John Powys - Atlantis

Compared with the people who put purpose after purpose before them and continue struggling energetically until they attain each of these purposes, these once-acting, once-stripping themselves, once-diving into the deep-sea Drifters seem allowed by Atropos the privilege of being porous to more than one universe and being aware of more than one Space and of more than one Time.

Yes! The winds of a million systems of things blow across them and one infinity calls to another infinity through them. And the singular thing is that among male children only those who are lucky enough to be born under the special inspiration of that funny little goddess, the old maid Atropos, whose abysmal intelligence has not been killed either by child-bearing or by playing the bitch, know that for life to be life and for the universe to be the universe it is essential that there shall be two embodiments of womankind. Each of these embodiments must have that everlasting mystery in her skin, in her flesh, in her hair, in her bones, in her milk, in her milt, in her mensuration as well as in her mind. But the one must be actively competent and divinely creative, the other incompetent and divinely passive. Nisos felt no longing for a mate who was protective of offspring and eternally producing offspring and keeping the human race alive upon this earth. It was the second type of female, the type protective of dreams and fancies and wishes and longings and illusions and imaginations, and ideals, and rebellions, and destructions, and insurrections, and redemptions, and recoveries, and re-births, and by means of all these things eternally changing the movements and explorations of the energy of life from one generation to another, towards which he felt drawn.

“What is it,” he asked himself, at that crucial moment, “that this Trojan girl has got in her that neither Tis’s little sister nor the daughter of Teiresias possess, but which I must have if I’m to be happy in my choice?”

It was at that very pulse-beat of Time that the young man became suddenly aware that Arsinöe was watching him with concentrated attention. Previous to this moment she had preserved the same friendly passivity that had always been her mood with Zeuks and had lasted throughout his recent amorous handling of her. But something, whether a flicker of romantic seriousness passing across the face of Nisos, or some thought or feeling of her own that may very well have reached her from the psychic work-shop of Atropos had suddenly drawn the girl nearer to the young man.

Nor was he oblivious of this change in her. But the curious thing was that while each of her successive moods, favourable to him or unfavourable to him, were of startling and piercing importance to herself while they lasted, to him, as he watched them come and go, they seemed, each of them in its entirety and intensity, so much a part of her that they endeared her to him in absolute remoteness from their tone, whether for him or against him, in relation to himself.

What particularly struck him at that moment was an odd relief that she was neither as pretty as his friend Tis’s little sister, Eione, nor as beautiful as Teiresias’ daughter, Pontopereia. “Your preciousness to me, my dear,” he told her in his heart, “is that you are not particularly graceful like Eione or particularly intellectual like Pontopereia, but just simply a sweet-natured extremely feminine woman whom fate has handed over to me for my very own and who has come to entirely belong to me and to no other man in the whole world. It’s because you’re completely and entirely mine,” so his improper, indecent, and outrageous thoughts ran on, “that you’re so entrancingly lovely. What I worship, what I have always worshipped, ever since as a little boy I had a laurel stick called ‘Sacred’, which, though it hadn’t any vital crack dividing its breast and supplying moths and flies and gnats and midges with a refuge from wind and rain, had one end resembling an idol’s head and another end resembling a dragon’s tail, is some object, possessed of an individuality that separates it from everything else in the world, and yet which is absolutely and entirely my very own, not to be shared in any way at all with anyone else. You are mine, aren’t you, you tender, soft, mysterious subtle, enduring, unique creature? Gods in Heaven! if you weren’t, I’d be so alone in this mad, aching, bruising, biting, scratching, stinging cosmos that I wouldn’t care what happened to me! It’s having found you, and having got you as both my idol and as my secret private personal toy that makes you what from now on you’ll always—”

“Come on, you two! Come on, for the sake of your poor old Zeuks, if not at the command of cloud-compelling Zeus! Come on, or Odysseus will be jumping into the sea with nothing but that ridiculous ‘prumneesia’ on his silly old pate!”

They both leapt to their feet, followed him at a run to the ladder, scrambled up helter-skelter, Arsinöe clinging to Nisos, while Zeuks, his left hand on the small of the man’s back and his right on the woman’s waist, pushed them violently from the rear.

Yes! Odysseus was standing alone at the base of the figure-head gripping “Expectation”, otherwise “Dokeesis”, firmly by the middle, and disentangling from the extraordinary object on his head what looked like a couple of dangling, elongated, devil-fish tentacles. Of these tentacles he was earnestly and gravely testing the strength, giving them a series of sharp tugs and using for this purpose both the hand that held the club and the one which was free and unencumbered.

Close to the mast stood Akron, watching over the curved spines and quiveringly extended arms of Pontos and Proros who were holding the swaying and dripping rope by which the “Teras” was moored to the rock that in shape resembled the Titan Atlas, and, as he watched those quivering arms and that massive rope, repeatedly turning his head away from the rock and towards Eumolpos at the helm.

Zeuks led the agitated and excited lovers straight up to Odysseus who swung round at once and regarded them from above his beard with a quiet and approving look, a look that said: “You’re doing very well, my children. Go on as you’ve begun and all will be well.”

It was only when Nisos realised the direction in which both the eyes and the pointed beard of the old man were now turned that a cold shudder of terror ran through him amounting to something like sheer panic though it didn’t quite reach that point.

Odysseus was calmly regarding the water, his body stone-still, while both from the hand that held the club and from the other hand trailed those two weird streamers. What these streamers really resembled were the long-drawn-out single hairs of a certain prehistoric creature that swam the salt seas aeons of centuries ago and lived by devouring monstrous cuttle-fish which floated in chasms of water that descended to the centre of the earth.

Contemplating the greenish-black depths, into which Odysseus kept dangling these streamers from his fantastic helmet and testing their strength, Nisos began to feel more real nervous dismay than he had ever felt in his life before.

“By Aidoneus if this isn’t worse,” he said to himself, “than when I was in that prison of Enorches!” And then as he stared at that black-green swirling water, into which some deadly intimation told him Odysseus would soon force him to plunge, it suddenly came to him how the image of that mark on the base of the Sixth Pillar—“the Son of Hephaistos”—had acted like an incantation or a magic spell to free him from that cruel Priest’s prison. And wasn’t Hephaistos the god of Fire?

Well then, wasn’t this mysterious Son of Hephaistos, or rather the Pillar raised up by him, the very saviour dedicated to come to the aid of a person in peril from Water? Thus, just as he had suddenly seen those two Letters on the wall of his prison, so he now saw them in the midst of that swirling green-black water.