John Powys - Atlantis

“And when, as at this hour, in the presence of the most dangerous, crucial, important, and fatal conjunction of the Zodiacal Signs of my destiny upon earth, you my parents’ oldest friend, you the world-famous Dryad of the oldest oak in Hellas, take upon yourself the piloting of my boat through the earth-waves of mould and sand and gravel and clay, the only offering I have wherewith to thank you, Kleta-Dryad, is the cry of gratitude in my heart: ‘vox et praeterea nihil!’ as Petraia the Midwife always says, in the language of their New Troy, about her twin-sister’s Nymph in that Italian cave.”

He was silent, his eyes fixed steadily upon her face, his ten fingers, with the intention no doubt, in true Odyssean style, of simulating calm, resisting the natural human tendency to clasp and unclasp themselves under the pressure of agitating and anxious thought, tugging at the fastenings of his broad belt, while he even went so far as to indulge in the motion of a long shiver.

Then he straightened himself. “Well!” he muttered: “I must have a good bath and a mighty meal and a lordly action of the bowels; and I must get hold of Nisos, and, if I can do it without scaring any of them, discuss with him and with Tis and Eione at what hour we’d better make our visit to Ornax; and whether, we’d better assume, and I fancy Eione will be our best advisor on that point, that these mysterious strangers, Zenios and Okyrhöe, have come to Ithaca from Thebes and belong to the House of Kadmos, and that they have been within their legal right according to our Hellenic tradition in possessing themselves of the person of Pontopereia, the daughter of Teiresias.

“But you are the only one, I swear to you, Kleta darling, who have given me the true clue to my fate at this supreme crisis in my turbulent life; add thus while the Sun, once more Helios Hyperion, freed forever from the yoke of Apollo, looks down upon me, and the Moon, once more the virgin Selene, freed forever from the yoke of Artemis, looks down upon me, as, in this stick-house of a stable for immortal horses, I carry on my haggling with Zeuks — not with Zeus on the top of Gargaros in Ida, but with Zeuks on the top of Kokkys-Thronax in Ithaca — what I shall have in my heart will be neither the tricks of Zenios of Ornax, nor the wiles of Zeuks of Agdos, but the wisdom of the Dryad whose garden was the cradle of Odysseus.”

With these words the crafty hero did what even his father had never done — if Laertes was his father rather than that “Father of Lies”, the great Hermes himself — he flung his arms about the old creature’s neck and kissed her with such dexterity that the protruding point of his bowsprit beard rested tenderly upon the curve of her left shoulder.

He never knew, nor did any of his household ever know, far less any of the city-dwellers between the walls, or any vineyard-owners outside the walls, what the old Dryad did when in silence he had released her, in silence had turned his back upon her, in silence had re-mounted the steps to his bedroom; but the scattered offscourings of dismembered vegetation, the sheddings from dead leaves, the tiny bits of dead sticks, the half-stripped feathers, the empty husks of grass-seed, the pale straw-heads of withered stalks, not to mention the almost invisible insects for whom these minute objects were as stately avenues of cyclopean ruins, in fact all the unconsidered and unrecorded things that in their infinite multitude made up her “garden”, accepted the opinion of a small black slug who assured its neighbour, a still smaller beetle, that the gods had turned their Dryad, as they had once turned Niobe, the ancestress of the human race, into a fountain of tears.

But the sun mounted up, steadily and ever more steadily, into the heavens, until he reached a point when the phantom moon that floated opposite to his rising, seemed to be drifting so aimlessly in a sky which was incapable of doing justice to more than one great luminary at the same time, that she looked as if nothing could hold her back from sliding down in an utter dive of helplessness into whatever element of complete extinction awaited such as sank and sank and sank, till they reached the nadir of the universe.

None of the three women, however, who poured first cold, then tepid, then pleasantly warm water, over the king in his bath, had the faintest resemblance in her mood just then to the moon in her vanishing. They were all indeed, although each in her different manner, far too intensely interested in the problem with which Odysseus had just confronted them to think of anything else. This was the question as to what special treasure or treasures he and Nisos had better take with them to Kokkys-Thronax if they were to be in any sort of secure position in bargaining with this madman, Zeuks.

Bargain with the fellow it was clear they had to; and from what the Dryad had said it was also clear that he was likely to prove an extremely shrewd bargainer. It did cross the cunning old hero’s mind that it might be possible to take a band of men up there, surround this homestead called Agdos, and carry off that immortal pair of horses by force; but the more he thought of such a violent and arbitrary way of going to work the less he liked it.

His one fixed idea, the one final purpose of all this planning and scheming was to hoist sail once more. What in every bone of his body, what in every pulse of his blood, what in every centre of his complicated nerves, he longed for was simply to sail again into the unknown. He couldn’t explain this urge, even to himself. It was deeper than any ordinary desire or intention.

His old friend the Dryad could have explained it to him. It was an obsession, like the migratory passion in birds and fish and insects and even in the spawn of eels!

In his old age it had become the final impulse of his energy, of his sex, of his fight for life, of his deepest secretive struggle, of his struggle, not so much to obey a destiny imposed upon by fate, as to create his own destiny. All he wanted now was to hoist sail once more; and, when he had hoisted sail, to sail ! It was not that he cared greatly whither he sailed, or to what end; but since he knew more about the coasts of the “blameless Ethiopians”,—for such was the name he had been brought up to use for the dwellers on both extremities of the earth — to the East than to the West, it must be to the “blameless Ethiopians” of the West that he would sail.

Yes, he would sail West. And if to touch the limits of the earth in that direction and to reach the “blameless Ethiopians” who dwelt at those limits, that is to say where the Sun, who could travel a thousand times faster than any other living thing, was wont to rise, after traversing, swifter than the wind, the lower regions beneath the earth, was his destiny he would fulfil it.

Odysseus was impelled all the more strongly to make the supreme voyage of his life a voyage towards the West, because, if these late wild rumours told the truth, the whole of the continent of Atlantis had been sunk to the bottom of the sea. From his childhood he had been hearing tales of this mysterious continent, and now to learn that it had been forever submerged, in fact that it existed no longer, made the sort of impression on his peculiar mind, a mind at once obstinately and implacably adventurous, and yet craftily empirical and practical, such as a high-spirited boy would receive who suddenly learnt that what he had been taught were stars floating in space were really tiny holes in the arch of a colossal dome; an impression of which the practical effect was to strengthen his decision that at all cost this ultimate voyage of his must be to the West.

“I shall sail,” he told himself, “ over the waves under which lies Atlantis!”