John Powys - Atlantis

“But our maiden goddess will be on our side; yes! she will lead us! She—” And then suddenly, after a terrifying pause, the boy heard Petraia utter a ghastly groan, followed by a horrible shriek. “She’s gone, gone, gone, gone! She’s left me! She’s deserted me! Athene! Athene! Athene! Where art thou, Athene?”

Nisos looked in positive fear at the woman. Her whole countenance was convulsed, distorted, twisted awry; while her eyes, enlarged and deepened into the most beautiful and most terrible eyes Nisos had ever seen in his short life, gave him the feeling, as they turned on him, as if his whole nature were being summed up and weighed and analysed and judged by the central nerve of the entire universe!

“What’s the matter, nurse?” he gasped in a low voice. At his question her gaze of terrible insight changed into one of contemptuous irritation.

“Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! Nothing’s ‘the matter’! What could be ‘the matter’? A person may be allowed, I take it, to change colour for a second when the goddess she has been serving for forty years begins inspiring her with the deepest secrets of life in one blob, one blur, one blot, one gobbet of prophetic truth; and then, just as a person’s in the act of expressing it glides off, glides away, glides into thin air, glides back to her grove or her grotto or her shrine leaving the person, leaving me , to be nothing but the silly, speechless idiot I always have been!”

Petraia stopped speaking and covered her contorted face with her two hands, while the boy noticed how big the tears were that forced themselves between those thin fingers and ran down between those wrinkled knuckles as the tall figure swayed and shook with her dreadful sobs.

Nisos was staggered. All he felt was awe and wonder; awe in the presence of such human emotion, and wonder that so wise a goddess could treat a faithful servant so unkindly and ungratefully. If only Petraia had been less upset she would have remained in touch with her twin-sister who in Aricia was at that very moment struggling desperately to convey to her by vibrations of pure thought that in this cosmic revolt on behalf of women, though the Fates and the All-Father and Themis might be against them, they had on their side the terrible Avengers of Blood, the Erinyes, who, according to Egeria, the Nymph in the Cave, could bring with them to the battle the Graiai, the Gorgons, the Sirens, and even the Nymphs of the Hesperides!

Had the woman only possessed the power to visualize the scene at that moment in the cave of Egeria, where the twin-sister on her knees with her long bare arms outstretched and her face transformed by an ecstasy of worship was invoking all the Chthonian deities on behalf of Petraia herself, that crazed creature might have been checked in her bitter wrath. As it was, she left Nisos without a word more; and the boy heard her as she went off talking blasphemously to herself about her service of the great goddess and how on this day of days the goddess had deserted her.

“So my life is to repeat itself, is it?” the boy heard her mutter, as she went up the slope with the particular aberrations of her way of moving when she was excited, which might be described as a limp and a jerk followed by a hop, exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, “always to repeat itself, is it? And there’s never, never, never, never to be anything the matter! What’s the matter? O I’ll go and see if anything’s the matter! The matter with my knees perhaps as I pray to you! With my voice perhaps as I sing hymns to you! With the floor of your shrine perhaps, with the echo of your arches perhaps, with the smoke of your incense perhaps? Or could it possibly be, that what the matter is, that you aren’t in your temple at all? Just somewhere else!”

Muttering and babbling in this blasphemous way Patraia stumbled up the slope towards the temple and vanished from his view among the many marble buildings that surrounded the central shrine. Left alone without the fly, or the moth, or the old midwife, or, for all he felt of her presence, the Goddess either, Nisos himself began slowly ascending the slope. Strange thoughts flitted through his head as placing one foot carefully and pensively in front of the other, and then the other in front of it, and then repeating the process, he mounted that grassy hill.

Since it was not the time for any particular celebration, or for the performance of any particular ritual, this ascent to the Temple and to its agglomeration of marble buildings, interspersed by the wooden houses of the priests and the still rougher and cruder hovels, mostly constructed of tattered sail-cloth and twisted withy-twigs of the slaves of the priests, was at that moment almost entirely deserted.

Surrounded therefore by an atmosphere of consecrated silence our young friend had one of those opportunities that come to us all at rare moments of really “collecting”, as we have come to call it, his wandering thoughts; and, as often happened when he was alone, his mind journeyed into a cloudy realm composed of an entirely imaginary circle of things and people.

This circle, person by person, and background by background, was his future, that far-off future, into which by the help of what he felt so strongly within him, what to himself he always called his “cleverness”, he was certain he would one day come.

Where many island children watching their companions being scolded for behaving badly would say to themselves: “I am good, I am!” Nisos would say to himself: “I am clever, I am!” and he had an absolute faith that, if he didn’t die by a violent death, he would one day be the memorable figure of his epoch. He never defined, or tried to analyse precisely, of what the power within him which he called his “cleverness” consisted.

His mother always told her neighbour, the lady of Druinos, that it consisted of a gift for subtle flattery and of a genius for propitiating older and wiser people. But of his real secret ambition he never spoke to his mother. The only person who had the faintest inkling of what it was, for nothing would have induced him to talk to Petraia about it, was his friend Tis, the herdsman.

But what in his hidden heart he actually imagined himself becoming was an inspired prophet. If Petraia could be so upset by the idea of their goddess deserting her and not speaking through her as Apollo did through the oracular woman at Delphi and as the Nymph Egeria did through Petraia’s twin-sister in Aricia, why shouldn’t he become the voice of some Divine Being, and win respect and esteem for himself for all time by expounding that Being’s philosophy?

He began to wonder what kind of divinity he would be most fitted to represent, and most happy in representing. And as he pondered on this important point he found himself staring at one particular blade of grass the top of which, the point as it were, of this brightly green dagger, had turned into a pale brown colour. The point had not shrivelled or crumpled in this transformation. It was still as smooth as the rest of that leaf of grass; but it was discoloured.

Something had bitten it or the excretion of some poisonous creature had sucked the life-blood from it; or, for all Nisos knew, this single grass-leaf with all the consciousness it possessed had uttered a curse against Zeus himself, the lord of high heaven, and had thus drawn upon itself an individual flash, especially adapted to a small object, of celestial lightning.

At first Nisos couldn’t help associating this discoloured point with Petraia’s unseemly outburst; but as he went on staring at it his secret dream about his own future on this island stirred within him.

“Yes, by Aidoneus,” he thought, “I know what special kind of prophet I’ll be, a kind that has never existed in the world before! I’ll not be a prophet to the clever who are weak and timid and nervous like me. I’ll be a prophet to the strong who have been hurt in some way. Yes, I’ll be a prophet to the healthy and strong who are like this leaf of grass with a brown tip.”