John Powys: Atlantis

His nose was neither curved like an eagle’s beak nor protuberant as a boar’s snout. It carried forward the straight line of his forehead and its character lay in its massive and bony breadth; for its nostrils were not especially wide nor did they twitch or contract and open with the abnormal sensitivity of horses or deer. Curiously enough it was not his majestic skull nor this weird breadth between his eyes that gave to the countenance of Odysseus its most familiar attribute.

Every person, whether male or female, in any group of people who encounter one another day by day, possesses some particular physical characteristic more realistically charged with that person’s predominant effect upon others than any other attribute. In the case of the aged Odysseus this was his beard. If the wily old warrior had any special personal vanity or anything about his appearance upon which he himself especially concentrated it was his beard.

To get the effect that pleased him over this beard of his it had become necessary for him not only to trim it with the utmost care but to shave off or cut away all the hair on the portions of his face other than those that served him as a stage for this dramatic emphasis upon his beard.

As he now leaned out into that hollow sap-scented darkness holding his blazing torch, his beard was emphasized precisely in the way that satisfied this one queer streak of personal vanity in him. It was no wonder then that the old Dryad’s appeal to him to come down those wooden steps, for they were much more than a ladder, and listen closely to what she wanted him to hear became an appeal that he felt to be irresistible, for in certain deep and narrow mole-runs in their nature the personal vanity of god-like men surpasses by a hundred-fold the natural vanity of women. But there was more in this than that. There was a queer psychic obsession in it; for once when, in middle manhood, and under the influence of this rather eccentric vanity of his, and of the method he had deliberately adopted for trimming it, his beard showed signs of taking the shape he desired for it, his mother Antikleia cried out to him when she caught sight of him emerging clean and fresh from a bath: “By the gods, boy, your beard is as pointed as the prow of a ship!” and, as it chanced, in flinging out this casual remark she proved she had read, as mothers sometimes, though not often, can read, what had hardly been known to himself, the hidden urge behind what he was doing to his face.

“O why is it,” he groaned to himself, this wily old sacker of cities, and enslaver of their defenders’ wives, “that we mortals have the power of re-creating our actual appearance with which we confront the sun and the moon? Animals and birds can’t do it though they can rejoice in the change or lament over the change when it’s done for them!”

If it had been some special competition of opposite odours during that February night, as they hovered round his home, some of them unspeakably exquisite, some of them revoltingly excremental, a few actually sepulchral, that swept his memory back at that moment to his mother’s words about the way he trimmed his beard, he was still descending that wooden flight of stairs, when a gust of wind from the sea whirled away from above both himself and Kleta’s oak a thick veil of mist, leaving in sight not only several zodiacal constellations, but among them, and yet not among them, such a shy, timid, lonely, brittle, shell-like crescent, that the idea of the Moon as she was before Artemis meddled with her, or Apollo meddled with the sun, whirled into his heavy skull.

This same gust of wind, not satisfied with making him aware that his disturbed sleep was connected with the fact that they were now in “noumenia” or the beginning of the month, brought from far-away, across rocks and deserts and forests and seas, in fact from the entrance to Hades itself a vision so strange that he paused in his descent, and holding his torch at arm’s length, so that its flame shouldn’t touch the protruding point of this same bowsprit-beard, shut both his deep-socketed, widely-separated eyes, and drew in his breath in such a gasping sigh that it was as if he were swallowing his own soul.

What that wind brought to him, as it revealed under those far-off stars that tiny crescent was nothing less than the glimpse he had in Hades of the ghost of Herakles himself, glaring round him like black night with his fingers on the string of his bow, while round about him whirled flocks upon flocks upon flocks of birds in feathered panic, their beaks and wings and claws indistinguishable as they circled.

But his vision of the former owner of the great club that nowadays was always so patiently waiting in the porch till its hour came round again, was gone with the gust that brought it. The old man leapt to the earth from the final rung of that wooden flight of steps and tightening his belt about his middle and holding his torch so that neither its flame nor its smoke should impede his movements he hurried across the uneven ground to the hollow oak.

It was certainly a pitiful old face that looked out at him from that mouldering recess; but he had known it now for all the years since Penelope died; and though in its lines and wrinkles, and in its scooped out hollows where soft feminine flesh should be, and in its bony protuberances where beguiling girlish dimples should be, it was a ghastly enough mask of the ravaging power of time, it had the same strangely preoccupied look it always had.

It was a beautiful face — no! not “beautiful” exactly — say rather haunting with its own special kind of poignant wistfulness — and it wore a permanent expression that betrayed the Dryad’s incurable inability to lose herself in any love or worship or devotion or absorbing affection that implied the sacrifice of the smallest fraction of that larger half of her conscious life that was given up to her struggle to be a tender nurse, not only to all the wild vegetation within her reach, but to the innumerable offscourings of animal, vegetable and even mineral life about her, that seemed to her queer mind to be in need of a friend.

Arrived at the hollow oak the old king thrust the torch he carried into the ground, where its quiet flame, now that the gust of wind had subsided, burned as steadily as a large candle. “There’s so much, Odysseus, to tell you‚” the Dryad began, “that I don’t know where to start. Kleta-Charis, my name-mother, has been here: that’s the chief thing I wanted to tell you. She was resting for the night in that cave of yours belonging to the Naiads where Athene helped you to hide your treasure when you returned to slay the suitors.”

“And where, now, old lady,” the king interrupted. “I am building my ship for my last voyage! But what did Kleta-Charis say? Don’t ’ee be afraid to tell me, old friend. I know of myself from what I’ve been feeling all night that there’s something new and strange on the wind; though whether from East or West the storm is coming, and whether Zeus or Poseidon is behind it I’ve not yet learnt.

“What I cannot understand is why my friend Athene hasn’t come to tell me what has been happening tonight. In all my life until now she has always come to me at a great crisis. Is it so serious, do you suppose, Kleta-Dryad, that she has been summoned by the gods of Olympos to a grand council? Or has she gone to the East, whither the great gods were always accustomed to go at this time of year, to receive worship and reward worshippers among the blameless Ethiopians?”

“Sit down on this, my child,” and the lady of the oak leaned forward from her hiding-place and using both of her long emaciated arms spread out on the dark mosses and small ferns between them the skin of a recently dead wolf.

“Kleta-Charis,” murmured the old Dryad in a low hoarse voice, and it was clear to her hearer that she spoke with an effort and with a grim determination to let him hear the worst at once, “Kleta-Charis told me that the great gods were at this hour in such extreme danger themselves that they had no time to think of the fate of their votaries and champions. She said that the whole of Tartaros has broken loose, and that in their first attempt to resist this upheaval, Zeus and Poseidon, blind with anger, raised up such a world-swallowing sea-wave that it swallowed the whole continent of Atlantis; and that the cities of Atlantis with all their populations had now sunk into Hades, where, if Aidoneus reigns still — but does he, Odysseus, does he reign in Hades still? — he ought to be marshalling them in their due order and bringing their leaders and chieftains, and especially those among them who were unjust and cruel, before the judgment-seats of Rhadamanthus and Minos.”