John Powys - Atlantis

If only he had the power of reading the thoughts that were passing to and fro within the living skull of Odysseus under that fantastic Helmet! What could the old hero be doing with his mind and his will to counter this gesticulated spell by which the Ruler of Atlantis was seeking to enthral him?

It was hard enough for Nisos to take his eyes away from those twining and twisting fingers, but he was too scared as well as too prudent to risk more than a series of snatching, switching, twitching glances at the appalling beauty and over-mastering power of the face above those flickering hands and that androgynous breast.

What on earth would the old hero decide to do? It was certainly a weird state of things for a person as inexperienced as he himself was to have to face. But here was his father facing it in deadly silence; and he told himself that if he intended to be a prophet when he grew older he must force himself to face what was happening now. He must in fact force himself to see himself cowering behind his father who held the Heraklean Club but who could do nothing in the presence of this Being but simply stand his ground, while round about them both, wandering up and down these towering bridges and triumphant bastions and tessellated battlements roamed the titanic Dragon-Monster Typhon who had shaken a whole Sicilian mountain from off his shoulders and who breathed such fire from his belly that no mortal man could face him, and yet, huger than he, and armed with a club not of wood, but of bronze, here also was the greatest of all the Hunters of the world, enormous Orion, threatening not only Typhon but all that lived and moved upon the earth and all that lived and moved beneath the waters! And here was he, Nisos, cowering behind the back of his father. But he must, he must without shirking his own shame, force himself to visualize this living group of heterogeneous Beings, human and divine and demonic and bestial, isolated there in drowned Atlantis, but as compared with the infinite extension of the sky, and the infinite extension of time, of no more importance or significance than if it had been a group of toads and tadpoles and newts and stickle-backs and dragonfly-grubs in the minute estuary of a small pond.

His half-conscious pride in being clever enough to think thus of himself and of the rest of them lifted his spirits considerably and once again, and this time with more faith and hope than before, he prayed to Atropos, the oldest and smallest, but by far the most powerful, of the Three Fates.

And lo! such was the regard which this aged directress of mortal lives had for our young friend, and whether he knew it or not this personal link with the old lady was the best omen and the deepest intimation that could possibly have reached him that one day he really might prove to be a prophet to the people of Hellas, — lo! there suddenly swam past them, following a straight line between Odysseus and the god-demon of the drowned City, a large and peculiarly handsome Dolphin, upon whose back, and clinging to him with a certain nervous intensity, was Atropos herself!

She gave our friend as she passed, and she looked at nobody else and took no notice of anybody else, a look he would live to remember all his days, and probably would recall on the day of his death. It was then that Odysseus swung round at last, turning his back upon the god-demon, as if the ripples made by the passing of that Dolphin had broken, independently of any effort he had to make for himself, the whole of the spell which was now in the process of being thrown over him by the twining and twisting of those appalling fingers.

But when, in the radiation of each of the Helmet’s hollow cords that gave to the calm old hero and his agitated son all their light and all their air, Nisos looked at his father’s face he was surprised to see upon it an expression quite different from the expression he expected; for what he saw was not satisfaction over something that had just happened but expectation of something that was just going to happen.

And this became yet more evident when the old man held up before his son, in the full light and air of both those hollow cords that sprang from the crazy-looking object upon his head and went wavering upwards till they reached ocean’s surface, his wooden Heraklean club.

“Expectation’s acting true to his name, eh, sonny?” murmured the old man, speaking as quietly as if in place of a glowering horror there was nobody present but Tis and his faithful cow.

Nisos looked at the life-crack in the great weapon’s bosom. Yes! There, as of old, was the big head and staring black eyes of the scientific fly; and there were the wavering antennae of the mystical moth!

To the son’s astonishment the old hero begged him to enquire from the fly if the Sixth Pillar at home could still hold converse with “Expectation”, and, in case it could, had it any news for them at the bottom of the deep sea? Nisos, though in his nervousness he felt as if the weaving fingers and the appallingly dominant eyes of the Being behind his father were keeping up a threat that nothing could dispel, gathered about him, as if it were the aegis of Athene herself, that look of Atropos and implored the fly to tell him the news.

Drawn back in a second were the quivering antennae of the moth, evidently under her friend’s pressure, while with all his usual adverbial emphasis, the fly announced that the essential drift of the Sixth Pillar’s news was that all the dimensions and all the elements of nature were at that moment waiting in an hushed and awestruck suspense the result of an ocean-deep contest between the immortal hunter Orion and the creator and survivor of Atlantis.

“The fly,” Nisos continued, translating the insect language as carefully as he could, for like all very ancient classic tongues this insect one, which was far older than any of those used either among the defenders or the destroyers of Ilium, was full of subtle shades of meaning, “the fly tells me that the Pillar is at this moment warning its friend the wooden club that the club carried by Orion is made of something heavier than wood. It is in fact made of bronze. And the fly is now telling me all that the Pillar says about it to the club. I beg you, my father, to listen for a second to the voice of the fly, so that you can see, but if anybody in the world knows that already, it’s you, what a grand teacher our goddess was when she put into my head, on the day the the Harpies attacked that stone with their nails, the trick of understanding this insect-tongue.

“Anyway, from what the fly says I gather that the Pillar has been assuring the Club that in the hands of wisdom wood can beat bronze, and that—”

But Odysseus interrupted him at this point with a violent movement, a movement that flung them both down upon the ground. Then in a hoarse whisper the old hero bade Nisos help him, covering both of them with as much seaweed as they could gather up and strew over themselves, as they lay where they were with the club between them.

“Is it Typhon or Orion?” whispered the son. “Both of them!” groaned the father. And then with a sound that was half a curse and half a chuckle: “But its worse for this Atlantis-Bitch than for us!”

Vain and useless as he well knew such trifling things as double-edged daggers were in the presence of such Beings as he now peered at from under his heap of seaweed and across the heap that hid his begetter, Nisos couldn’t help clutching his only weapon, such as it was, and he couldn’t help feeling relieved when he saw by the light from the two Protean cords that swayed above their heaps of seaweed that his father had a tight grip upon their only real weapon, the club that in its day had drunk of the blood of the Nemean Lion, the club that sometimes bore the name of “Dokeesis”, “Seeming”, and sometimes the still simpler name of “Expectation”.