John Powys - Atlantis

The creature whom Allekto was half-carrying through the air with her was also a female Being, and although it was not till later that Nisos learnt that she must have been Euryale or a daughter of “the wide sea”, and in fact that she was a progeny of the sea monster Keto himself, he already knew, from her tusks like those of a wild pig, and her claws of brass, and the serpents that were a living portion of her flesh and blood, and above all from that unspeakable and utterly indescribable look in her eyes that made it impossible for any other living child of the earth or of the heavens to face her glance without at least the risk of being frozen into stone with sheer terror, that she was one of the Gorgons, an immortal sister of the mortal Medusa.

While absorbed in his contemplation of these two monsters, who were now hovering round and round the Lykophos-Mound, Nisos had not yet noticed the most important person of all in this cosmic-comic burlesque show, namely the Being whom these two monsters were preparing to attack. She, he found out later, was none other than Atropos, the smallest, but at the same time the wisest and the oldest, of the three Fates, or the “Moirai”, those who can, when so they wish, decide the Destiny of every man and every woman born into the world.

Young Nisos Naubolides must have had something in him of the spirit of Odysseus, though, in place of being related to the king, his father Krateros and his brother Agelaos were the only living rivals of the old hero as claimants for the kingship. But the boy certainly displayed something beyond his boasted “cleverness” when, in order to find out what really was the object of this mad attack by the Erinys and the Gorgon, he made a run to another small fir-tree-trunk and clung tightly to it.

Yes! There she was, Atropos herself, the unturning, unbending, unwavering, unrelenting, implacable Decider of mortal destinies! As Nisos saw her, she saw him, and for an incredible moment this “clever” boy who had just made up his mind to be the prophet to the strong, looked into the eyes of Fate, into the eyes of her who could decide the Destiny of any man and any woman born into this world. Yes, they looked each other full in the face.

Atropos was under a spruce-fir just as Nisos was; but she was seated beneath hers, while he was clinging to his. As he looked at her now Nisos realized that the flesh and blood of which she was made was neither the normal flesh and blood of mortals nor what he had always been taught to believe was the immortal flesh of the gods with its veins full of ichor, that divine liquid more like the sap of imperishable vegetation than the raw red stomach-turning juice that mortals call blood.

No, the boy realized as he gazed at her that the mystery of her being was far deeper than anything he had been taught to attribute to her or to her sisters. In fact the aura that hovered round her and the spirit that emanated from her were so transporting to him that the frightful noise kept up above his head by the barking and bellowing of the Fury and the still more terrifying sound, resembling a series of viscous and glutinous thunder-claps following one another like a procession of sea-blown bubbles and finally bursting as they broke into the air, made by the Gorgon, became no more than hens cackling in a yard.

Yes, the material out of which Atropos was made was clearly as different from the ichor-nourished substance of the Olympians as it was from the horn-like material of the bodies of the Erinys and Gorgon. Nor was it made of that vaporous stuff, only a little thicker than mist or spray such as composed those phantom-like forms who eternally harangued each other in Arima. No; the truth is that the longer Nisos Naubolides looked into the eyes of Fate and the longer Fate looked into the eyes of Nisos Naubolides the more clearly did the latter realize that the imperishable frame of Atropos, this “one who could not be turned”, was made of a substance drawn from a level of existence outside both time and space, though cunningly adapted to play its part in each of them.

But the boy proved how “clever” he was by imbibing like an inexhaustible draught of timeless experience much more at that moment than the mere physical nature of the oldest of the Fates; for there came over him in a trance that was more than a trance the surprising knowledge — and this, though again and again he blundered hopelessly in trying to describe it in words, was really with him to the day of his death — that Atropos helps us in the creation of our individual fate by an infinitely long series of what some would call nothing but blind, stupid, dull, dreamy, moon-struck “brown studies”, many of which take place inside the walls of houses, and others when we are moving about on our ordinary errands outside.

In these interruptions of our ordinary consciousness we fall into a brainless, idea-less moment of dull abstraction in which we cease to think of anything in particular but just stare blindly and dully at some particular physical object, no matter what, that happens to be there at the moment. This object, in itself of no particular interest, and never selected for its real purpose is merely an object to stare at, lean upon, rest against and use as a trance-background, or brown-study foreground, or, if you like, like a shoal beneath a stranded consciousness, or a reef of brainless abstraction, wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all.

Nisos showed how born he was to be an interpreter if not a prophet by his complete acceptance — as from the trunk of his spruce-fir he faced the Mistress of Fate as she leaned against the trunk of her spruce-fir — of the revelation that our individual destiny is made up of an accumulation of brainless, uninspired, brown-study moments of abstraction wherein we cease to be organic living creatures and almost become inanimates, almost become things of wood and stone and clay and dust and earth, almost become what we were before we were intelligent or instinctive creatures: almost — but not quite!

For, as our young friend looked Atropos in the face, there was permitted to him what is permitted to few among us mortals during our lifetime, namely the realization of what actually happens to us when we fall, as we all do, into these day-dreams. At that moment, as Nisos Naubolides now knew well, all over the surface of the earth there were living creatures, many of them men, women, and children, many of them horses, cattle, lions, wolves, foxes, wild asses and tame pigs, sheep and goats, rats and mice, who were standing or crouching, lying or sitting in one of these brooding trances when dazed and dreaming, we are asleep and yet not asleep.

For Nisos at this moment almost all the inhabitants of the earth, at least such as were not included in his school-geography-books, were “blameless Ethiopians”; and what he conjured up at that instant over the entire face of the earth’s surface were millions of men no different from those he knew so well, no different from the king and the king’s son, no different from his own father, Krateros Naubolides, or from the old man, Damnos Geraios, or from his own familiar bosom-crony, Tis, the herdsman from the other end of Ithaca, all of whom, as they went about their affairs, fell now and again into these day dreams of fate where, asleep and yet not asleep, they created without knowing it their future destiny.

And as he looked into the eyes of Atropos he seemed to become the blood-brother, the “Kasi”, or school-camerado, of all these day-dreamers, till their dream was his dream, and without any “pomposizing,” or processioning in the manner of Hermes, he became aware that with this whole great multitude, including not only his fellow-men but all creatures upon the earth, he was, without knowing it, living a double life, in fact two quite separate lives, one in this world and one in some other world.