John Powys: Atlantis

“Whether this mysterious Being to whose machinations, directed against the Son of Kronos, Atlantis owes her drowning, has the power to dominate Orion I have not the remotest idea. I can only assure you that when I saw Orion in Hades after my vision of Minos judging the Dead I felt very hostile to him. Ghost himself, he was killing for the second time, and for an everlasting Second Death, every creature he could discover, in a blind ecstasy of universal murder.

“Thus, my dear boy, when I hear you ask me whether the fact that the image or the eidolon or the actual living form of Orion coming into our two minds at the same moment when he is stalking through these deserted buildings in one of his insane murdering fits, is an omen, I can only answer, emphatically and definitely, no !

“ No! It is no more an omen than when Polyphemos killed my companions and tried to kill me. It is a struggle, a battle, a contest, my little son. It is a fight! And everything in life is a fight, Nisos my friend, everything ! That the idea of this savage Hunter, this madman, who some say raped his own mother, and whose very name means ‘to pour out semen’, and who others say had neither father nor mother, but was born of the semen of Zeus and Poseidon deliberately thrust into the hide of some slaughtered beast, and left to ferment there for the necessary nine or ten months, came into our minds at the same moment only shows how the eidola of dangerous men, who are threatening us, can pass through air and water and earth and fire till they fling themselves upon us like horrible projected shadows, warning us that very shortly the men themselves in their own flesh and blood will be upon us!

“Omens? It is the fight for life, the fight in life, the fight of life, and, by all the gods! the fight with life! But what we must set ourselves to do now is to discover the palace, the dwelling, the temple, the throne, the hiding-place of the Being who rules this place.”

He gathered up his own trailing cord of the Helmet of Proteus more effectively round his head and watched his son do the same for himself and also for the club of Herakles; and once more they went on with their exploratory journey. But their quest was soon at its end. Without warning, without the faintest hint of premonition, they were suddenly standing on a platform of green marble, marble that through all this water had itself the look of water and of water in motion too; while in front of them, but to their surprise not on the tremendous and awe-inspiring throne they were expecting and looking for, but on a heap of long-dead, long-decayed, long-rotted, long-dissolved, long-degenerated, filthily-stinking, foully-crumbling, horribly-putrifying mass of sea-weeds in accumulated decomposition, reclined, or rather sprawled, the god-titan, or goddess-titan, for this horrific and terrifying rebel against all Deities was completely bi-sexual and androgynous, who was by reason of his, or of her, or of its defiance of Zeus and of Poseidon and of Aidoneus, those three Olympian Rulers of Sky and Sea and Hades, responsible for the drowning of Atlantis.

This mysterious Being, whose physical appearance struck Nisos as more shocking and also more feminine than human words could convey, fixed her eyes upon the young man as he stared in stupefied horror and made with outstretched and inwardly curved fingers a series of gestures, of a dangerously magnetic nature, compelling him to approach her. This summoning gesture he felt unable to resist, and first with one of his feet and then with the other — and as each foot advanced he felt himself forced to move his arms, in a fumbling and groping manner, mechanically forward — he slowly and steadily, while he trembled from head to foot at what he was doing, advanced towards this indescribable creature’s embrace.

And then, evidently as much to the surprise of this terrifying Being as to that of its intended victim, Odysseus calmly stepped forward and stood between them with his broad back towards his son and his face towards the Being crouching on that pile of rotting seaweed.

Nisos experienced an extremely odd sensation as he allowed his right hand grasping his two-edged weapon to sink down by his side and contemplated the broad back in front of him. It was to him a completely new sensation and one which made him feel a little foolish. He liked to be the active one, the most active one, in any group or in any company. He had been brought up to feel it his duty to serve, guard, protect, and defend his parents; and also to serve, guard, protect, and defend his King; and furthermore to help, aid, sustain and champion the very old.

And here he was standing weakly, feebly, passively, stupidly, behind the back of a person who was both his Father and his King and at the same was a very old man. Used to analysing his feelings he found it more than a little difficult to decide whether it was better to submit and obey on this occasion, when so old a man who was both his father and his king placed himself between him and the present danger and did so too without uttering a single word, did so in fact purely by the silent and practical and significant action of facing this appalling Being himself and turning his back upon the child of his loins, or whether he ought, with one desperate leap and a wild rush, to fling the old man aside, raise high his own arm, and plunge Zeuks’ deadly double-edged dagger again and again into what he could only pray would prove to be the heart of this living Mystery of Horror.

Why he thought of her, what put her into his head, what power concealed in the depths of his own nature called upon her for help, Nisos could no more tell than he could tell whether she would have been, in any case and entirely independent of both Odysseus and himself, exploring, as many another powerful Deity might well want to do, the deserted Metropolis of a drowned world, but she who now came suddenly into our friend’s head was none other than Atropos herself, the oldest and the smallest, but far the most powerful, of the three Goddesses of Fate.

“O Atropos, O Atropos!” Nisos prayed in his heart. “Great Goddess of Fate! Thou who once didst let me struggle with Gorgons and Furies on thy behalf, help Odysseus and help me against this Horror!”

He had no sooner uttered this prayer than he was aware of a curious hush in the humming and murmuring waters around them. He shuffled sideways just a little; in fact just enough to be able to choose to see or to choose not to see, according to his wish, the magnetic eyes of the Being reclining on that foul heap of stinking seaweed. From this position he could see that the Being in front of him had got its eyes fixed steadily upon the face of Odysseus and was still making with its semi-human, semi-vulture-like finger-claws a monotonous, repetitive, ritualistic pantomime of silent motions, which clearly gesticulated what in words would have been: “Come to me! Come to me! Come to me! You and I, when once we are one, will conquer the universe!”

The Creature’s “Come to me!” was repeated over and over and while this appalling sorcery of repetition went on Nisos’ glance wandered to a half-revealed object that lay amid that rotting dark-brown seaweed. What it was, when once he caught sight of it, was evident enough, though the seaweed in which it was entangled covered many portions of it. It was the skeleton of a man or woman. Nisos didn’t know enough about anatomy to know to which of the sexes it had belonged, and the light that shone from the couple of swaying cords that emanated from the Helmet of Proteus was not strong enough to reveal with certainty whether the owner of the flesh that had once covered that skeleton was a tall or a short person; but those white bones entwined with dusky seaweed made him, as the Helmet’s flickering light fell upon them, wonder why he had never asked the all-knowing old hero how it was that considering the thousands of people who must have been drowned in that sunken city he hadn’t seen until this moment a single dead man or woman. Anyone would certainly have supposed that if the thunder-loving Son of Kronos had caused the sinking of a crowded city like this as a punishment for impiety the whole place would be full of dead people caught and drowned without warning in the midst of their daily business and profane pleasures.