John Powys: Atlantis

Nisos simply and silently obeyed the fellow; but the burst of stored-up ribaldry with which Zeuks died was so explosive that there was no corpse left to bury or burn. Out of world-dust he’d come, and into world-dust he dissolved, and the tiny blob of insect lovers he’d swallowed, melted with him into thin air.

Long afterwards Nisos and Arsinöe would spend hours asking each other about their memory of that landing. “What exactly did you feel,” that luckiest of middle-aged Prophets would cry, “when Odysseus stopped us from lifting a finger against the Red-Skins crowding round us? Do you remember how he looked when he came back to us, after talking with them in some words they understood that he’d picked up, Heaven knows where, to tell us that we’d landed on a place called Manhattan, whose Ruler was a very very old Queen called Nokomis, whose only child had already sailed away to a Kingdom they called Ponemah, which was the land of the Wind they called Keewaydin? And, O my Love, my Life, you know as I know what we both felt when he cried aloud to us all, he, Odysseus, the son of Laertes, among all those Red-Skins: ‘Now that our wind from the East has dropped at last, and the only wind that we feel is the North West wind Keewaydin, shall we hoist our sail again? Never, never, never, never! Come my friends, all of you, white, black, yellow, and red, let us pour out all our wine upon her and then burn her! Yes, let us burn our ship!’”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset — Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. In addition to his Autobiography his masterpieces are considered to be Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Porius . But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn’t be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.