John Powys - Atlantis

Standing motionless the old man gazed for a long moment over that imaginary world’s edge. “She would be with me if she could,” he murmured aloud; and then shrugged his shoulders. “The gods with me or the gods against me,” he thought, “I shall do what I shall do; and what will come of it will be what will come of it!”

He then swung round but instead of leaning against the uneven edge of crumbling and rotten wood and peering down at the sleeping old creature as he had done at first, he now proceeded to call upon her by name; thus giving her an opportunity to arrange her appearance a little before presenting herself. There was enough light to catch her expression fully and clearly when, after a couple of minutes delay, she appeared at the entrance to her hollow tree.

“What — is — it?” she groaned hoarsely. “Has Krateros Naubolides attacked the Palace?”

The old king smiled under cover of his beard. “Not yet, my friend, not quite yet. But no doubt if the Palace doesn’t take precautions and take them quickly too he will attack us before we know where we are. And that, my dear old friend, is precisely why I have come to disturb you so early. I feel ashamed of myself for breaking up your dream but there’s something I’m very anxious to know, and you are the only mortal or immortal, the only Nymph of land or sea, who can help me to attain this knowledge.”

Never in all his days had the crafty old wanderer seen such a look of unmitigated beatitude as rushed into the haggard face of Dryad! “O my dear child!” she cried, “I never thought the Olympians would give me a chance to”—Here the ancient creature had to struggle grimly with a rush of up-surging sobs—“to help the son of Laertes at a real crisis in his life. And I never would have presumed to push myself forward, whatever knowledge I might happen to have, without some sign, some invitation, some request, at least some permission, some opportunity, some door ajar. But now that you yourself have spoken, my dear lord, and have as the Persians say, stretched out your sceptre towards me, I can tell you all I know.”

“Tell me, old friend, tell me quick; so that I can act at once. It has become fatally clear to me at last, though it took many days to make me believe it, that my wise goddess and ever-faithful protectress must have hurried away in anger and contempt from our wretched and ignoble quarrels and from this ‘complicated world-crisis’ as our more pompous contemporaries will love to call it, though of course, as you and I know well, if every battle between Gods and Titans is a ‘world-crisis’ our poor old world has never been free from one. Yes, it is natural enough that she should do what our great Olympians have always done at a crisis, gone off; gone off to recover her faith in the natural piety of humanity by enjoying for a while the innocent worship of these guileless races. And so, my dear friend, I’ll put to you without further delay, the question I should have implored our great Goddess to answer. It is this.

“I have been assured by Eurycleia that the maiden Eione who has lately come to serve in our household, and who is, she herself declared, when I found her in the Cave of the Naiads, a sister of our excellent herdsman Tis, has revealed in recent conversations the discovery of an extremely important secret.

“It was to reveal this discovery to her faithful brother Tis that Eione came here from the opposite end of Ithaca. Eurycleia indeed assures me that Moros, who is Eione’s grandfather and also the grandfather of our faithful Tis, has discovered that there is a formidable pair of foreigners, calling themselves Zenios and Okyrhöe, who have occupied for several years — nobody seems to know exactly for how long — a lonely and desolate farm-house on the extreme sea-verge of a rocky headland that has been deserted for generations and left to fall into ruin. There are springs of fresh water in that lonely place, there are remains of several walls and even the remnants of a few wooden fences but the ground that was once protected by these things has been so blighted by sea-winds that it is doubtful if any grain would grow there now; and, if it did, it is certain its chance of its surviving the depredations of beasts and birds would be small.

“But grand-dad Moros swore to Eione — you’re listening to me, aren’t you, old friend? — that this queer foreign couple came here from Thebes after the death of Cadmus and that they brought with them enough treasure to keep them for a hundred years. And grand-dad Moros declares further that he has spoken with both Zenios and Okyrhöe and has learnt from them that they have under their protection in their half-ruined dwelling a young maiden who is the living daughter of the great prophet Teiresias.

“Eione’s grand-dad swears he has been told by this couple, who have several times welcomed him to a lavish meal in their lonely refuge, whose local name is Ornax, that this young daughter of Teiresias, who has inherited from her father a startling amount of his prophetic inspiration, declares that if Odysseus does not sail from Ithaca this Spring on his last voyage he will die miserably in his bed, yes! in his bed in his ancient palace, of an ignoble disease flung upon him out of the deep sea by his deadly enemy Poseidon. Unlike other youthful prophets this young girl has never once contradicted, never once altered by a single breath, this terrible prediction. Her protectors Zenios and Okyrhöe swore to old Moros again and again, so Eione tells Eurycleia, that if ever Teiresias’ daughter whose name, it seems is Pontopereia, came here, with this prophecy of hers, she would inevitably convince us all of its truth.”

The aged Dryad gave two or three jerky hops forward till she stood on a heap of last year’s dead oak-leaves. Here she became more erect than Odysseus had ever seen her; and raising her withered arms above her head she began clasping and unclasping her gnarled fingers tightly round the back of her neck.

“O my child, my child,” she murmured. “Say the words, only say the words, and I will help you to the limit of my power and — and—” Here the old lady broke off, under the strength of her emotion. “—and beyond the limit!” she added in a gasping whisper.

“You mean, my dear friend,” said Odysseus quietly, “that by the laws of decency and order that the world owes to Themis and to which Zeus himself bows, it would be improper for you, a mortal Nymph, to help me, a mortal man, before I had prayed and implored you to do so?”

The Dryad nodded furiously. “And we are further,” he went on, “since both of us are doomed to die, we are further obligated by the ineluctable courtesies of the cosmos to accept whatever comes of such an appeal for help made by a mortal man to a mortal Nymph? Isn’t that so, old friend?”

And once more the Dryad nodded; but this time resignedly rather than passionately.

“Well then, old sweetheart,” the crafty hero concluded, “I do most earnestly beg your help in this difficult situation, but unluckily”—and it would have been clear enough to Penelope, had it been she who was just then listening to the old king, that this heroic courtesy in face of the unregulated chaos of life was extremely unpalatable to the old creature to whom it was offered—“it looks to me as if, since I am a man who cannot escape death, by reason of my association with the body of my mother, and since you are not one of these immortal nymphs of fountain and grove and cave and river but like myself are doomed to old age, it seems that even working together we shall find it no easy task to get out of this appalling dilemma: but easy or hard, I will lay it before you, old friend, exactly as it is.”

He made a sign with his hand towards a large mossy stone a few paces to the North of her decayed and crumbling tree-trunk; and here they both sat down. “I understand from Eurycleia,” he went on, “and she of course gets all her knowledge of the tricks of our enemies from”—but catching a look on his companion’s face that he knew only too well, Odysseus interrupted his appeal for help and his tale of difficulties by reminding the Dryad that the aged Eurycleia was being assisted in the palace by the boy Nisos who was the younger son of Krateros Naubolides, the chief enemy of their House, as well as by the simple-minded maiden Leipephile who was betrothed to Krateros’ elder son.