John Powys - Atlantis

“No, no! That’s absurd. My wife is dead and has left none to take her place. What’s wrong with me then? To reach home from those immortal bitches was to escape slavery. But now that I’m at home and at peace, in rich, untroubled luxury, with my son a devoted priest of my divine protector, now that I am free from all ills of mind and body and have no enemy that I couldn’t destroy with a look, a step, a thrust, a blow, now that I’m within a bow-shot of the ‘herm’ of Themis, the Mistress of Order and Decency and Custom, and only a couple of bow-shots from the Temple of the Daughter of Zeus, what’s the matter with me that I can’t rest by day or night till I’ve built my ship and hoisted my sail and am steering for an unknown horizon?

“Well, let’s see,” he was addressing the three women now, “what’s been happening in my Cave of the Naiads. No! I’m not going to rush off, Nurse darling, in any mad hurry nor with unmoved bowels nor unrelieved bladder, and I hope to find you, and Leipephile and Arsinöe too, ready to give me as good a bath as this when I come back tonight; and I can tell you, my dears, I fully expect I may need it! But we shall see. Good luck to us all!”

All was dim in that long, low corridor, for the Sun was steadily mounting towards high noon and not until dawn tomorrow would there be any striking sign of the lord of light again, whether written in fire or written in blood. The Sixth Pillar was aware of a queer throbbing sensation under each of those grimly-scrawled letters upon its pediment as the king approached it and passed it, making straight for the Club of Herakles near the low arch leading into the olive-garden.

“O my! O my! O my! O my!” sighed the up-lifted arm of the solitary olive-shoot that had reared up between the flagstones of that ancient threshold; but when Odysseus stopped in front of the swollen-bosom’d club and taking it up with his left hand and transferring it to his right took a firm hold of it in its narrowest place, which was about three-quarters of its whole length if you measured from head to heel, he proceeded to carry it at right angles to his hip as a hunter carries a boar-spear when making his way through a thick forest.

By no unusual chance or casual accident, for they had been hovering over the rough ground of the slaves’ graves, awaiting him for several hours, did Myos the house-fly and Pyraust the girl-moth settle upon the great weapon, as the old hero held it at this horizontal angle to his person, and secrete themselves, as best they could, in the deep life-crack of the club’s conscious identity, where existed all the organic pulses of its mortal being.

They were both still huddled close together in this dynamic concealment and were still keeping up the metaphysical debate into which they delighted to throw the whole life-energy of their restless natures when Odysseus, after a rapid walk of four and a half miles, reached the sea-coast.

For a few moments the effect upon him of facing the sea was overwhelming. The purpose of his coming to where the waves broke was completely swept away by the waves themselves. In their breaking they took this purpose of his and tore it to tatters of lacy wisps and wind-tossed feathers and flying flurries of fleeting foam.

He had come to the same exact spot only a day or two ago when the waves were no wilder than they were today and the sun was no more dazzling; and yet the sight of this far-flung spray, of these gleaming sun-dazzlements hadn’t swallowed up then in such a gasping whirlpool of sensation every plan and scheme he had been carefully formulating.

What was there about the sea today that made its effect upon him so much more overpowering than it had been that other time? In the intensity of this question, which his whole spirit seemed to be putting to some faraway heart of the cosmos, he grasped more tightly the club which he carried in his right hand.

Ah! how well the club knew that tightening of the fingers! “Not quite as strongly grasped,” it thought, “as when Herakles heard the growl of that monstrous beast! But I know very well what my new wielder is worrying about now — what’s in these roaring waves that wasn’t in them before?

“ That ’ s what’s sticking in his gullet, not the salt wings of the strangling wind nor the whirling spray. And I know what it is that’s in them. I know what it is that’s made them different. I know what it is that lurks behind these curving and cresting and breaking waves. It’s nothing less than Keto the unspeakable, Keto from the abysmal chasm in the floor of the Atlantic, Keto by whom Phorkys the Old Man of the Sea begot Echidna the Ghost-Serpent of Arima, who, by her own son Orthos the brother of Cerberos, gave birth to the feline abortion that called itself a Lion whose brains I converted into good rich dung for the ferns and honeysuckle of the Nemean Forest!”

Thus murmured the club of Herakles in the hand of its new master, while Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth hugged each other in the crack of his body where his soul was most active, and while Odysseus with an impatient effort turned his back on those gleaming waves and entered the cave.

Then it was that the club endeavoured, by barging against every sea-weed-covered wall and colliding with every gigantic shell-fish that extended its wrinkled curves and scaly convolutions and encrusted horns from every obtruding buttress and arch, to catch his new master’s attention by creating a dying-away echo that could just out-reverberate the hoarse long-drawn roar of the retreating tide by repeating the syllables “Keto-Keto-Keto-Keto” over and over again.

At last they arrived — Odysseus and his vociferous weapon — to the palatial interior of the cave, where the roof was high and the walls smooth, and the pavement, by being lifted up well above shore-level was not only dry but free from all rocky or stony obstructions.

The central hall, so to speak, of this cavernous palace by the sea resembled a gigantic workshop under immortal jurisdiction — not the jurisdiction of Hephaistos the god of fire but of some antipodal God of the extreme opposite element, that of water, but nevertheless a great and divine artificer.

In the centre of this elevated floor, which was surrounded by several subsidiary caverns that Odysseus had converted into storehouses for the materials of ship-building, lay the unfinished hull of a well-formed sea-going ocean-ship.

When the old hero, with his still murmuring but now much less tightly held companion, reached this half-built ship, which had a most curious look in this ocean-temple, he swung round and faced the wide up-sloping approach by which he had come.

This incline, which, as he now gazed down its full length, had become an astonishingly steep ascent, grew narrower and narrower the nearer it got to the flying surf and wildly tossed spray of the breaking waves.

“What has become of all the Naiads?” the king asked himself, “who were wont to frequent this cave? Have they been frightened away by that Monster of the Deep, Keto, the mate of Phorkys, the Old Man of the Sea?”

The king looked calmly round, evidently deciding, as not only his Heraklean club was deciding, but as the fly and the moth in their hiding-place in the bosom of the club were still more anxiously deciding, that some appeal to the absent Naiads to whom the cave belonged was called for at this juncture. Had the club, however, and, still more had the insects in the bosom of the club, made the appeal that followed, it would no doubt have been a more tactful one, but at any rate the king’s voice echoed mightily through the whole place.

“O divine Naiads, I know your lives are determined, even as the lives of your cousins the Dryads, by the lives of the Forests and the Fountains and the Groves and the Caverns which you deify by your dear presences but which you cannot survive, whereas the fifty daughters of Nereus remain undying and imperishable even as Keto herself, the monstrous wife of Phorkys, for the sea cannot cease to exist, any more than can the earth herself, mother of us all.