John Powys - Atlantis

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.