John Powys: Atlantis

The old Dryad, having poured out all this in one breath save for a gasp at the word “Atlantis” and another at the word “Aidoneus”, sank down on her knees in the inside of the hollow tree-trunk and rested her chin and her hands against the rough, powdery, thousand-year-old jaggedness of disintegration which for nearly a century had constituted the window-sill of the slowly dying oak which was in a sense her house, and in a sense herself.

She breathed heavily, but freely enough now, as she watched the effect of her words upon the massive, upturned, almost bald head beneath her, as he squatted cross-legged upon the wolf-skin, while his torch from its muddy socket in the wet moss threw a wavering beam of light upon his outstretched bowsprit-beard which at noon-day was like the solid silver of a graven image in a temple.

But the most silvery beard in that darkness, in spite of the crescent-moon and the stars and the torch, would have been reduced to a colour-levelling monotone by the encompassing gloom. He remained silent for a long moment. Then he said slowly: “My friend Athene is bound to appear soon. She will touch me with her immortal hand. She will counsel me with her divine wisdom.”

After hearing this the dweller in the dying oak fell silent in her turn while far-away they both could catch the voice of some fortunate sea-bird that after losing itself inland fell to uttering repeated cries of relief when it caught once more the sound of waves breaking on the rocks.

“Athene will probably appear to me,” began Odysseus again, “in the form of a young fisherman or goatherd when I go tomorrow, today I mean, to the cave of the Naiads where I’m building my ship. It was clever of me — eh, Kleta, old friend? — to go to a place like that which all the island regards as so sacred to the sea-powers that they daren’t approach it? My difficulty, as I knew from the start, when I began working on the keel and the body of my ship, will be to collect enough sail-cloth to make a big enough main-sail.

“You, of course, old friend, always busy as you are with tending your wild garden, have no idea of the things we men have to consider, especially in matters of war and of ships. I’ve made up my mind to hoist sail again before I die. I’m not going to rot here alive till I’m eaten by worms. You tell me Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus have between them drowned the whole of Atlantis. That doesn’t look to me as if the power of the gods were declining!

“Zeus, the Father of Athene, has often been influenced by her far-sighted wisdom; and when she visits me she will tell me how to propitiate the Father of men and gods. Even if Atlantis is at the bottom of the ocean, why should I be worried? Answer me that , name-child of the loveliest of the Graces! Couldn’t I steer my ship, when once I’ve got her mainsail, over the graves of a hundred Atlantises?

“I tell you’ old friend, I can’t see what there is in this news to make me miserable. I just can’t see! I feel at this moment as if I—”

But he suddenly stopped; confounded by what he saw in the old face staring at him out of that hollow tree.

“What’s the matter, Kleta-Dryad, old friend? For the sake of all the Olympians tell your child what’s the matter?”

The Dryad uttered a choking sound in her throat that was like the sob of a sea-wave caught and imprisoned behind cruel rocks when it longs to leap and curve and curl and toss and crest and fume and foam and race over the ocean’s surface. Then she said, speaking in a queer voice that seemed to come from the middle of her old bent spine and to force itself between her ribs and her withered breasts: “I can’t hide it from you, my child; I can’t hide it from you! But what Kleta-Charis really came to tell me was that Keto herself, the most terrible of all sea-monsters, has been seen in your cave!

“Oh child of my soul think of it! Yes, Keto herself, sister of that awful Eurybia who along with Echidna haunts Arima over there, where only those of us who have lost their wits ever go; yes! Keto the sea-monster who plays the beast with old man Phorkys of all the old gods of the sea has been seen in your cave; and since she has been there not a Naiad dares to go near it; and Kleta-Charis told me that nothing would ever induce her or any of her sisters to visit the place again! O my child, my child! It’s terrible to think of! What it will really be is a second Arima.

“Yes, Odysseus, a second ‘Arima’ whose threshold none of us will dare to cross. What are you doing? Where are you going, Odysseus? You’re not forgetting there are two hours still before Dawn, are you? Where are you going, Odysseus? You frighten me when you pull your blanket round you like that!”

Her voice rose to a hoarse shriek. “Stop, Odysseus! Stop! I tell you there are two hours more of night before the dawn comes. You can’t go now , my child! You can’t go like that!”

The only reply he made to her frantic appeal, as he rose to his feet and wrapped his blanket more tightly round him, was to turn his face towards the East and stand absolutely still with his mouth open, his nostrils wide and quivering, and his breath drawn deeply inwards in long spasms of excited suction.

But when the troubled old creature went so far in her agitation as to clamber grotesquely if not indecently out of the hollow oak and seize him by the wrist, he did speak, and when he spoke he did so with a natural and easy calm entirely free from all intensity of locked-in emotion.

“I am only going to my room,” he said, “to get some sleep, and I’ve not the least intention of going anywhere, Kleta, old friend, till I have had a good meal. Athene will no doubt either send me a message or come herself. I only hope she won’t send Telemachos. Why is it, Kleta dear, that I find it so hard to feel at ease with Telemachos since his mother died? He’s become so rigid and austere and pontifical; more of a priest than a son. The great goddess herself is free enough and natural enough with me. I can even fool her a bit now and again and make sport of the way she has treated me and challenge her to treat my son in the same way.

“And all this without her getting angry with me or my getting angry with her. Though she’s an immortal Olympian, and I am very much of a too-human mortal man, the goddess and I understand each other perfectly. Nothing anyone said to make trouble between us about her telling Telemachos things she doesn’t tell me would make me angry with her. She’s the goddess who all my life has helped me; and I am the one from among the rulers of men she has chosen to aid and defend — and that’s all there is between us.

“This business of priesthood and worship, and sanctity and calling upon the dead, and swallowing the smoke from mystic tripods, and eating the flesh of dead or of living gods, and drinking their blood, and bringing the dead to life by boiling their bones in magic cauldrons is something beyond me altogether and alien to me, and I cannot understand what has come over Telemachos since his mother died. He’s become so silent and secretive and so wrapt up in all this priestly ritual, that I can’t get a word out of him. He says he has no wish to be king of Ithaca and lord of the islands when I’m dead!

“Sometimes I think it’s all due to this curst Priest of Orpheus. But that is hard to believe; for Telemachos from his infancy has seen the Maenads and Bacchantes of Dionysos without wanting to join them! He has seen the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone without wanting to follow them into the Kingdom of Aidoneus. I tell you, Kleta, all the priests and prophets of the gods that I’ve known, and I’ve known many, are such as teach us rulers how to overcome our enemies and how to break down the gates of their cities and take their women captive.