John Powys - Atlantis

Turning his steady gaze as well as his bowsprit-beard towards his son, the old adventurer, who with Akron’s help was only using his left hand to climb on deck while under his left arm the club of Herakles was squeezed against his ribs, signed to Nisos, who was treading water in an unruffled sunlit sea, to detach from his shoulder, as he himself with his right hand was now detaching from his head the Helmet of Proteus.

The sight that had made the youth utter that cry was nothing less than the complete disappearance of the figure-head of the “Teras” so long renowned in all the harbours of all the Islands. “There’s something here,” the boy told himself, as he watched the Helmet of Proteus with its elaborate apparatus of hollow cords, sink out of sight, “that deserves more thought than I can give it till I’m warm and dry.”

But as in his turn he was helped by Akron to reach the “Teras’” top deck he couldn’t help wondering why it had been necessary to sacrifice this elaborately worked-out method of remaining for an indefinite time beneath the ocean.

“That awful Being,” he said to himself, “had certainly no sympathy with anybody or anything. We were all the same to it! It would cut to bits, it would burn to cinders, a hero, a lion, a dolphin, a bird, a frog, a worm, a maggot, a flea. And all this to understand life!

“It didn’t enjoy anything, or like anything, or admire anything, or pity anything. And yet it wanted to explore everything and understand everything. What a perfectly appalling way of understanding things! All it could understand of anything was how that ‘anything’ reacted to torture and compulsion. Well, well: I have learnt from the bottom of the ocean even more than from the ancient and adverbial language of flies. I now know what I shall be a prophet of when I am a man. I’ll be a prophet for the putting of Science in its place! And what is its place? Its place is the servant, not the master, of life, the friendly ‘doulos’, or obedient slave of living things, not their pitiless ‘basileus’, or ‘royal despot’.”

That day, with all the following days for several months, turned out to be one of the happiest epochs in the whole life of Nisos, the son of Odysseus. He grew more devoted to Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector, than he had ever imagined that it was possible for him to be to any girl. In a physical sense, in a romantic sense, in a psychic sense she appealed to him; and on her side all she had endured in her captivity had left her with so much subtle knowledge of the pathetic simplicity of masculine self-esteem that not the most teasing obstacles, the most stupid jealousies, the most ridiculous suspicions, the most childish egotisms, could spoil for her what she saw of honesty, loyalty, and simplicity in her boy-lover’s nature.

He also came to understand Odysseus as he had never dared to hope was possible; but it was not so much the mental enlightenment he got of the great Adventurer’s character as the simply boyish delight in the endless stories the old man would tell out of his inexhaustible memory, as they sat together under that single mast and outstretched sail in the most fortunate wind that ever wafted a vessel towards an unknown, but O! so passionately imagined, shore!

What was most fascinating of all perhaps to the boy was the way the old man would correct and qualify, and sometimes event indignantly contradict, the ballad ditties that had already been scattered abroad throughout Hellas about so many of his exploits. Of these ballad-tales Odysseus hesitated not to explain to his son that the ones about the Trojan War itself were far grander as poetry than the more modern and more domestic ones, full, though these latter were, of the realism of daily life, and more concerned with his own private and particular experiences.

Certainly if their luck-blest sailing from East to West was a specially dedicated time for Nisos, it was an even rarer period of exquisite human happiness for Arsinöe. She had by this time come to profoundly understand, not in a scientific manner, but in a much subtler, wiser, and entirely feminine manner, all four of the chieftains on board, for no sea-faring chronicler ought to omit Akron; while our friend Zeuks, like his father, Arcadian Pan, had the power of enjoying a young woman without spoiling her chances with other men: and finally, since she was the only girl on the “Teras”, the ship itself, devoid of a figure-head, was her only rival.

As for Zeuks, he had for the whole of this happy voyage from East to West exactly what his peculiar turn of mind liked best in the world, that is to say, for Arsinöe would never express herself with him, an old man, a middle-aged man, and a very young man, all well-educated, with whom he could discuss his favourite problems forever, problems that were at once erotic and metaphysical and that lent themselves to a humorous elaboration which any woman’s mind spoilt. For the feminine intelligence, brought on the scene, swept in its direct realism so fast over both his logical hieroglyphs on the sands of time and the pantomime-stage overlooking them, that it spoilt the whole humour of his game.

And so when Arsinöe was helping Odysseus take his bath, or was learning something about navigation from Akron, Zeuks would argue with Nisos about that life-logos idea which was summed up in those two significant words “spoudazo terpsis”, which Nisos loved to translate, in the adverbial language of the fly, “I powerfully throw my whole will into enjoying myself under all conditions,” while in his own secret mind Zeuks would struggle to find, though he never could find it, some pregnant aphorism that would say to the whole regiment of all the thinkers and all the prophets that have ever been: “to laugh at everything is the prerogative of man, and we must acquire the art of doing it quickly before everything laughs at us.”

By good luck, or rather by the profoundly wise premonition of Nausikaa, the “Teras” had sailed with provisions enough to last the whole crew for half a year, so that even Akron, cautious as he was, felt no fear that they would reach the end of their resources before they reached the coast of some island or country or continent. And even supposing the ocean stretched on and on as far as the Isles of the Blest where those favoured by the gods lived forever in perpetual happiness, what could happen to the “Teras” before she reached those isles need not trouble them now. Akron indeed went so far as to confess to Eumolpos the helmsman that when he experienced a certain shudder of apprehension at the idea of having to encounter such world-famous favourites of the immortals, he overcame the uneasiness of his respectful awe by the idea that these Blessed Ones might get some kind of a human thrill at being greeted with news from home.

But months passed by and the “Teras” reached no Isles of the Blest or any other Isles. Days followed days, weeks followed weeks, and they met nothing but the same monotony of unending waters. At last there came a day when there arose such an angry controversy among the crew, who had never bargained for a voyage as long as this, that Odysseus himself had to help Akron in restoring order. It was a quite natural nautical dispute about this everlasting fair wind. There certainly was something queer in a wind that never stopped filling their one great sail. Too well they all got to know that old familiar expanse of sail-cloth as it bulged out, so full of that never ceasing wind! There was even a dark stain upon it, in the shape of a man’s hand, made by the blood of a seagull.

But it really was wonderful how quickly the aged adventurer restored order. And he didn’t do it just by his bawdy jests; though there were plenty of those. He did it by holding their fascinated attention while he regaled them with one enthralling episode after another drawn from the actual stream of memorable things. It had been about this wind that their dispute had arisen; and, as so often happens in these contests, in each of the opposing arsenals of argumentative weapons, more were drawn from temperament than from experience.