John Powys - Atlantis

And what was “for the best”, here and now in Ithaca, was that Odysseus their lord and king should hoist sail again and depart for the Isles of the Blessed whither Menelaos, the brother of Agamemnon, had already sailed.

So that was it! And the little black spot in his rattled brain was no more than “othonia”, a rag of sail-cloth, a woven wisp of crumpled weed, which had been completely obliterated, swept forth, cast away, blotted out from his terrestrial brain by the stench of those loathsome immortals! Othonia! Othonia! Othonia! Sails! Sails! Sails! Sails for whatever ship Odysseus can build, Sails for whatever crew Odysseus can find, to carry him on his last voyage across the sea!

It was in this first blush of his relief at the recovery of his memory that Nisos Naubolides suddenly felt himself seized by the wrist. He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not noticed the man approaching him; but there at his side was the mysterious Priest of Orpheus. “COME!” was all the man said.

Nisos, who felt that if he could only avoid looking at the fellow’s face he could cope with him perfectly, tried to pull his arm away. But this he found he couldn’t do. And how queer it was that he couldn’t look at him! Only an hour ago he had looked into the face of Euryale, the Gorgon, without being turned to stone. In the eyes of Fate Itself he had been finding comfort; but not with a secretive, intrusive wretch who wasn’t even a priest of Dionysus, or of Demeter, or of Persephone or of the authentic Mysteries of Eleusis, but only of these newfangled, sanctimonious, priest-invented, fabulous Mysteries, of an Orpheus who himself was more of a fantastic poet than a hero or demigod, he felt entirely paralysed.

So here was he, Nisos Naubolides, the favoured one of the oldest of the Fates, one who was fated to use his cleverness, when he became a man, to grand prophetic effect, here was he, for some mad, mystical, demoniac reason, unable even to glance at the face of this crafty intruder! “Well,” the boy said to himself, “I know I heard old Damnos Geraios, Leipephile’s grand-dad, tell mother once that there were certain papyri which absorb certain pigments and others that cannot absorb them. So I suppose my particular kind of ‘cleverness’, though it may have Fate Itself on its side, would be entirely wasted on this man.”

By this time the man in question had conducted him to a sinister-looking square building, “ Go in there and learn reverence! ” was all he said as he pushed him in and barred the door behind him.

Nisos was so relieved at being liberated from the man’s touch, and from the nearness of a face he felt he couldn’t bring himself even to glance at, that the first thing he did was to clap his hands. “Well!” he said to himself, “as long as I don’t have that filthy sod hanging around, I don’t care what happens!”

What had happened was indeed a curious experience for a young prince of the House of Naubolides. He found himself enclosed in an extremely small and absolutely square cell that was nakedly bare from the centre of its ceiling to the centre of its floor. Ceiling, walls, floor, were all of the same stone and this stone was of a most unusual colour. He tried in vain to think of any object he knew that was of this peculiar colour. The nearest he could get to it was a thunder-cloud he had once seen when he was very little reflected in a muddle of rain-water near the cow-sheds of his home.

He stood on one leg for a second which was a custom of his when dumbfounded. But he soon brought his foot down again and remained with his heels together and his eyes fixed on things far beyond the queer-coloured walls that surrounded him.

The point he was considering now was simply this. Why should his natural awe and pious dread in the presence of the oldest of the Fates have produced in him no shrinking at all but on the contrary an indignant protectiveness and an unbounded respect, while the mere touch of this Priest of Orpheus, not to speak of the appalling disgust roused by the thought of seeing his face, made him shiver all over? Without having to separate either of his heels again, remove either of his feet from that weirdly coloured stone floor, Nisos decided that what really made the difference was that Atropos, like the Goddess Athene, had been well known to him from babyhood. His cradle so to speak had been rocked to the rhythm of the Three Fates and to the Rhythm of Athene’s name. He didn’t put it to himself in those exact words; but that was the substance of what he now thought.

But there was more in it than that. There was something else that was much harder to put into words, whether only to clear it up for himself, or to explain it, if he had to explain it later, to his mother. The oldest of the Fates was in reality much more like himself than this terrible priest of none knew what. She fought for her friends as he did. She felt pity for that poor old Zeus left lonely on the peak of Gargaros without his thunder-bolts, just as, if he ever thought of the All-Father at all, he would have felt pity himself.

And the same with Pallas Athene. She was one for telling huge palpable lies. And he had to do that himself. That was necessary in life’s ups and downs. He had to do it every day! When he became the Prophet of the strong and healthy who have been hurt and hit in some way, he would show them the importance of being clever! But when this Priest talked of reverence it was clear he meant something quite different from proper piety.

Did these “Orphic Mysteries” which this weird new kind of Priest celebrated mean some blasphemous and horrible change in the proper manner of worship? Once again Nisos lifted up his right foot and stood on one leg thinking hard, like a young sand-piper pretending to be a heron.

“This must be,” he said to himself, “one of those moments in the life of a clever prophet when he has to think about thinking. What the teachers at School say is always: ‘Think, Nisos! Think, Kasi! Think, Agelaos!’ But if you’re going to be a prophet — you’ve got to do more than think. Any fool can think. You’ve got to think about thinking.”

Finding however that the position in which a person thinks about thinking has an appreciable effect on his thought Nisos returned his right foot to that queerly-coloured floor with some violence. “We can’t think properly about thinking,” he thought, “without bringing in ourselves. Atropos has to be Fate unswerving or she cannot think. Athene has to be the natural daughter of Zeus’ brain or she cannot think. Was this new kind of priest not thinking of himself at all but, busy in the establishment of some Secret Society, or Holy Cause, or Community Conspiracy, compared with whose dark and inhuman and impersonal purpose, he himself, the man Enorches, was as nothing?

“When I think,” the embryo prophet now told himself, “I think like Athene and like Atropos and like the old Odysseus, from myself outwards. But I have a revolting suspicion that, when this horrible Orpheus-man thinks, he thinks towards himself inwards.”

It may have been partly due to the queerly-coloured stone-work of this square cell, but our young friend’s mind at this point turned, as if automatically, to an interior vision of those two letters carved upon the oldest Pillar in the Porch of the Palace. He felt, as he thought of those letters, as if they were engraved upon the substance of his own soul.

“From now on,” he told himself, “I shall dodge, avoid, and undermine in every way I possibly can, these infernal ‘Mysteries of Orpheus’.” Having decided this point the youthful challenger looked round him more carefully than he had done before. Yes, this chamber into which that man had thrust him was certainly a naked one! It was as if he were imprisoned inside a hard, square, semi-precious stone: a stone that, with him inside, might have been worn by some tremendous titanic giant, a giant as big as Atlas who was reported to hold up the sky.