John Powys - Atlantis

“The king says that the Titan, though no weakling, lacks the broad shoulders and muscular neck that would render his task agreeable. The king says his shoulders slope like a woman’s just as do those of this damned rock to which we’ve now got to tie up our grand old sea-eagle!”

It was clear to Nisos, if not to Zeuks, who had at last under the shock of the arrival of the skipper of the “Teras”, shaken off his shameless tendency to respond to any increase in dramatic danger by an increase in undramatic drowsiness, that the four sailors on the deck below had stopped using their oars and that the “Teras” was now doing nothing but obeying the helmsmanship of Eumolpos as she followed the urge of those four men’s final strokes.

“Odysseus told me”—and Nisos cried out his master’s name with a voice to be heard in competition with the two sounds that just then were most dominant; in the first place with the whistling of the wind in the complicated rigging beneath the mast, rigging which, though doubtless less involved than Pontos’ and Proros’ recent “pessenizing” with soldiers made of splinters and slivers and shavings of wood, would have been enough to puzzle any landsman; and in the second place with the stentorian breathing of the poor blanketed Enorches.

Nisos must instinctively have said “Odysseus” instead of “the King” because, with this incredible moonlight flooding the rocks and beaches along whose edge they were moving and with that extraordinary rock wearing a human shape and those two phantom goddesses moaning forth into the moonlight their contrarious explanations of the present world-madness, it must have struck him that what was now happening was so dramatic that it lent itself better to the romantic name of the lover of Circe and Calypso than to the clanging monosyllable “King” whose only virtue was that it was the symbol of absolute law and order.

“Odysseus told me to say that both you yourself, friend Zeuks, and you also, Arsinöe my dear, will be welcome as soon as you can reach it, at the Passengers’ Dining-Table in the King’s cabin, and he told me to accompany you both as soon as—”

“What’s the matter, baby-boy?” interrupted Zeuks, looking as if he were a human skin on the point of bursting and losing its human shape in one great bubble of laughter: “Have you got a flea in—”

“I pray it’s not a poisonous fly!” cried Arsinöe, with unmistakable sympathy in her tone. “You may laugh my Lord Zeuks,” the girl went on, coming hurriedly to Nisos’ side and raising both hands to the spot just above his collar-bone where he was now scratching himself with positively vicious intensity, “yes, you may laugh, but there may easily have been a whole swarm of poisonous insects carried from our last ‘port of call’ which was of course your — or I suppose I must now say ‘our’—island harbour.”

But to the girl’s astonishment, and indeed to the astonishment of both Zeuks and Akron, Nisos thrust away her sympathetic hand, though its delicate fingers were trembling with real concern. But Arsinöe was saved from feeling hurt at his rejection of her help by her amazement at what he proceeded to do when she withdrew her hand. Both Zeuks and Akron were as astonished as she was and all the three of them drew near to watch his antics.

Even Enorches, clutching his outer blanket with his left hand round his throat and his inner blanket with his right hand round his waist, woke up suddenly from his trance and stared with unglazed absorbed concentrated attention at what Nisos was doing. Nisos had clearly got possession now of whatever creature it was that had caused him to scratch himself to such a tune; and he now held it in his clenched fist close to one of his ears. The only sound that issued from his imprisoning fingers was an irregular buzzing; and Arsinöe smiled at both Zeuks and Akron, who were now openly smiling at each other, while the Priest of Orpheus began muttering the most formidable liturgical prayer he knew by heart that the most mystical swamp in the realm of Aidoneus should receive his purified ghost.

“You were indeed brave to come all this way from your club-tent, Master Myos,” murmured our young friend; “though I hope your dear companion, the Brown Moth, won’t be too miserable in your absence.”

“Look at Enorches!” was the Fly’s reply to this; and the moment our friend obeyed him he knew perfectly well that the Moth was anything but miserable; for it was indeed obvious from the beatific smile of paradisal bliss that now radiated from the Priest’s curiously emphatic nose, mouth, eye-sockets, eyebrows, and ears, that the lovely little winged shadow that now kept hovering under and above and round and beneath the oddly-shaped chin of the oracle of Nothingness was nothing less than the Brown Moth herself playing at burning to death on the altar of truth.

That neither the worship of Eros nor of Dionysos nor even of Silence herself, oldest of all divinities in the world and the one most likely to outlive them all, could wholly satisfy the Priest’s voracious mystery-maw, Nisos at that moment felt certain. The Orphic Priest could praise Nothingness; but the ecstasy he worshipped was a real, actual, concrete experience, which, if not given him by drink or by lechery, could be given him by the devotion of a disciple.

“She knows you are here, does she?”

“Of course. And when she’s finished playing at ‘wings in the candle’ to pluck that poor devil out of his black blot of clotted ink, she’ll come fluttering round us; and then together—‘off we’ll fly to drink with Helen before we die!’”

“With Helen?”

“I mean in a metaphysical sense, by sipping her Nepenthe.”

“It’s wonderful, Master Myos, isn’t it, that I haven’t forgotten your language?”

“Ah, my friend! Don’t you know why that is?”

“I can’t say I do.”

“That’s because”—and the Fly began to grow as academic as he always did with the Moth—“that’s because it was Athene herself who taught you the syntax of it.”

“You mean the peculiar way you always begin and always end with the adverb?”

“I mean the way we say: ‘Beautifully fluttered round him the moth symbolically-speaking.’”

“But do go on, Master Fly, with what you were telling me you had just over-heard from the talk of the Sixth Pillar with the Club of Herakles.”

“The Sixth Pillar told the Club that Princess Nausikaa had been chosen Queen of her Native Land and that those two Immortal Horses, that the Priest over there tried to maim, are even now on their way through the air to take her back to that country where her palace still possesses that famous garden which is the most beautiful garden that has ever been seen in the whole history of the world.”

“Those two Horses coming here, do you say?”

At this startling piece of news Nisos jumped to his feet, removed his hand from his ear, opened his fingers, and let the Fly go free with a flourish of his wrist. The Fly was no sooner free than it was instantly joined by the Moth, and the speed with which the two of them flew off the top deck, down the ladder to the oarsmen’s deck, down the next ladder to the cabin-deck, and thence straight into the interior of the great weapon that was their nomadic home, was incredible.

We human beings in our crowded life are more aware of the starting-points and arriving-points of insects than of the rapidity of their movements from point to point.

“Come along, Zeuks, for heaven’s sake come along! And you too my lord Enorches! Fate will find a Community for you — don’t you doubt it — where you can preach, if not practise, your nihilistic ideas, whether under the love-charms of Eros or under the Thyrsi of Dionysos!”