John Powys - Atlantis

Had Keto, the eldest daughter of the Sea, possessed, at the back of her swirling hair, now the very colour of that Nothingness into which everything shall return, possessed a foam-drop of the feeling resembling ours, she would have been softened in some infinitesimal measure by the poignant sight of those two pathetic human beings, the little farm-girl with slender outstretched arms and the broad-shouldered shepherd of the people, brandishing his old cracked root of a twisted pine disfigured by honeysuckle and brooding on the spilt brains of lions; but that drifting face remained as impassive as the exquisite convolutions of a cockle-shell; impassive and implacable, and still slowly advancing.

But it was at that moment that behind this intolerable sea-horror with its appalling beauty and its deadly hair there suddenly rose up a three-fold prong held aloft in a vast overshadowing muscular arm. “Stop, all of you! stop, I say!” boomed the god’s terrific voice, as the outstretched trident was directed towards them.

With the sluicing and shelving roar of a hoarse, out-drawing, tidal retreat the whole volume of water, swallowing up Keto entirely as it went, rolled back about the tall and menacing torso of Poseidon. Recognizing his worst personal enemy in this insatiable avenger of the Kyklops Polyphemos and this passionate ally of the Trojans, Odysseus contented himself with shrugging his massive shoulders, with extending an imperative yet kindly hand to the young girl, with swinging the club in an almost humorous gesture of submitting to fate, and with walking, without another glance at the ship he was building, slowly forth from the Naiad’s Cave by the nearest inland path; a retreat from action that was an unspeakable relief to both the fly and the moth.

“Were you on your way somewhere, child?” he asked the young girl in a friendly voice, still retaining her hand. “I’m herdsman Tis’s youngest sister,” the girl replied in a docile voice. “Grandfather sent me with a message to him. Grandfather told me to stop at the Naiad’s Gave and see if it was true that you were building a ship. They say, down our way, that if you, my lord, sail from Ithaca, one of the Naubolides boys will be king in your place: but I tell them that’s all silly nonsense.”

The girl’s obvious sincerity made Odysseus look more closely at her and he was struck by the oddity of her appearance. She had one of the plainest faces he had ever seen, and her stomach and torso were shapeless and graceless, but her legs were as beautifully formed as those of some incomparable dancer. “I’ll take you to the house,” he said. “Tis sleeps there and the women will find a place for you.”

Never had Nisos Naubolides felt surer of himself or of his destiny than when, on this same morning of the old king’s visit to the cave of the Naiads, he set out for the Temple of Athene. He had come straight from the presence of his mother Pandea whom he had found as he had expected, not in the Naubolides homestead of Aulion, but in the house called Druinos, where lived Nosodea, the mother of the two girls Leipephile and Stratonika, who was Pandea’s best gossip, best scandal-monger, and best-loved friend.

The old Odysseus must have been still lying on his bed with his eyes closed after his nocturnal conversation with the Dryad Kleta when Nisos set out so full of confidence in himself and his future. As to Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth, they must already have discovered for the benefit of the Club of Herakles and of the inquisitive Olive-shoot which had sprung up near the club, some important news about the ambiguous activities of the Priest of Orpheus who had occupied the ante-chamber to the Temple, for they were now flying back in their return from the Temple.

At the foot of a long slope of carefully tended green grass that led away from the Temple in an Eastern direction there was an old roughly hewn ungainly statue — scarcely a statue at all for it was more like a low stone pillar or “herm”, with the crude outlines of a clumsily carved feminine face just indicated at the top of it — not of Athene but of the Goddess Themis, the special guardian throughout all Hellas of law and order and justice and decent behaviour.

Nisos stopped in amazement in front of this image. He knew every curve and every hollow and every tinge of colour upon this ungainly block of stone. But behold! there was this morning a horrible great crack clear across it. It was a crack that reached from what might have been the figure’s left shoulder to what might have been its right buttock. Nisos now examined the injured image with the utmost nicety from top to toe.

As he was doing this he suddenly paused with an excited gasping little cry, the sort of cry a young soldier might have uttered who had just discovered on the battlefield the severed head of his general.

It was not quite as startled a cry as that; but it was in the sa me category of shocked astonishment. What he had seen were unmistakable blood-marks at different places all over the stone’s surface.

“Whose blood?” was the question that shot through the boy’s mind. Down on his knees he sank and began scrabbling with both hands in the grass. Here his startled curiosity was more than rewarded. Again and again his fingers encountered certain curious horny objects, which, as he lifted them up into the sunlight that was now blazing down upon him from a cloudless sky, revealed themselves without doubt or question to be nothing less than broken finger-nails, enormously sharp and super-humanly long finger-nails, some of them thicker than others, but almost all, he soon noticed, bloody as well as broken. “ Whose blood? ” the boy desperately asked himself again.

His whole feeling towards these abnormally large finger-nails was an extremely queer one. It was indeed such a confused and complicated one that, clever as he was, the lad was completely non-plussed. What agitated him was not so much these large and bloody finger-nails in themselves as what they represented and the world of associations they brought with them.

“This must be,” the boy told himself in one of his characteristic introspective mole-runs, as he automatically gathered those horrible fragments into a heap, “this must be what you feel when you go mad. Didn’t Herakles go mad? Didn’t Ajax go mad? I mean when they’d annoyed Zeus in some way? Perhaps I’ve annoyed Zeus in some way without meaning to, and what I feel now is the beginning of my punishment.”

For the last year and a half Nisos had deliberately cultivated his tendency to elaborate his fancies and enlarge upon his feelings. He had done this ever since the day when, neither of them knowing that he was within hearing, he had overheard his mother say to his father, “Nisos will be a famous philosopher one day! Don’t you see how introspective he is?” “Introspective is what I am!” he had henceforth always told himself.

And when other boys beat him at racing or jumping or throwing the discus, “I’ll be a prophet,” he told himself, “when you are all common soldiers!”

His face just then, while the blazing sunshine caught the five beads of perspiration on his forehead and behaved towards them with the same passionate intensity as it was at that moment displaying towards the whole Aegean Sea, had a very curious expression. At that heap of supernaturally large and inhumanly pointed finger-nails, all torn and bloody he felt he was in a dream, whence, though he knew it was a dream, he was unable to force himself to wake. “Heavens and Earth!” he thought. “Of course I know whose finger-nails those are! They’re the ‘Harpies, the Snatchers’! They must have some quarrel with Themis.” He shut his eyes and with the back of his hand wiped those five miniature seas of sweat out of existence.