of these elegant sea-horses it was not long before it was possible for them to see, on rising to the ocean’s surface pretty well in the identical place where they dived down, the familiar single mast and complicated rigging of the “Teras”, not to speak of those tall, weird, eternally arguing goddesses “of an infant world”, Eurybia and Echidna, who still stood, disputing with each other as to what was happening on earth at this crucial time, disputing with each other in their new “Arima”, near to the Atlas-shaped rock to which the “Teras” was moored.

  “Look! O my father! Look, for the sake of Aidoneus and Persephoneia, look! It is gone!” Gasping and spitting out the water from his throat and stomach, Nisos, keeping himself afloat with both legs and one arm, for their Dolphin-steeds were soon a mile away, shouted this news to Odysseus, to whom the watchful Akron had already thrown a rope.

  Turning his steady gaze as well as his bowsprit-beard towards his son, the old adventurer, who with Akron’s help was only using his left hand to climb on deck while under his left arm the club of Herakles was squeezed against his ribs, signed to Nisos, who was treading water in an unruffled sunlit sea, to detach from his shoulder, as he himself with his right hand was now detaching from his head the Helmet of Proteus.

  The sight that had made the youth utter that cry was nothing less than the complete disappearance of the figure-head of the “Teras” so long renowned in all the harbours of all the Islands. “There’s something here,” the boy told himself, as he watched the Helmet of Proteus with its elaborate apparatus of hollow cords, sink out of sight, “that deserves more thought than I can give it till I’m warm and dry.”

  But as in his turn he was helped by Akron to reach the “Teras’” top deck he couldn’t help wondering why it had been necessary to sacrifice this elaborately worked-out method of remaining for an indefinite time beneath the ocean.

  “That awful Being,” he said to himself, “had certainly no sympathy with anybody or anything. We were all the same to it! It would cut to bits, it would burn to cinders, a hero, a lion, a dolphin, a bird, a frog, a worm, a maggot, a flea. And all this to
understand life!

  “It didn’t enjoy anything, or like anything, or admire anything, or pity anything. And yet it wanted to explore everything and understand everything. What a perfectly appalling way of understanding things! All it could understand of anything was how that ‘anything’ reacted to torture and compulsion. Well, well: I have learnt from the bottom of the ocean even more than from the ancient and adverbial language of flies. I now know what I shall be a prophet of when I am a man. I’ll be a prophet for the putting of Science in its place! And what is its place? Its place is the servant, not the master, of life, the friendly ‘doulos’, or obedient slave of living things, not their pitiless ‘basileus’, or ‘royal despot’.”

  That day, with all the following days for several months, turned out to be one of the happiest epochs in the whole life of Nisos, the son of Odysseus. He grew more devoted to Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector, than he had ever imagined that it was possible for him to be to any girl. In a physical sense, in a romantic sense, in a psychic sense she appealed to him; and on her side all she had endured in her captivity had left her with so much subtle knowledge of the pathetic simplicity of masculine self-esteem that not the most teasing obstacles, the most stupid jealousies, the most ridiculous suspicions, the most childish egotisms, could spoil for her what she saw of honesty, loyalty, and simplicity in her boy-lover’s nature.

  He also came to understand Odysseus as he had never dared to hope was possible; but it was not so much the mental enlightenment he got of the great Adventurer’s character as the simply boyish delight in the endless stories the old man would tell out of his inexhaustible memory, as they sat together under that single mast and outstretched sail in the most fortunate wind that ever wafted a vessel towards an unknown, but O! so passionately imagined, shore!

  What was most fascinating of all perhaps to the boy was the way the old man would correct and qualify, and sometimes event indignantly contradict, the ballad ditties that had already been scattered abroad throughout Hellas about so many of his exploits. Of these ballad-tales Odysseus hesitated not to explain to his son that the ones about the Trojan War itself were far grander as poetry than the more modern and more domestic ones, full, though these latter were, of the realism of daily life, and more concerned with his own private and particular experiences.

  Certainly if their luck-blest sailing from East to West was a specially dedicated time for Nisos, it was an even rarer period of exquisite human happiness for Arsinöe. She had by this time come to profoundly understand, not in a scientific manner, but in a much subtler, wiser, and entirely feminine manner, all four of the chieftains on board, for no sea-faring chronicler ought to omit Akron; while our friend Zeuks, like his father, Arcadian Pan, had the power of enjoying a young woman without spoiling her chances with other men: and finally, since she was the only girl on the “Teras”, the ship itself, devoid of a figure-head, was her only rival.

  As for Zeuks, he had for the whole of this happy voyage from East to West exactly what his peculiar turn of mind liked best in the world, that is to say, for Arsinöe would never express herself with him, an old man, a middle-aged man, and a very young man, all well-educated, with whom he could discuss his favourite problems forever, problems that were at once erotic and metaphysical and that lent themselves to a humorous elaboration which any woman’s mind spoilt. For the feminine intelligence, brought on the scene, swept in its direct realism so fast over both his logical hieroglyphs on the sands of time and the pantomime-stage overlooking them, that it spoilt the whole humour of his game.

  And so when Arsinöe was helping Odysseus take his bath, or was learning something about navigation from Akron, Zeuks would argue with Nisos about that life-logos idea which was summed up in those two significant words “spoudazo terpsis”, which Nisos loved to translate, in the adverbial language of the fly, “I powerfully throw my whole will into enjoying myself under all conditions,” while in his own secret mind Zeuks would struggle to find, though he never could find it, some pregnant aphorism that would say to the whole regiment of all the thinkers and all the prophets that have ever been: “to laugh at everything is the prerogative of man, and we must acquire the art of doing it quickly before everything laughs at us.”

  By good luck, or rather by the profoundly wise premonition of Nausikaa, the “Teras” had sailed with provisions enough to last the whole crew for half a year, so that even Akron, cautious as he was, felt no fear that they would reach the end of their resources before they reached the coast of some island or country or continent. And even supposing the ocean stretched on and on as far as the Isles of the Blest where those favoured by the gods lived forever in perpetual happiness, what could happen to the “Teras” before she reached those isles need not trouble them now. Akron indeed went so far as to confess to Eumolpos the helmsman that when he experienced a certain shudder of apprehension at the idea of having to encounter such world-famous favourites of the immortals, he overcame the uneasiness of his respectful awe by the idea that these Blessed Ones might get some kind of a human thrill at being greeted with news from home.

  But months passed by and the “Teras” reached no Isles of the Blest or any other Isles. Days followed days, weeks followed weeks, and they met nothing but the same monotony of unending waters. At last there came a day when there arose such an angry controversy among the crew, who had never bargained for a voyage as long as this, that Odysseus himself had to help Akron in restoring order. It was a quite natural nautical dispute about this everlasting fair wind. There certainly was something queer in a wind that never stopped filling their one great sail. Too well they all got to know that old familiar expanse of sail-cloth as it bulged out, so full of that never ceasing wind! There was even a dark stain upon it, in the shape of a man’s hand, made by the blood of a seagull.

  But it really was wonderful how quickly the aged adventurer restored order. And he didn’t do it just by his bawdy jests; though there were plenty of those. He did it by holding their fascinated attention while he regaled them with one enthralling episode after another drawn from the actual stream of memorable things. It had been about this wind that their dispute had arisen; and, as so often happens in these contests, in each of the opposing arsenals of argumentative weapons, more were drawn from temperament than from experience.

  In the matter of his own adventures Odysseus had come to realize as he grew older, and in doing so he had been greatly assisted by his old Dryad’s intimacy with the Naiads of the Cave, that there were already a number of tavern-and-harbour ditties, school-boy catches, ballad-minstrel songs, and even longer and more scrupulously measured verses, that made very free use of him and of his adventures, just as they did of those of Agamemnon and Achilles and Hector and Ajax; and he now quickly understood, as he caught the drift of this present dispute, that it had to do with an entirely false and rather ridiculous tale that had been rumoured abroad about an ox-hide bag, in which Aiolos, the King of the floating island of Aeolia, bound up the four winds of heaven; and about this bag being given to Odysseus to carry with him on his ship, and about Odysseus’s ship-mates, imagining it contained gold and silver, untying the knot and letting the winds go free, and finally about the frantic fury into which the foolish Aiolos flew when their ship was blown back to his fantastic brass-bound floating island!

  Odysseus explained to both sides in this airy dispute that the winds had nothing to do with any such preposterous potentate as King Aiolos of Aeolia, this portly despot with his over-fed six sons married to his pampered six daughters, none of whom did anything but eat and drink all day long.

  He explained to them that the mother of the winds was Eos the Goddess of the Dawn, who had married Astraios the son of that very Eurybia they had left on the island of Wone disputing with Echidna; and he warned them that unless they wanted the Hunter Orion on their track they had better cut out this silliness about ox-hide bags.

  “I can’t interfere,” he told them, “with what the minstrels and tavern-singers make up
about me. But inspired poetry is one thing and a versified fairy-tale, however entertainingly told, is another thing.”

  “Land! Land! Land! Land!”

  By divine good luck—though Nisos had his own secret thought that his old helper Atropos had something to do with it—it happened to be at the exact hour of Noon with the Sun high above them and the water calm when the whole lot of them crowded on deck to welcome this most heavenly of all sights to those in the air or on the water, the simple sight of the solid earth. It was not a mountainous coast they beheld nor a particularly rocky one. It was just a coast, just a shore, just land at last.

  Akron wisely decided not to let his helmsman steer them straight in at the first approach. “I prefer to wait,” he told them—and Odysseus bowed to his opinion—“till we find a really good landing.”

  It is a curious thing but “what happens” as we say, often takes the course of events out of the hands of any particular power, even out of the hands of Tyche the Goddess of Chance herself, and yet doesn’t yield it up to Fate or Destiny or the Will of Heaven. The event is not so much stranger than fiction as more appallingly natural than the natural, and to our amazement redeems all sorrows in the sweetness of its silent finality.

  Probably no one will ever be really able to explain what there was in common between three extremely vital Entities on board the “Teras” that caused them all three to die of pure delight at their approach to land.

  None of the three was entirely human, and it is possible that this was the reason; for it often happens that when plants and insects and half-gods die, ordinary human beings go on living. Ordinary human beings must have a certain mixture of fat and gristle in them that has the power, just because it is—well! what it is, of completely absorbing certain deadly vibrations.