John Powys: Atlantis

What struck him most about this whole drowned city as it rose up before him now was, strangely enough, its suitability, its fittingness, its adaptability for being a drowned city. It lent itself to its doom. It was in fact the most perfect realization of a drowned city that could have entered, or the idea of which could have entered, any great poet’s imagination.

What especially struck Nisos about it was its unity with itself, the fact, namely, that it rose in so many levels, with its stair-ways and bridges and squares and platforms and tiers and terraces, as if conceived and created to support the pedestals and pillars of the metropolis of the universe with temples and theatres and dance-halls and council-chambers and academies and ecclesias and arenas and hippodromes and senate-halls, towering up, one above another, towards the surface of the water that covered them, making in their colossal entirety one single isolated palace-house, where reigned and ruled in undisturbed supremacy the mysterious Being who had revolted against Heaven, defied the Human Race, and adapted its own unfathomable consciousness to a secret submarine life, with no companion but the Man-Dragon, Typhon.

It was the extraordinary way in which this city beneath the waters satisfied the whole deep-breathing desire in the ultimate chemical elements of existence that they should have nothing within them to the end of their days save what in silence uttereth speech and whose speech is the speech of air, water, fire, and earth, an elemental language which in its essence is the music of enjoyment, that gave the thing its real secret.

It was queer and quaint to notice, as the two of them progressed onwards in what they both divined would probably turn out to be intricate curves returning by degrees to the region of the city from which they had set forth, how the various fish and sea-creatures they were constantly encountering showed not the faintest alarm at their appearance and even came so close that they sometimes brushed against their necks and arms and faces with their fins and tails. One star-fish for instance struck Nisos so violently in the mouth that it made his lip bleed, and it gave him a very queer shock when this sudden taste of blood mixed with salt-water brought back to his memory an occasion when as a child he had picked up a jelly-fish on the sea-coast, and then, falling on his face as he tried to bite it, had bloodied his mouth.

A much more obscure memory may have been released when he saw the extremely elastic and singularly delicate skin of one queer-looking sea-creature, skin that resembled the caul with which new-born babes are sometimes covered, rent and torn by the stab of a small sword-fish. But it was when he noticed one luckless fish whose eye was gone that he suddenly remembered how when he was questioning Eione as to the way the Helmet of Proteus, the thing that at this moment he and his father were using to such good effect, had come into her hands, she told him that Arcadian Pan had stolen it from the great Hunter Orion, whose consequent lack of it had resulted in his being blinded.

“The blinding of Orion! How very odd that I should never have given that piece of news a second thought!”

By one of those queer coincidences that it is always almost impossible to regard as just coincidences he had no sooner thought of the injury that Tis’s little sister had unwittingly done to the great Hunter Orion than his father suddenly turned to him and said with a smile: “I was just wondering why it is, my son, that only once in my life I’ve composed a line of poetry, while from my memory I can repeat so many lines.”

“What was the line you once composed?” enquired Nisos. “It would interest me so much if you’d repeat it to me now! Do, please, please, my father, let me hear that line of poetry you composed. Had it to do with what at that moment came into my head? I mean the blinding of Orion?”

Odysseus swung slowly round. “It’s curious,” he said, “that you should have spoken of Orion; for the line I composed, and I really do consider it a proper, authentic, natural line, though the only poetic part of it is the fact that it is rhythmical and runs smoothly, is about Orion. Well, I can’t really say it’s about him. But at any rate it refers to him, and the syllables of the line run musically together! In fact it’s because they run so musically that I can repeat the line now. It’s the simple sound of it that works the trick. In fact it’s the sort of thing a child could invent without having to give it any particular significance.

“Yes, a child, if it tried to make up a story in poetry would be delighted if a line like this suddenly came into its head. It would probably even try to compose a second line, such as in its rhythm and smooth flow could follow the first.

“It was when I was in the Garden of Alkinöos to which Nausikaa guided me and when I was telling her father and mother, indeed when I was telling them all, about the ghosts of the Heroes I saw in Erebos, that this line suddenly came into my head.

“I had been explaining to them how I beheld the holy and upright Minos, that great son of Zeus, acting as Judge among the Ghosts in Hades when suddenly I thought: ‘I must tell them how I saw the great Orion’; and it was only then, when, without premeditation, I uttered the words ‘Ton de met Orionay pelorion eisenoeesa’, that I realised I had uttered a line of real poetry. And yet all I’d said was just quite simply that ‘after him’—by which I meant of course after Minos—‘I beheld the gigantic Orion’. But I must have instinctively realized that the words I was using had suddenly, like a boat from a muddy ditch into a flowing stream, emerged out of prose and into poetry; for I knew the poetic rhythm in what I added to this, namely:

‘Chersin echone ropalon panchalkion aien aages.’

‘In his hands holding his club, all-bronzed and ever unbroken.’”

Nisos spontaneously brandished his double-edged dagger as Odysseus, moving on with a firmer stride, mounted a short flight of broad stone steps and began to cross a marble square of immense size in the middle of which must have been a grove of enormous trees. It was painful to observe the lost and condemned trunks of this grove, not merely blackened by the salt water but curst with a peculiar shade of blackness to which an exquisitely faint blue tinge had been in some way added.

As they followed the marble roadway between these weird tree-trunks that were like ghosts gathered in a desolate flock by some invisible enchanter, Odysseus turned to his son. “I can’t tell how it is, my boy, but I have an instinct that it’s not for nothing that you and I were brought at the same moment into contact with the name ‘Orion’.”

Nisos stood so still that he might himself have been one of those ghastly tree-trunks with their weird metallic glitter in that pale light.

“Do you mean, my father—” began the young man. But his words, whatever they were going to be, dissolved in that circumambient greyness; for as he met his father’s glance he knew without any exchange of words what the older man was thinking. In fact their separate thought-streams at that critical moment in their lives whirled together in a silent circular eddy. “You think, my Lord,” the younger man whispered, “that we’re in the line of the great Hunter’s arrows where we now stand; and that we might be hit and turned into ghosts ourselves at any second?”

Odysseus lowered his club till it rested on the pavement of the road they were following and they both gazed with instinctive apprehension at a group of colossal Sea-Weeds that rose, tough, wiry, weltering, succulent and elastic into the water, and seemed to be treating the water itself as if it were a thick undulating mass of weirdly smelling rubber that bent into curves and grooves and hollows as they pressed against it, and into it too, as you might say, without causing it to split or crack or bleed or sweat or melt; causing it to yield where it was pressed against, but always finding it impossible to prevent it returning, like a squeezed bubble, or like a vast impressionable bladder, the moment the pressure was relaxed.