John Powys: Atlantis

“Both of them!” Odysseus had gasped, with that queer sound that might have been a groan and might have been a chuckle; and as Nisos, feeling a human superiority to the fly, as the fly in his turn had felt a metaphysical superiority to the moth, peered out from under one heap of seaweed and across another, he did indeed behold “both of them”. And they were a really overwhelming sight. Typhon, the largest living creature ever born on land or in sea or air or fire, Typhon of whom even his mother the Earth was afraid, Typhon who had come so near to defeating Zeus that Zeus was only saved by a trick that was not a trick of his own, now approached from the South, breathing fire upon the spot where the Creator of Atlantis sprawled on her seaweed throne and where the son as well as the grandson of Laertes crouched at her feet as if within two seaweed graves.

The fortunate thing for our seaweed-hidden humanity just then was the fact that this colossal Monster with the arms, head, breast, hips and belly of a man, had, in place of the legs of man or beast, the terrific, curving, twisting, writhing, scale-covered tail of a dragon. Typhon’s hands were garnished with the most vulpine and vulturine claws that were ever seen before, or during, or after the Great Flood that drowned Atlantis; while the gleam of the flame and the reek of the smoke that poured at all times from his throat in place of air kept making this ocean-deep water, through which he was now moving, steam and bubble round his too-human mouth, in a fashion that was as fascinatingly weird as it was, in some other queer way, disturbingly shocking.

But if the physical appearance of Typhon not only terrified but attracted Nisos after some mad and inexplicable fashion, the appearance of Orion, the greatest Hunter there has ever been, or ever will be, caused him to shiver under his rank-stinking shroud of slippery-slimy sea-refuse with a much more definite tug-of-war sensation between two conflicting emotions than he felt about the fugitive from beneath Etna.

It was indeed a certain concentrated, absolutely absorbed, gravely exultant enjoyment, held back as if by a leash just this side of ecstasy, which he read in the almost touchingly boyish features of the great Hunter that tore his sympathy into two halves of almost equally intense repercussion. O how he wanted to see that vast bow the Giant carried in his left hand bent for a shot and strung with one of those deadly arrows he wore in his belt! O how he longed to see that huge bronze club he swung in his right hand brought crashing down on the fire-breathing, water-bubbling visage of this Monster, who awaited his approach without a trace of perturbation!

So completely capable did Typhon evidently feel himself to be of clawing to death, or crushing to death, or squeezing to death, or burning to death with his fiery breath, or biting the head off any pursuer who dared approach him that Nisos was scarcely surprised to see him presently curl his gigantic tail in a vast circle round his ophidian loins and, deliberately clutching with outstretched human fingers handfuls of shells and pebbles and seaweed and sand, squat down in relaxed ease with his back against one of the colossal ammonites of which there are many in that deep bosom of the ocean.

What struck our young watcher, in spite of his boyish sympathy with every variety of hunter, as a really sublime spectacle of indifference in the hunted as to the final issue of the hunt, was the placid position in which the fire-breathing refugee from his living grave beneath Etna awaited the terrific Orion.

And like a mountain of submarine marble that has been washed smooth by the waves till it resembles a block of rainbow-gleaming ice, the great Hunter was now exposed to the petrified stare of our young friend under his counterpane of striking sea-weed. The tremendous figure in the foreground was engaged, it was plain to see, in adjusting an arrow to the string.

Through the wavering atmospheric lustre that emanated from the fantastic object on his father’s head the whole spectacle struck the prostrate lad with a strange sense of some vast world-history reaching some long-prognosticated moment, where life in its mysterious essence, human, sub-human, super-human, cosmic, and astronomic, had arrived at some pivotal point where the whole business, inscrutable, unspeakable, absolutely real, but beyond both mind and matter, gathers itself together to become something for which naturally enough there is as yet no name.

Then he saw Orion draw the arrow back on its quivering bow-string against his naked breast and let it fly. It flew with a reverberating directness straight towards the reclining Typhon and past the very feet of the recumbent Creator of Atlantis. It passed clean through one of the outstretched hands of the Man-Dragon, nailing it to the ground; and Orion perceiving this and glorying in it had the same look upon his face as when with his arrows he drove the Pleiades into the sky, and again when he came at last upon the sun-god Helios newly-risen over the edge of the world and was cured of his blindness.

But the latest and greatest of the primeval children of our Mother the Earth was not overcome by this shock. He didn’t roar, nor did he howl; he didn’t shriek, nor did he bellow: he didn’t curse nor wail, nor yell, nor rumble, nor weep, nor moan. He only lifted as high as he could his right shoulder, for it was his left hand that had been hit, swung his right arm downward across his bent torso, seized the arrow and struggled to pull it out. The arrow, however, after piercing his hand, had gone deep into a very obstinate piece of rock, and pull as he might with that powerful arm and that powerful shoulder he couldn’t pull it out.

While he struggled with it Nisos could see the vast figure of Orion approaching with long strides and brandishing his bronze club. At that particular sight the young man’s mind moved very fast. He recalled what his father, lying now by his side, had told him, and how the words he used had of their own accord, so he declared, taken upon them the rhythm of poetry. In fact simultaneously with the approach of that tall terrifying figure, Nisos seemed to catch again the very syllables of what the old warrior had muttered at that moment.

“Tonde met’ Orionay pelorion eisenoeesa.”

“Chersin echone rapalon panchalkeon aien aages.”

What astonished the young man most in himself at that crucial second was that in spite of all tradition, convention, propriety, decency, law, order, education, custom, and harmonious necessity, he found that his sympathy was with the hunted and not the hunter, with the ugly and not the beautiful, with the Monster, and not the destroyer of Monsters, and he suddenly felt in himself a mad, wicked, rebellious, reckless impulse to jump up from the side of Odysseus, clutch the double-edged dagger that had belonged to the son of Arcadian Pan, leap on the shoulder of this god-defying Man-Dragon, and spur him on with a mocking and resounding challenge to withstand Orion to the death!

Odysseus must have become aware, by some psychic vibration passing from one light-giving Proteus-cord to the other, of this rebellious impulse in the life-blood of the child of his loins, for he suddenly handed to him his club, leapt to his feet with astonishing agility, crossed the few yards between them and Typhon in a couple of strides, and kneeling on one knee, and using both hands, pulled out the arrow! Nisos who was instantly at his side gave him back the club and helped him to his feet. But they now found themselves, while they watched Orion’s steady approach, standing so close to the Creator of Atlantis that this incalculable Entity was able to try its dangerous magic upon them both just as it pleased; one deadly-white phosphorescent tentacle of a finger being laid on the shoulder of Odysseus and the other on the shoulder of Nisos.