John Powys - Atlantis

“But it was the great goddess Athene who met me here when I was brought home by the ship of the Phaiakians and she told me to pray to you and to worship you and to cry aloud to you whenever I came here to build my ship for myself. And thus I obey her; and through my weak old voice it is the great goddess herself who calls upon you, O heavenly Naiads, who calls upon you to tell why you have deserted this beautiful cave and whether the cave itself is soon to be destroyed under the wrath of Poseidon the Shaker of the Earth as he avenges himself on the monstrous—”

He was interrupted by a clear young girlish voice which was certainly not that of any Nymph, whether an immortal Nereid or a more vulnerable Naiad, but was obviously the voice, as Odysseus and his Heraklean club and those other living consciousnesses within the club, felt at once, not only of a maid of human origin but of a maid who spoke with the native island accent.

“Go away, you horrid thing! Go away! Or I’ll call the King!” The little girl had evidently been watching the approach of the wily old warrior and his war-experienced weapon; for she now sprang up from the deepest portion of the ship’s stern, where this one man’s dry-dock work had advanced furthest, and with outstretched arms and streaming hair began shaking her fists and staring with wide-open eyes at something at the waves’ edge.

Odysseus swung round on his heel; but between what this island-maid beheld and the line of his vision there was some obstacle, the corner of a rock, or an enormous fossil jutting out from the wall, or perhaps only an extra-thick tuft of salt weed on the floor of the descent into the sea, that completely hindered his vision as he struggled to focus the object that was giving her this shock.

It was an intensely awkward moment; for it was clear that the advancing monster, if such it were, must have assumed that Odysseus could see it as clearly as did the maiden but was scared either by his own old age or out of respect for the power of the immortal sea-god from interfering.

“She thinks,” said the club of Herakles to himself “that the king is so old he’ll just remain quiet and still while she tears the girl to pieces and swallows her!”

This idea was so appalling to the great weapon that, inspired, as we all can be by sheer desperation, he made one surpassing effort and slipping out of the hero’s hand fell with a crash upon the rocky floor.

And then, in stooping to pick him up, Odysseus saw Keto. Never had the shrewd old hero shown more self-control or more subtle and convoluted cunning than he showed now. With the club in his hand and held by the middle as hunters hold a short boar-spear he ran down the slope straight towards the creature who was already half-out of the water. Keto’s face was that of a beautiful woman, though it had at that moment an expression of horrible lust, mingled with insatiable greed: but it was not her face but her hair that was the strangest thing about her.

Her hair was of an extremely weird tint and was so long that as it spread out over the wave that was carrying her forward it changed the colour of the wave to its own hue. It was doubtless due in part to the fact that the season being an exceptionally early spring, there was so much fresh green to be observed in every direction, together with such startling contrasts as the blue of the sky and the purple of the mountains, that this weird apparition of Keto’s hair struck these three consciousnesses as it came nearer and nearer, with that appallingly beautiful face at the head of its advance, as something so absolutely ghastly in its reversion to a colour that could only be described as a manifestation of Death and Nothingness in the midst of Life and Joy, that each one of them felt the approach of something like a frozen paralysis.

Not one of the three, not the wise old king with his staggering burden of memories unequalled by any man who has ever lived upon earth, not the terrific club of the greatest killer of anti-human Pests who has come to the rescue of humanity, not the young girl in her fresh youth from the oldest and simplest of the island’s farming homesteads, had ever in their life before been thus paralysed by all that was suggested in a mere colour, and that colour without horns or claws or teeth or sting — just simply the colour of hair!

But all three of them felt simultaneously that their fearful impressions from Keto’s hair were connected with one single simple thing, with nothing more or less in fact than the dead leaves of one particular kind of tree — O so well known to them all! — that grew somehow round every one of their homes in this island.

Over and over again had all three of them felt some strange shudder over this particular colour; the Heraklean club rather less than the old man or the young girl, since his native home was really in the forest of Nemea, situated on the “epeiros”, as the islanders called the mainland.

Like a flash that combined the deadly bolt of forked lightning with the more widely spread illumination of sheet-lightning, some peculiar horror for normal mortal senses seemed to lurk in the mysterious colour of this sea-monster’s hair. Yes! the only parallel to it was the colour of the dead leaves of that one particular tree in autumn, especially when autumn came earlier in the year than usual, causing these dead leaves to be isolated from their fellows.

It wasn’t a negative colour or the absence of anything. It was a positive colour, and it possessed its own absolutely special metallic gleam. The colour grey, contrasted with what this colour was, would have appeared a friendly and natural if rather a melancholy apparition. But this colour flung forth a metaphysical shock. It possessed a look as if Nothingness itself, the primordial and perhaps the ultimate Non Est had chosen to incarnate itself in visible appearance.

“You will see me again!” it seemed to say to the old king, to the young farm-girl, to the club that slew the Nemean Lion. And the club was fully aware of the fact that there was a special reason for its sharing the horror that now menaced the other two, the fact namely that the Nemean Lion whose brains it dashed out on the “epeiros” was actually, though belonging to the earth, an offspring of this monster of the deep.

Little did either the old man or the young girl guess that the forward rush with which they both followed the Heraklean weapon, as, straining itself forward till it almost flew out of the king’s grasp, it rushed with blind defiance down that slippery slope straight towards the beautiful face in its terrible hair, had anything to do with the fact that the weapon the king carried knew so much more than they did of the creature they were encountering.

So terrific, however, was the shock of sheer panic that struck them all three when they came within reach of that swirling whirlpool of hair — the colour of the absolute void before there was any world at all — that fortunately for the two human ones it broke through, just as if it had really been a flash of metaphysical illumination, the natural barrier between the consciousness of the club of Herakles and the consciousness of the man and the girl, so that when, within a couple of yards of the wave’s edge, they finally stopped, Odysseus was able to threaten that beautiful face in the midst of that abysmal hair with the knowledge possessed by the weapon of the son of Zeus and his mortal bride Alkmene.

“Beware, you evil mother of good daughters, you mother of the Graiai, born with white hair, of the Graiai, who still live in Kisthene, the cavern of rock-roses, where there is neither sun nor moon, and where no stars shine, and who have only one eye to see with, and only one tooth to eat with! Beware, I tell you, you demon-mother of the white-haired Graiai! If ever your face is seen again near this Cave of the Naiads I shall rob your daughters of both their one eye and their one tooth; for none knoweth the road to Kisthene of the Rock-Roses better than I, wanderer as I’ve been through both the world of the living and the world of the dead!”