John Powys - Atlantis

This was an elderly virgin called Petraia who belonged to an island family into which in each generation for hundreds of years an old maid with Sibylline inspiration had been born. Petraia was not the prophetess for this particular generation but she was twin-sister to the woman who was. And the goddess knew well that there existed, as happens sometimes with twins, a mysterious thought-transference between Petraia and her sister, who had fled from the world to the sacred Arician Forest of the Italian King Latinus, where she had become a follower of the immortal Nymph Egeria who lived like an oracle in a hidden cave.

It was through her sister’s association with this Italian Nymph that Petraia was able to keep the virgin-goddess whom she served in close contact with all that preceded the founding of the New Troy, destined, so the word went forth, to rule the world from its Seven Hills.

Nisos was thoroughly at home with Petraia who in his infancy had been his nurse as well as his mother’s midwife, so that he at once accepted her appearance at this juncture as an authentic answer to his prayer. Without a moment’s delay in one wild rush of excited words the boy poured out the whole of his story and explained his difficulty about the insects.

The slender and stately old lady surveyed him with whimsical scrutiny. “So you want to get the news from those two small prisoners of yours, do you? And you need an interpreter?”

“O Nurse, I’m thankful it’s you!” gasped Nisos. “Mother wanted me to find out what’s going on and I don’t feel like telling her about what I’ve just seen down there”; and he gave his head a jerk in the down-hill direction. “Does the goddess, do you think, know all about that ? Does she know they’ve left a lot of their disgusting nails or claws, or whatever they are, behind, and all bloody too? Why does she let such things happen, Nurse, and so near her Temple? Themis is cracked clean through — does she know that ? — clean through, from shoulder to hip! Mother will have a fit when she hears. I’m not going to be the one to tell her, nurse. You bet your life I’m not! You know what she is when she hears things like that. She’ll go rampaging off to Druinos to pour out everything to Nosodea; and there in his corner like a hunched-up toad you may depend old Damnos Geraios will be gloating over every word and thinking what new silliness he can invent for dear sweet simple Leipephile and what new imaginary wickedness for that idealistic fool Stratonika, so that she’ll have to lacerate herself to the bone to purge it away! But tell me, nurse most sacred, nurse most precious, nurse most holy, does our great goddess, who sent you here in answer to my prayer, know about Themis?”

He looked searchingly at the virginal midwife as he asked this question. He knew well that his faith in the omnipotence of their goddess wasn’t what it had been when he was five years old. He was nearly seventeen now, and in these last years he had had a great many very private and rather peculiar thoughts; but it would still have shocked an indestructible vein of piety in him to think that such things could happen as this horrible attack on the obelisk of Themis so near Athene’s very judgment-seat, without her knowing anything about it!

Petraia smiled that reassuring familiar smile that had so often comforted him in his paroxysing panic lest the feathered bosom of aboriginal Night should swallow him up alive.

“Let’s think of your insects first,” Petraia said now, and she added: “Moths and Flies before Law and Order!” She added these words with that particular kind of domestic persiflage that is more annoying to a boy nearly seventeen than a slap in the face.

However, he obediently lifted the back of his hand closer to his eyes and stared at the moth and the fly so intently that he could see the delicate lacy fringes on the margins of the moth’s brown wings and the metallic circles like polished adamant round the bulging eyes of the house-fly.

As Nisos stared at the insects it seemed to him that he could feel like a palpable wafture of nard-scented air the divine power of feminine virginity, a power that male youth always recognizes without knowing precisely what it is, pass from Petraia’s hand to the nerves of his shoulder. It did, yes! it actually did, transform the quivering of those brown wings and the friction of those jet-black legs upon those gauzy wings into the expression of thoughts that a human being could follow. “So that’s it!” he said to himself sharply and shrewdly.

And he was so afraid that just as a crib of some classic paragraph might be snatched from a school-boy before he had got the hang of it, that this preternatural translation of the sign-language of insects into the sound-language of men might be withdrawn before he got its full import that he began announcing to Petraia in a louder voice than he generally used and in a hurried and curiously jerky manner that what the insects had revealed to him was that there was a quarrel beginning, that might soon become a deep rift, between Zeus and Hera, the former being alone on the peak of Gargaros deprived, one rumour declares, of all his weapons, while the latter was almost equally alone on the summit of Olympos.

He further announced to Petraia that the effect of this quarrel upon the great goddess Athene was to force her to withdraw herself from taking any part in any public movement until the issue between Zeus and Hera became clearer or definitely resolved itself in one way or another.

“But at this point,” so he explained to the old midwife, “while the moth understands that our goddess has left Ithaca altogether, the fly is sure she is still in the island, and probably still in the temple; but is unwilling to commit herself, or take any side, or make any definite move, till things are clearer than they are at present.

“Another thing the fly tells me, Nurse dear, which astonishes me a good deal, and to confess the truth gives me a funny feeling, indeed, if I were absolutely honest, as you used to teach me every Naubolides with our claim to the kingship ought to be, makes me shiver and shake is that Tartaros has broken loose, and that Typhon, the most terrible of all the Titans, has burst his bonds from beneath Etna and is again breathing fire and smoke against the gods.

“But you see, Nurse dear, what makes it so hard for me to tell you all they say is that they keep contradicting each other as if they were speaking as ambassadors from opposite camps. For instance what the fly says is that the real reason why our great goddess Athene has withdrawn ‘pro-tem’ into herself is that she is waiting to hear what Zeus will do if certain rumours that have reached her from Italy are correct, namely that at a special place in Italy where there are seven sacred hills the descendants of Aeneas the pious ally of Priam have already begun to build a new Troy.

“The moth, on the other hand, swears that Athene has gone to visit the blameless Ethiopians to find out for herself whether it is true that Persephone has quarrelled with Aidoneus and helped Teiresias to bring back from Hades the weeping Niobe, the First Woman, together with her husband Phoroneus, the First Man.”

Long before the insects had ceased revealing their discoveries to the undulations of the knuckles of his now weakly and wearily extended hand, the inspiration proceeding from the virginity of the old maid who had nursed him ceased to give him the clue to the small creatures’ sign-language.

He gazed helplessly at her, while a wave of tiredness and the feeling of being a hopeless fool engulfed him. “What do you make of it all, Nurse?” he murmured feebly.

“It is clear enough, Nisos,” commented Petraia, “that a female moth and a male fly are bound to be on opposite sides in the great ‘old battle’.”