John Powys - Atlantis

“Please, O please, thou Son of Odysseus, call on your father to use his power to lift us out of this humiliation!”

“Is it not clear,” protested the fly, while the moth at his side quickly recovered her equanimity, “that the poor darling has suffered a serious shock? Think of her assuming that an aged hero who has lived, loved, and fought with the gods and whose capture of Troy, as the Pillar in the Corridor has been telling me, is included in the poetical recitations of all the master-reciters in Hellas, is less poetical when resting by the wayside as an ordinary tired old man, than if under a gorgeous canopy he were riding on the back of an elephant followed by a procession of camels as the emperor of a host of jewelled Barbarians!

“It can only be, as you can see at once, my noble Lord Nisos, that our beautiful friend is suffering from a shock caused by the pressure of this appalling mass of water; and it would be very kind, as well as most appropriate, if, in order to turn her attention to other things, you would tell your King that the Sixth Pillar has just informed me that the fire-breathing Monster, Typhon, half-Dragon and half-Giant, and the arch-enemy of the Olympians, whom Zeus buried under a mountain in Italy, but who had been loose for several months, has now been decoyed by the Being who lives down here, and whose image is the Teras’ figure-head, into serving Him or Her or It, after the manner in which an obedient Beast serves its master. In fact, O most noble, O most loyal, O most sagacious grandson of Laertes, if you will forgive my turning for a moment from the philosophical aspects of life to those of more immediate concern”—and Nisos noticed that the head of the fly grew suddenly larger and blacker than usual and that both its orbicular eyes were gazing into the distance—“I believe the Monster I have just referred to, not the figure-head Being, if you understand, but the half-ophidian and half-human fire-breather, has smelt human blood down here and is hastening in our direction.”

The hand with which Nisos had hurriedly touched his master’s elbow, pointed now at a convulsive cloud of smoke and fire that he could see bending its course towards them over a sort of under-water aqueduct, and then, drawing from a slit in his own shirt, in a manner worthy of Zeuks himself, that dagger-sword with two edges that had been pressed into his hand as he went over the side, he gave a little straightening jerk to the club in the old man’s hand as if indicating to it that battling with a Monster rather than philosophizing with a Fly must now be the order of the day.

It now became obvious once more to our friend what a perfect fellow-voyager and fellow-adventurer his new father was. Apparently Odysseus had so shrewdly and so quickly taken in the immediate topography of their position and the general nature of this astonishing metropolis of a drowned continent that he had no sooner caught sight of the Fire-breathing Typhon advancing towards them, swaying and heaving and writhing like a serpent with the lower half of its body, but steering itself with human arms and keeping a straight course along a sort of aqueduct, which perhaps still, though it only had the thirst of titans and monsters to quench, carried fresh streams in spite of all this intolerable weight of salt water: then with “Dokeesis” otherwise “Expectation” or the Nemean club in his right hand, and his son’s arm gripped tight above the elbow in his left, he hurried off in a straight line towards the advancing monster but upon such a different level of ground that to reach them Typhon would have had to risk a plunge of about a thousand feet, a leap which for all his dragon scales and serpent tail and the fearful strength of his gigantic arms was evidently beyond his power.

What struck Nisos most about Odysseus as they advanced side by side towards this writhing and twisting cloud of fire and smoke, till it was almost exactly above their heads, was the man’s absolutely amazing gift for adapting himself to a staggering and overwhelming situation with complete calm and balance of mind.

“As for myself,” Nisos thought, “I believe I might just manage to carry things off with a rush and be brave enough to scare my enemy with brandishings of my dagger as I flew at his throat; but what I couldn’t do would be to get rid of my secret dread, my stalking and skulking terror, the horror I’d feel in my jumpy nerves and the heart-beating throbs of my jittering pulses.

“Why, the old man behaves as if this terrifying dead city at the bottom of the sea were the friendly haunts of his family dryad. He seems able to note things and examine things and analyse things with as much calm and as much lively interest as if he were observing the beasts and birds and shrubs and trees and plants and rocks and stones of a new tract of totally unknown country that we had invaded and occupied.”

“I don’t like the idea,” said Odysseus at last, lowering his head after having kept it thrown back and tilted upwards with his bowsprit beard pointing to the world they had left, “of that creature up there dropping his kopros on our heads.”

Nisos in his turn lifted his head; and there did indeed seem to him a very potent probability that from the under-belly of Typhon or, worse still, from beneath his serpentine tail, extremely unpleasant excrement might descend upon them! From that unwieldy body gusts of the foulest-smelling wind, collected for long in those over-replenished bowels, were already beginning to explode in startling and menacing bursts of spluttering thunder; and it certainly wasn’t a pleasant prospect to imagine themselves being chased from one end of the ocean to the other by the droppings of this fire-breathing fugitive from the wrath of Zeus.

“I don’t know, my son,” the old man continued, “whether you can make out the width of that fresh-water aqueduct under his coils as he comes on; but from what I can see of the situation it strikes me that this final rebellious child of our old Earth has got himself on a road that’s too narrow for him to turn till he arrives at the end of it. It’s too high a jump even for him, and I really believe, now he’s once on that aqueduct, that there’s nothing he can do but go on to the end of the thing! We shall, no doubt, my dear boy, have many other vexations before we’ve got to the end of our aqueduct; but I think we’re in no immediate danger from that outrageous Man-Dragon up there.”

Forward therefore with free steps the father and son moved. They had to walk independently of each other because each held his weapon in his right hand, and when by any chance they moved too close, the hilt of the son’s sword-dagger kept grazing the knuckles of the father’s left hand.

What Odysseus was thinking as they went forward in this way Nisos would have given a lot to know; but he had by this time discovered that one of the fundamental characteristics of this greatest of all leaders was his power of keeping his wandering and philosophical thoughts wholly and completely distinct from his practical thoughts, that is to say from his tactics, stratagems, decisions, and plannings for future action.

For himself, as father and son advanced in this manner, both cautiously and impulsively, along the bottom of the deepest of earth’s seas, Nisos was too absorbed and spell-bound by the external overpoweringness of what he saw to have any spirit left for mental reaction to it save awe and wonder. He decided that it must have been on the ground-floor so to say of the ocean-bed that they had found themselves after their dive.

But what a place it was, far more impressive than any city he had ever seen before, or ever was likely to see! The stones it was built of were all the same colour; but whether this was due to the action of the water or to the particular kind of rock or of marble that the builders had used he wasn’t enough of a traveller to know. But all the visible masonry, including the roads and the pavements, was certainly of one and the same tint, and this tint was of a grey shade, but quite unlike any other grey shade he could ever remember having seen.