John Powys: Atlantis

In the matter of his own adventures Odysseus had come to realize as he grew older, and in doing so he had been greatly assisted by his old Dryad’s intimacy with the Naiads of the Cave, that there were already a number of tavern-and-harbour ditties, school-boy catches, ballad-minstrel songs, and even longer and more scrupulously measured verses, that made very free use of him and of his adventures, just as they did of those of Agamemnon and Achilles and Hector and Ajax; and he now quickly understood, as he caught the drift of this present dispute, that it had to do with an entirely false and rather ridiculous tale that had been rumoured abroad about an ox-hide bag, in which Aiolos, the King of the floating island of Aeolia, bound up the four winds of heaven; and about this bag being given to Odysseus to carry with him on his ship, and about Odysseus’s ship-mates, imagining it contained gold and silver, untying the knot and letting the winds go free, and finally about the frantic fury into which the foolish Aiolos flew when their ship was blown back to his fantastic brass-bound floating island!

Odysseus explained to both sides in this airy dispute that the winds had nothing to do with any such preposterous potentate as King Aiolos of Aeolia, this portly despot with his over-fed six sons married to his pampered six daughters, none of whom did anything but eat and drink all day long.

He explained to them that the mother of the winds was Eos the Goddess of the Dawn, who had married Astraios the son of that very Eurybia they had left on the island of Wone disputing with Echidna; and he warned them that unless they wanted the Hunter Orion on their track they had better cut out this silliness about ox-hide bags.

“I can’t interfere,” he told them, “with what the minstrels and tavern-singers make up about me. But inspired poetry is one thing and a versified fairy-tale, however entertainingly told, is another thing.”

“Land! Land! Land! Land!”

By divine good luck — though Nisos had his own secret thought that his old helper Atropos had something to do with it — it happened to be at the exact hour of Noon with the Sun high above them and the water calm when the whole lot of them crowded on deck to welcome this most heavenly of all sights to those in the air or on the water, the simple sight of the solid earth. It was not a mountainous coast they beheld nor a particularly rocky one. It was just a coast, just a shore, just land at last.

Akron wisely decided not to let his helmsman steer them straight in at the first approach. “I prefer to wait,” he told them — and Odysseus bowed to his opinion—“till we find a really good landing.”

It is a curious thing but “what happens” as we say, often takes the course of events out of the hands of any particular power, even out of the hands of Tyche the Goddess of Chance herself, and yet doesn’t yield it up to Fate or Destiny or the Will of Heaven. The event is not so much stranger than fiction as more appallingly natural than the natural, and to our amazement redeems all sorrows in the sweetness of its silent finality.

Probably no one will ever be really able to explain what there was in common between three extremely vital Entities on board the “Teras” that caused them all three to die of pure delight at their approach to land.

None of the three was entirely human, and it is possible that this was the reason; for it often happens that when plants and insects and half-gods die, ordinary human beings go on living. Ordinary human beings must have a certain mixture of fat and gristle in them that has the power, just because it is — well! what it is, of completely absorbing certain deadly vibrations.

“It’s the end of me!” Zeuks murmured, as Nisos, fancying that the son of the great god Pan was merely drunk, bent rather irritably over him. He wanted to go to Arsinöe who was standing where the Figure-Head had once been, and was talking to Akron and Odysseus; but his conscience had compelled him not to desert his friend the Fly, who was stretched out on its back upon one of the wings of the Moth, who had beaten herself to death in an ecstasy of happiness against the wooden edge of the “life-crack” in the bosom of the club of Herakles.

“And of me also!” faintly whispered the Fly feebly moving one long thin leg backwards and forwards along the surface of both his translucent wings.

Nisos was tempted to cry out for Arsinöe. “It’s funny,” he thought, “that all death calls for women; and yet all life depends on women!”

“Is the Pillar saying anything to the Club about our landing?” he asked the dying Fly, feeling instinctively that it would like to die talking.

But the Moth being dead and its own end near the Fly was disinclined to report on the world-events. “I have been thinking,” he whispered, “about our burial; and it is of this I wish to speak.”

“I take it,” said Nisos, “you mean yours and the Moth’s?”

“I do,” whispered the Fly.

“Have you decided upon the exact spot?”

“I have.”

“Do I know it?”

“You do.”

“You don’t mean the Sea?”

“No! No! No! No!”

“Where do you mean?”

“Put your ear close.”

Nisos obeyed, though it meant his pressing rather awkwardly against the motionless Zeuks. “You don’t mean you want me to finish you off first?”

“Of course,” groaned the Fly. “Don’t you understand that I’m done for and want to — to — be in one blob with her ?”

“Blot did you say?”

“Call it what you like. I said blob.”

“Where is it you want me to bury you both?”

“I want to be swallowed. I want to go into a god’s stomach.”

At this point Zeuks lifted his head with a chuckle. “I am no god of flies,” he said, “but I can follow this little beggar’s buzzing. Squeeze the two of them into a pellet and I’ll swallow it right now!”

Nisos gravely and reverently obeyed. With his finger and thumb he killed the Fly; and then of its body and of the body and the surviving wing of the Moth he made one blot or blob and held it towards Zeuks.

“Kiss it!” murmured the great-grandson of ever-youthful Maia.

Nisos kissed it and placed it between the lips of Zeuks who swallowed it with a pleased smile.

“Kiss me !”

Nisos again obeyed and kissed the grandson of Hermes with so much feeling that a tear fell on a cheek that looked as if it might at any moment be split from one side to the other by a burst of profane amusement. When this world-deep bubble of irrepressible jocularity had subsided, Zeuks, who was far too weak to do anything but just murmur the words, told Nisos that it was curious to think that at this moment all over the world there were entities dying in their loneliness, who were without a friend to help them and who had moreover an awareness of their loneliness that was so definite and clear that it was painful to think about it. “When you consider‚” Zeuks murmured, but Nisos could see, below the tragic pity of his words, a bubble of such defiant, mischievous merriment bursting through the whole body of the man that it seemed to arise out of the heart of life itself, “when you consider all the men and women and all the beasts, fishes, birds, reptiles and insects, isn’t it awful to think of creatures dying in the panic terror of loneliness? Did you know, my friend”—Zeuks’ speech by this time was so low that Nisos had to bend down to catch it—“that there are vibrations from one organism to another throughout the entire universe? Well! There are! And do you know what I’m going to do now? And please don’t disturb me in it! I give you my word I’ll die the moment I’ve done it. I’m going to tell every dying one in this whole crazy and confounded world that they’ve got me, Zeuks, the son of Pan, that is to say of the rebel who is everywhere, on their side against Zeus ‚and that the best way of fooling him and the whole lot of them is to die laughing, yes! laughing at this big, bloody, beggarly joke of a world! Stand back now, my dear!”