John Powys: Atlantis

But he was absolutely amazed when he heard his father, who like himself was now on his feet, addressing Orion in a calm, quiet, but extremely authoritative voice.

“We have met without meeting, O mighty Orion, and I must request you to kneel down here for a moment at my side. I must ask you to do so in the name of your island of Chios. I must ask you to do so in the name of Merope. I must ask you to do so for the sake of the hide of that sacrificed bull, filled with the mingled semen of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes, and buried in the earth for ten months, out of which you were born.”

If the tone of Odysseus and the substance of his words were an astonishment to Nisos it was a still greater wonder to the boy when the towering giant submissively obeyed and knelt down by their side apparently quite indifferent to the fact that while he, a demi-god, was on his knees, they, a pair of mortal men, were on their feet.

Nisos now became painfully conscious of what might have been called the psychic helplessness of the four of them, Odysseus, Orion, the Nemean Club, and himself, arranged in a convenient row, as if they were Hesperidean Apples, to be devoured, one after another, by that Being reclining on the dead seaweed. Nor, it appeared, were any of the four of them very surprised by what they heard, though the tone of the Being’s voice when it first came forth might well have pulverized, or, at any rate, petrified, any one of them, caught by it alone.

It was not only the most scraping and jarring voice that Nisos had ever heard. It was the most mechanical, automatic, and metallic voice. It was a voice like the triumphant screaming of steel when in contact with tin. It was a voice like the voice of every instrument in the Smithy of Hephaistos if they had revolted and taken over for themselves the whole resounding and echoing place. It was not the voice of a god, or a man, or a beast, or a bird, or a reptile, or an insect. It was the voice of a vast reverberating arsenal full of every kind of instrument for every kind of creation and every kind of destruction.

“From now on, to the end of your lives,” the voice from the Entity reclining on the dead seaweed grimly grated like a wheel, or grievously groaned like a plough-share, “you three migrants to my kingdom, of which, as you know, having once come you are forever the loyal subjects, will go about the world proclaiming my kingdom’s laws. These laws will, in their own time and in due course, become the law of the whole earth, the law of every country and race and tribe and nation and people. This law will be absolutely and entirely scientific. As it is born of science, so it will grow, century by century and aeon by aeon, more purely scientific. Its one and sole purpose will be science for the sake of science. It will care nothing about such trifling, frivolous, unimportant matters as faith, hope and charity. It will care nothing about the happiness of people, or the comfort of people, or the education of people, still less, if that be possible, about the virtue or the righteousness or the compassion or the pity or the sympathy of people.

“It will use people — that is to say men, women, and children as it uses animals. It will practise upon them and experiment with them, not for their sake, but always purely and solely, as it ought to be, for the only Purpose, the only Religion, the only Object, the only Ideal, the only Patriotism, the only Cause, Reason or Consideration worth anything in the world— to understand everything that exists in every aspect of its existence.

“For the sake of Science we must create. For the sake of Science we must destroy. For the sake of Science we must go so deeply into the secret of the power of one human mind over another, and of all human minds over the substance of earth, the substance of air, the substance of water, and, above all, the substance of fire, so that in the final event the whole earth will be as completely under control as my ship of state the ‘Teras’. As completely, do I say? O much, much more! For though it will be worked and handled by human beings, just as the ‘Teras’ is worked by Akron and Teknon, and Pontos and Proros, and Klyton and Halios and Euros, they will be scientific human beings, that is to say every man, woman, and child, in the whole world will be dominated absolutely and entirely by me, or by someone appointed by me; and, in this new ‘Teras’ of mine, I shall sail to the furthest limit of the Cosmos carrying my war-cry of ‘Science or Death!’ to the end of Space and Time.”

“Shut your eyes, darling!” murmured the fly to the moth, “for our ‘cosmos’, or whatever you call our old club, is going to hit this Science-Horror pretty heavily, furiously, bloodily, murderously on the head!”

Nisos was so close to the “life-crack” within the club’s bosom that in the dead silence following the voice from that terribly beautiful countenance he couldn’t help catching, as the adverb-loaded buzz of the fly ceased, the moth’s contribution to the crisis, which, as can be imagined, was contained in two monosyllabic sighs—“priest”—“death”. But such was his sympathy with the club’s emotion that the boy now deliberately removed his hand. “Like son, like father,” might have been a proverb among flies, for Odysseus also completely relaxed his hold upon the club. Whether the savour of “poisonous brass and metal sick” from the brazen club held by the kneeling Orion, who with his height thus reduced by half was still taller by a head than the father and son who were on their feet, had anything to do with the violence of its wooden rival neither Odysseus or Nisos ever knew; and the bronze and the wooden weapon never met again. But, after a desperate, whirling circle, the self-brandished pine-tree-stump from that Nemean wood crashed down head-foremost full into the forehead of the mysterious Being on that seaweed heap, breaking its skull to bits.

And, not content with this, the self-moved slayer of the Nemean Lion, just as if a ghost or “eidolon” of Herakles himself, wrenched forth from the dead past of that hero’s madness, had been wielding him, continued to strike at that indescribably beautiful and majestic face, till there was nothing left but a revolting mixture of blood, flesh, bones, seaweed and sand, streaked with filthily bedaubed tufts of hair.

The whole business was over and the gigantic Orion with his club of bronze was already striding off, without a word to Odysseus, in a south-westerly direction whence he must have caught, on some far-carried stir of the waters, a trailing cloud-wisp of Typhon’s breath, when a couple of Dolphins, a great deal larger than the one that had carried Atropos, but evidently, Nisos quickly told himself, sent to their aid by that timely-interfering Mistress of Particular Destinies, stopped with a slant-sliding pause of their triumphant witchery of movement close by their very side.

On the backs of these elegant sea-horses it was not long before it was possible for them to see, on rising to the ocean’s surface pretty well in the identical place where they dived down, the familiar single mast and complicated rigging of the “Teras”, not to speak of those tall, weird, eternally arguing goddesses “of an infant world”, Eurybia and Echidna, who still stood, disputing with each other as to what was happening on earth at this crucial time, disputing with each other in their new “Arima”, near to the Atlas-shaped rock to which the “Teras” was moored.

“Look! O my father! Look, for the sake of Aidoneus and Persephoneia, look! It is gone!” Gasping and spitting out the water from his throat and stomach, Nisos, keeping himself afloat with both legs and one arm, for their Dolphin-steeds were soon a mile away, shouted this news to Odysseus, to whom the watchful Akron had already thrown a rope.