John Powys - Atlantis

“Have you realized, my Lord,” whispered Nisos; and it showed the nature of the intimate crisis that was intensifying itself about them, like an elemental process, parallel to, but not the same as, the process of freezing, that the young man without consciousness of what he did reverted to his mood of utterance before he knew his parentage, “have you realized that we’re on the edge of—”

His voice died away as he looked down; and there came no responding reply from the old man, as he too looked down. And well might the two of them — mere mental human animals of fibres and nerves as they were! — look down and look long, at what lay before them. They were indeed confronted by what might have struck them as a vast reserve of creation-material out of which all the multitudinous formations of earth-life could be replenished, reproduced, refilled with pith and sap and blood-juice.

They were indeed standing on the brink of a vast precipitous chasm that apparently descended to the centre of the earth but which the water of the ocean had now wholly filled. Huge rubber-like sea-growths protruded so thickly out of this indescribable gulf that it was clearly a horrible possibility that impulsive wayfarers might mistake the tops of these elastic weeds of the great salt deep for just a rougher portion of the paving-ground of the road they were following; but the idea that at any moment they might catch, carried to them by this weird element that could scarcely be called water, the twang of an arrow’s flight from the bow of the great Hunter Orion, subdued to a minor degree of tension their reaction to this precipice beneath their feet.

Once more Nisos was, as they used to say in his island-school, bowled over by his new parent’s calm. For the old man turned his back upon this cosmic chasm in the floor of the world just as he might have done if it had only been a muddy ditch near their old Dryad’s decayed oak-tree.

“Well, sonny,” he said, “we must go back a little way, but it won’t have to be far. We’ll find a way of getting our direction again if I’m not mistaken when we’re at that arch.” He was not mistaken. They soon found, exactly at the point he’d mentioned, sweeping upwards from that same arch, a tremendous flight of steps, a staircase, in fact, that soared up and up and up with such a stupendous urge that, in the process of their mounting it and ascending its grandly sweeping curves, neither of them, neither father nor son, could help feeling a curious exultant pride in belonging to the same type, if not to the same race, of human animals, who were responsible — quite apart from the Being who had tyrannized over them — for the building of this amazing city.

They had only to pause for a moment with their elbows on an ebony balustrade to realize what a sublime achievement this Metropolis of Atlantis was. The wonder was not only in the fact that its stairways and bridges and great squares and vast marketplaces were supported by the same colossal pillars, as the towering temples, which themselves, in their turn, were over-topped by yet more bridges, bridges above which still mightier and higher platforms had been erected, platforms which had been made the floors for still loftier towers. It was also in the fact that the whole mass of them, yes! the whole volume and weight of all these amazing constructions, were connected with one another, forming, so to speak, one vast musical composition in marble and stone. And if this drowned super-city was indeed by far the most remarkable creation that the world contained, how was it that the human race could calmly look on while some Titan built and some Olympian drowned its sublime structure? How was it that no desperate prayers to Atropos, who was the oldest and wisest even if she was the smallest and the most easily exhausted of the three Fates who govern the affairs of men and of nations, were not uplifted by the prophets of the people? But it now seemed to both the father and the son as they contemplated this spectacle, leaning upon that ebony balustrade with its summit disappearing in the salt water above them and the foundation disappearing in the salt water beneath them, that they really could hear the terrifying twang of the bow-string of Orion.

But Odysseus wasn’t one to remain paralysed and confounded even though in the presence of a menace from Orion on one side and from Typhon on the other. “If that’s the Hunter,” he remarked quietly, “that is, without question,” and he jerked his beard in the opposite direction, “the breathing of the Monster. So I suppose we’d better leave this point of vantage and swing round again, whether eastward or westward, or northward or southward; for I have now absolutely lost all sense of direction, and I expect you have too, my son! But I know we were just now following that damned Dragon, so, if I’m right to assume from the noise I can hear that the brute’s coming back this way we’ve got to return to our first direction, sonny, which was certainly directly opposite our present one.”

They turned their backs therefore to the still faint but extremely unpleasant sounds of which they both were now fully aware, and made their way, the father with Herakles’ club and the son with Zeuks’ double-edged dagger, back once more in the direction from which they had just been hastening.

“Was it an omen, my father, both of us thinking of Orion at the same time?” enquired Nisos rather timidly, for he was not sure, as nobody who knew Odysseus ever could be really sure, what his precise reaction would be to any question that had a mystical or religious over-tone.

In one sense this famous hero’s character was abnormally simple, as simple, you might almost say, as that of an animal, in another sense it was unpredictable, yes! not so much complicated, or subtle, as wholly unpredictable. Even here it might have been argued that there was something animal-like, although to anyone who has a long experience of any particular species of animal the absolutely incalculable never occurs.

But it was precisely this, the absolute incalculable, that did occur with Odysseus; and it was upon this peculiarity that the popular idea of his wiliness and cunning rested. Human cunning, like human honesty, is one of the hardest of all qualities to catch, isolate, hold, and clearly define, especially so when we agitate our measuring scales by the introduction of our moral emotions. Odysseus’ unpredictableness resembled in fact both the unpredictableness of the sort of super-animal we call “good”, like Pegasos, and the unpredictableness of the sort of super-animal we call “bad”, like Typhon.

But now to his son’s question about Orion the old man’s reply was both very gentle and very definite. “I have noticed,” he said, “that the intimation of a great friend’s approach or of a great enemy’s approach reaches us through the intervening space much more quickly and much more unmistakably when the personage arriving finds us entirely alone and with nothing around us and about us except the elemental, the mineral, the vegetable forms of existence. Get away, you little idiots!” and he brushed aside with his left hand a shoal of tiny fish who had evidently mistaken his projecting beard for a growth of the sort of seaweed that might be expected to harbour the particular kind of small creatures that were to these scaly little mouths and distended gills a veritable heaven of feasting. “Of course in this case, my dear child‚” Odysseus went on, “you and I, since we have the same friends and enemies, can well, for the argument’s sake, count as one person. To both of us, therefore, the presence of Orion down here at the bottom of the sea, exploring the metropolis of Atlantis, just as we are doing ourselves, is without question a menace to you and me. That he is, no doubt, much more of a menace to our enemy Typhon makes no difference to us. It is known that Orion was blinded for ravishing his mother and only restored to sight by the power of the Dawn. It is known that he has an insane passion for killing anything and everything with bow and arrow and that on one occasion he set out to destroy in this manner the whole human race. Whether he is here as a friend or as an enemy of the Being who rules this place and whose mysterious countenance our ship carries as her figure-head is completely unknown to us.