John Powys - Atlantis

All three of them for a brief space, while every pulse-beat of time brought Orion nearer, were in any case reduced to helpless inactivity by the choking cloud of fire and smoke with which Typhon covered his retreat. But a retreat, and a very shrewd and very rapid retreat this enemy of Zeus was able to make under cover of his own fiery breath, so that when Orion, brandishing his club of bronze, arrived on the scene he had not the remotest idea whether his fugitive had fled east or west or north or south.

Nor did it appear to him that either of the two men he found awaiting him were in a condition capable of replying intelligently to any question he might ask as to the direction of the flight of the Enemy of Heaven. They were both, at least so it seemed to the simple mind of the great Hunter, so confused, so dazed, so numbed, so completely metagrabolized by the leprous white, death-worm-white, sarcophagus-toad-white dead-sea-eel-white fingers that rested upon them that he might equally well make enquiries of a heap of ordure dropped by the fugitive.

So he addressed himself to the Being who had reduced them to this condition.

“Tell me, you creator of drowned cities, you hypnotizer of men, whither has that monster whose belly-flame no water can quench and whose bladder-smoke no ocean can quell, shogged off on his wriggling tail?”

Neither the father with his unbelievable past nor the son with his doubtful future appeared able to utter a word. But the mental vibration between them was so aided by the cords of the Protean Helmet that Odysseus indicated to Nisos in a whisper below a whisper that the club of Herakles had begun to make curious little jerks, abrupt stirrings, and quiverings quite independent of the hand that held it. “Feel him, will you, son?” whispered the old hero, “and tell me what you think!”

Nisos laid his left hand on the club’s head, just above its life-crack where the hollow cord, clinging closely to it, still protected the sheltering insects from the pressure of the water. “If it wants to act on its own, my king and my father‚” the young man whispered, “I would risk it and let it do so!”

And the club, whom some called “Expectation”, and others called “Dokeesis”, said to itself: “That bronze affair which Orion is whirling about over our heads may be all right for breaking stones. It is far too unwieldy, mechanical, automatic, and impervious to all suggestion, to crack the skull of a dangerous magician. If I can only make Odysseus give me my complete freedom I’ll show him and this lad too how to deal with wicked and horrible Beings! I came near it at the cave of the Naiads; but this Living Horror lying on that dead seaweed is worse than the oldest natural-born monster. But I, Dokeesis, can deal with it! Only let me go, and you shall see!”

And then, as his own hand on the club’s head and his father’s hand round the club’s waist relaxed a little, Nisos heard the fly say to the moth: “It’s hard for a thinking person like myself to go on studying life while these gods and men and monsters make such a stir; but I’m at least lucky to have someone like you, not quite indifferent to philosophic conclusions. Before the Pillar stopped talking to the club just now, it revealed the real cause of all this hullabaloo. It said it had learnt from earth and water and air and fire that the death of every deity in the world was at hand. It said that the world, what it always calls ‘the Pillared Firmament’, would outlast every creator that was supposed to have made it. This boy Nisos thinks that our ancient classical language is too adverbial. Adverbial! How else, I should like to know, could any language express how perfectly, beautifully, intelligently, clearly, and completely the club, in whose bosom you and I are at peace, understands our old and subtle tongue? Anyway the Pillar has now revealed that as a result of a spontaneous and natural revolt all over the world against god-worship, all the gods that exist, from Zeus downwards, and all the goddesses that exist from Hera downwards, including Athene herself and Eros and Dionysos and of course including Aidoneus the god of the dead, and Poseidon the god of the sea, are fated to perish. They are not fated to perish rapidly. Some indeed, Athene and Hermes for example, will perish slowly.

“But perish they all will. And the fatal sickness that must ere long bring them to their end is caused by this growing refusal to worship them. If mortal beings depend on the sun and the rain, immortal beings depend on our worship of them. If we stop worshipping them, the juice, the sap, the pith, the oil, the ichor, the very blood of their life vanishes; and like plants without sun and air, and plants without earth and water, they simply wither away.”

The fly now became silent; but Nisos heard the moth answering him in her most vehement manner. “I don’t see the use of dead things like sand and rocks and air and water and fire going on when living things like gods and men and insects have vanished away. That would mean that nothing would be left; for if no one knew they were there, there’d be nobody there and everything would be nothing.”

“Your voice, beautiful one,” said the fly, “sounds as if you’d rather like everything to be nothing.”

“I would! I would! I would!” cried the moth; “for then the greatest Priest who has ever lived would be right, and the Pillar and the Club and all the rest of you would be wrong!”

Nisos decided in his own mind that it must have been the abnormal excitement of the club itself that had communicated this tension to its inmates. “Shall I,” he said to himself, “take my hand off its head, and see what happens? My Father’s hardly holding it at all! Suppose I did take my hand off its head would it move of itself? Would it go for this horror?”

Nisos had never in his life been aware of so many cross-currents of thoughts and intentions, of revelations and counter-revelations, of insurrections and counter-insurrections. He was conscious of feelings that whirled one way and of feelings that whirled exactly the opposite way, through his consciousness. It was like being torn in half. With one part of his soul he longed to lift his hand from the club and see the club plunge itself with all the power that killed Nemean Lion into the face of this Mystery enthroned on this dead seaweed!

With the other part of his soul he felt that to see the terrible beauty of this majestic face mauled, crushed, churned up, smashed up, beaten up, pounded up, hammered up, reduced to an indistinguishable paste of pestilential mud and blood would be to assist at the most savage crime that his wickedest imagination had ever pictured. But there was an “I am I” within him that was deeper than his divided soul; and with this he felt that the only conceivable alternative to letting the club obliterate this Ruler of Atlantis was to let the Horror have its way, to give up himself to it with absolute submission, to give up his father Odysseus to it, to give up his friend Zeuks, the son of Arcadian Pan, to it, and, worst of all, to give up to it his girl Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector of Troy. No, no, no, no! He couldn’t let this Being, whatever the mystery of its creative power, whatever the ineffable beauty of its face, whatever its justification as the archenemy of Olympos, triumph over all he loved, unresisted!

He felt too agitated, as the quivering of “Expectation” alias “Dokeesis” under the pressure of his hand indicated that at the withdrawal of his hand the club would act on its own and leap at that unspeakably lovely face bending towards them, to have the calm of mind to do what Odysseus was doing at this moment, namely keeping his eye fixed, not on the Creator-Survivor of Atlantis, but on the great Hunter Orion, who, towering above them, was now examining with the utmost nicety each arrow in his quiver, and as he did so kept turning north, south, east, west, and snuffing at the air for the direction of Typhon’s flight.