John Powys - Atlantis

It happened however, that at the moment when Arsinöe came flying towards him with anything but a desperate cry, with, in fact, a welcoming and laughing salute, he had just bent down to lift up the corner of one of those well-scrubbed planks leading down to the hold; for he had seen a wounded rat with the lower part of its body a mass of crushed flesh and blood feebly moving its front legs down there and making a faint and piteous appeal to an indifferent universe.

“Nisos! My dear, my dear! What is it? O the poor little thing!” And once having embraced the situation she not only allowed Zeuks to overtake her and with some trepidation to salute his rival but she gripped that rival’s arm, and, stooping down beside him, snatched up a piece of broken pottery that some sailor had dropped a minute ago, and in a few well-directed strokes sent the soul of the rat to the kingdom of Aidoneus.

Was it the royal blood of the House of Priam in her veins, pulsing through the cells of her brain, that gave Arsinöe on this occasion so much more spontaneous grace of gesture and so much more swiftness of mental apprehension than was possessed by either the Son of Arcadian Pan or the son of Odysseus, or was it a new feeling in her own heart? Anyway, the rat having been disposed of, there passed between Arsinöe and Nisos, almost as if the dead creature’s blood had brought it about, a strangely swift understanding. This understanding was so deep and complete that our friend Zeuks, while he grew aware of it, found himself, in a manner which if it had been less complete he could never have attained, able to disregard it.

“Excuse me, you two,” he ejaculated casually and carelessly, “if you don’t mind, I’ll rush up now and see what’s been happening. You can follow as leisurely as you like.”

The daughter of Hector smiled at the son of Odysseus; for since a couple of Libyan lads had just scrambled hurriedly past them on the way up, and three elderly sailors had shuffled uneasily past them on the way down, it was clear that however strong their instinct might be to snatch a moment of quiescence at this crisis in their lives, this particular cross-road corner, dominated by the mutilated rat and the piece of broken pottery that had ended its misery, was not a good place to stand aside in out of the mid-current of events.

Arsinöe felt a sensitive woman’s natural reluctance to confuse the background of one man’s love-making with the background of another man’s love-making, so she hesitated about letting Nisos lead her back into the cabin of Eione and Pontopereia, while the one where Nausikaa had recently given herself to the old king struck the Trojan imagination of Hector’s daughter as already dedicated to the heir of the Latin ruler whose New Troy was even then rising upon its Seven Hills.

Thus it was that driven by her own sensitivity to the particular background of any sexual emotion she automatically steered the ardent Nisos towards the ladder leading up to the seats of the oarsmen; and it was upon the oarsmen’s deck, as far as they could withdraw themselves from the great motionless oars of the four rowers, that they threw their arms round each other.

Never in his life had Nisos felt as he did now after they had unclasped their arms and had sunk back against the side of the vessel. He held her by her two hands and with their knees touching he stared at her with vibrant intensity but as if from a tremendous distance. What he was really beginning to approach at that moment was simply and solely the everlasting mystery of the feminine.

And what struck him above everything else in this connection was the fact of the unfathomable and impassable gulf between the whole being of a man and the whole being of a woman. Her bodily life and its particular quality, the physical, chemical, elemental nature of her flesh and blood, was as different from his as was the substance of a fallen star or a meteorite from the stalk of a burdock. “The extraordinary thing about it,” he told himself, “is that this femininity exists in exactly the same things, like hair, and finger-knuckles, and veins, where veins are apparent, and the bones of wrists, and the rounded bones of knee-caps and the curving bones of chin and of jaw, and the more remarkable curves of shoulders, yes! in exactly the same things that in a corresponding manner exist in our male bodies as when I look at Zeuks or Akron or at my own reflection! And yet there is this startling, upsetting, disturbing difference between us!

“And all this is quite apart from the fatal, everlasting, tragic difference in bodily shape, which has to do with a girl’s breasts and hips and all her softer and more undulating curves.” So Nisos thought; and the more he gazed at her in this curious, special way the more did this mystery of her femininity grow upon him and envelope him. “What is it? What is it? What is it?” The spirit within him called aloud. But as he gave himself up to her he ceased to look at her. What he was now looking at were not the round knee-caps against which his own hard bare knees were pressed, but what seemed in that dim light to be a small ivory box or bottle — he couldn’t be quite sure which it was, but he leaned to the view that it was an ivory box — out of which Euros kept shaking certain small, pearly shells upon a square wooden tray and examining them with extreme care as they lay side by side, before he gathered them up and shovelled them back into their glittering container.

Arsinöe herself was in the vague, dreamy, passive, resigned mood which had been her only happy mood for many a long year. She hadn’t made friends with Zeuks in the way Eione had done with Arcadian Pan. But to be the son of a god is a very different thing from being a god. Besides, the great love-affair of Arsinöe’s life had been her devotion to her father Hector, a devotion that couldn’t have been tenderer or more ardent if Hector had responded to it but all he did was to take her away from her nameless mother and place her under the care of his wife Andromache.

On this deck of the oarsmen they could only embrace with their eyes a very narrow space of sky; so that neither of them had the least idea whether Pegasos had or had not spread his wings. The Trojan girl had really come to like Nisos quite a good deal and to feel a solid trust in him; but if some woman-friend had asked her point-blank: “What do you feel for this kid?” she would have probably revealed the truth that she felt a strong protective instinct for him and a desire to look after him. She would in all probability have made her woman-friend laugh, if she had not started a regular giggling-fit between them, by confessing that there had been moments of late, since she had known him better, when she had got the same sort of pleasure from his company as she used to get when she played with a special boy-doll of hers she was accustomed to call Ottatos.

Whether characteristic or not of the difference between the sexes in every human tribe beneath the sun, this interlude, or siesta, or metaphysical sticking-place in the dramatic story of the “Teras” or “Ship of Marvels”, was a noteworthy experience for Nisos whatever it may have been for Arsinöe.

It struck him very forcibly that the extraordinary good luck — and he prayed it really was, from whatever far distance flung, the impact of the wisdom of that wisest of all old little maids his ancient patroness “Atropos” that had brought it about — of his having been thrown into contact with this Trojan captive was the greatest event in his whole life.

And it was so because, since his own entire intention was to be a prophet when he became a mature man, the last thing he wanted for his companion through life was an energetic, assiduous, industrious, conscientious, formidable, inexhaustibly active and indefatigably competent. What Nisos wanted or some would prefer to say needed, was someone whose whole nature had the unusual power of being able to devote itself to the one perfectly simple and mysteriously wise act of drifting. Such an one, whether a man or woman, is able to act in a heart-whole and independent way only once in their life; but this act is the infinitely complicated one of stripping themselves stark naked, diving into the deep salt sea and there drifting wherever the tide carries them.