John Powys - Atlantis

The boy had been thinking too hard, thinking with a cleverness that had become a strain. His nerves now began to behave as if they might in a little while make the sound of popping , after the manner of certain seed-pods. In pure nervousness he began to do funny things. He went up to the wall directly under a little square hole, that let in all the light the place had, and began to scrabble at it with his nails; at nothing in particular, just at the wall.

But this silliness was brought to an end by his wondering if it were possible that there might be — but this was probably only a little less silly — any scratches on these walls that resembled that “U” and that “H” on the base of the Pillar in the Palace-Porch. “Apparently,” he thought, as he looked carefully about him, “to escape in soul from a Priest of Orpheus is easier than to escape in body!”

But he set himself the task of examining his prison in the manner in which he fancied his old friend, Myos the fly, would have examined it if he had been the one to show scant reverence to Orpheus. In his nervous excitement Nisos almost laughed aloud when he imagined Pyraust, the moth-girl, asking Myos to tell her who Orpheus was, and the fly describing him to the moth as the first original spider.

But he now meticulously examined every one of these four walls dutifully thanking as he did so the sky-god Ouranos, Zeus’ grandfather, for the light that came from a small half-a-foot-square window near the top of one of them. He was growing nervous again now. With his birthday in sight, for he would be seventeen in a few days, he felt he must hurry up with his mental development if he were to be recognized by the whole Island as the Prophet to the strong by the time his brother, duly married to Leipephile Pheresides, had inherited their father’s claim to be king in succession to Odysseus or even — here he looked round in real apprehension now; for where, in the name of Zeus, was the door through which he’d been thrust into this place? — even instead of Odysseus!

“Oh popoi!” he groaned. “Was there ever such a fool as I am? Of course it’s to stop Odysseus from hoisting sail like a real king and to keep him petering out in his palace till he dies of idleness, or what Mummy calls ‘malakia’ or some such word, that Dad and Agelaos have been hiding up for years all the ‘othonia’ or sail-cloth they can get hold of!

“If ever,” Nisos thought, “there has been a fool in Ithaca I am that fool!” But he had no sooner “given himself to the crows”, as the island saying had it, as the greatest fool among all the “kasis” or class-mates of his age from coast to coast, than he suddenly become certain he had caught sight of the Pillar’s “U” and “H”.

Madly he rushed towards those scratches and pressed against them with both his bare hands. By Zeus, the Pillar had saved him! A great stone in the wall moved outwards, fell silently on a bed of moss outside, and lay there motionless. In the sun that stone took to itself a completely different colour from the one that had characterized it within those walls.

It struck the boy, as he jumped upon it, and jumped away from it, and ran off free, that that heavy stone looked as if it were drinking in, in that one second, enough air and sun to give it a new colour for a thousand years!

A few days after the momentous encounter between the oldest but far the most powerful of the Three Fates and the boy Nisos who had now reached the age of seventeen, the hero Odysseus awoke in the grey “wolf-light” of the pre-dawn, and, with nothing on but his blanket, his sandals, and his broad ox-hide belt, scrambled down the ladder and shuffled across the intervening space to the Dryad’s hollow tree.

It must be confessed that on this occasion the old king was the awakener of the old Dryad, and not the other way round. It gave Odysseus indeed something of a shock when, in that pallid “wolf-light”, with one hand on the soft-crumbling edge of the phantom-grey orifice, he peeped down upon the crumpled heap of faded substances, patches of linen, pieces of cloth, bits of bone, fragments of withered flesh, tangled twists of lichen-coloured female hair, in fact all the accessories and visible appendages of what might well have been an aged human female’s bed, including the old lady herself reposing within it.

The patches of linen and cloth were so pitiably the kind of objects that a wandering female beggar would have picked up in her capricious travels that Odysseus drew back with that sort of instinctive reluctance to disconcert a sleeping female that any male householder might feel who finds such an one slumbering in one of his out-houses.

But, along with this feeling, another and a very different one came over him as once more he thrust his bowsprit beard and his massive almost bald skull over the edge of that crumbling orifice.

This was a much more intimate and personal feeling, though sex and sex-shyness entered into it. It was indeed the sort of self-restrained courtesy on the relations between the sexes such as Odysseus had learnt as a child from his mother, Anticleia, the sophisticated daughter of the crafty and mischievously magnanimous Autolycus. In an island-palace such as theirs, crowded with alien visitors from half the coasts of Hellas, some kind of calculated refinement in ordinary personal contact was essential; and it was the dignified reserve of such well-brought-up behaviour that the old man felt he had outraged by peering down upon this sleeping old woman, as she lay half-naked amid her long-accumulated bits of human finery like some moribund forest-fungus that had just managed to survive the winter.

“I must wake the old creature somehow,” he thought, “for if I’m to carry through this touchy business of appealing to the people in open ‘agora’ I must find out more about these strangers from Thebes who’ve got the daughter of Teiresias in their keeping, and the Dryad is the only one who can help me.”

He turned his pointed beard to the West without getting any inspiration. Then he turned it to the East and despatched across all the forests and mountains and seas and swamps and deserts that separated him from the land of the blameless Ethopians what he felt to be the swiftest kind of prayer. “What actually is it that I have done,” he asked himself, “to vex her as much as this?” And he drew a sigh that really came without any pretence from the very bottom of his being, “I’ve prayed to her as if my prayer were a wave, a wave that must bring her back. Yes, I’ve sent a wave to the Eastern edge of the world! It’s a wave of the sea I’ve sent; only it’s not merely making a furrow of sea-water; it’s making a furrow of earth-mould, a furrow of broken branches, a furrow through all the forests of the Mainland till the Mainland itself reaches the edge of the earth!”

The old man’s pointed beard seemed to follow his thought as if it possessed the power of transforming itself into the wave its owner was imagining. “But what sort of thing is the edge of the earth,” Odysseus wondered; “and do the blameless Ethiopians peep over that edge as I peeped just now at the sleep of the Dryad?”

As he pondered on this, he saw in his mind a terrific chasm of absolute darkness along the fringe of which hung suspended gigantic smoke-blackened shapeless rocks, beneath which there was nothing but a hollow bottomless abyss. And then it seemed to the king, as he imagined himself lying on his stomach on one of these blackened rocks and staring down into the abyss, that he saw the sun coming up out of that unspeakable gulf.

“Do the blameless Ethiopians,” he wondered, “ever fall over that frightful edge?” He imagined the great goddess who was his friend, standing there in all her divine beauty, with the terrible Aegis-shield on her arm, its magic tassels dark with the darkness of the gulf of Erebos, while from her breastplate glared forth upon all who dared approach her the dreadful head of Medusa, the dead Gorgon, with the still living hair of its twining serpents feeding on the obscure mystery of its human fate.