John Powys: Atlantis

“And over there, within a dozen buzzing flaps of my wings, rests that great Club of Herakles as it has done for seventeen years! Yes! as it has done ever since Penelope died. Eurycleia must have seen it for seventeen years balanced between those out-jutting pieces of quartz!

“All those years — think of it! — it has been keeping its position, upright and invincible, leaning first to the right but still upright, still straight and unbending; and then, just a tiny bit, to the left, but still straight and unbending! Aye! How I admire thee, O great Club!”

And the fly went on to think how it would love to throw some charm or spell over the Club that would force it to make known to Odysseus how this cunning Orphic Priest was ousting Telemachos from the great hall of the Temple! It longed to ask the Club how it could refrain from calling upon its former master Herakles, now that it was clear that the old Odysseus was beginning to lose his grip upon the sequence of events.

Thus as strongly moved in its heart as it was in its mind, the fly stared at the archway beside which the Club was resting. Meanwhile the great Club was being slowly aroused from a dim obscure and puzzled sleep by the approach of the dawn-goddess, that tiptoe-footed daughter of Helios Hyperion, whose rosy fingers were still pressed against the palms of her hands.

“So I am still myself,” was the first clear thought of the great weapon. “Yes, I am still myself.” And it began deliberately recalling that far-off day when Herakles snatched it up from a fire-burnt portion of that Nemean forest on the mainland when he was struggling with the monstrous lion.

The club had been seriously blackened by that fire; but long before the fire had touched it it had been deeply indented by the trailing and twisting around it of a honeysuckle intruder who eventually would have possessed itself of it entirely and have transformed it from a noble pine sapling, half-strangled by a deadly honeysuckle, into a flourishing honeysuckle beautifying a wretched dead pine-trunk already blackened in some forest-fire.

“Still myself,” continued the great weapon in its slow confused awakening under the gradual approach of dawn, “still old Dokeesis — who was embraced in that far-off forest by God knows what treacherous neighbour-plant, but who is still able to fit himself as easily into the hand of an older hero as into the hand of a younger hero; Yea! by the gods, and into the hand of a mortal hero as into the hand of an immortal one!”

Pondering thus, the fire-blackened, well-polished club, deeply furrowed into rounded grooves and convoluted curves by the parasitic plant which had so assisted or impeded — who can say which? — its natural growth as to endow it with what resembled a female bosom, found himself recalling his feelings, when, years and years ago, he was washed up by the waves on the coast of Ithaca.

Broken pieces of sea-bitten wreckage from far older vessels than the one upon which the sea-god’s wrath had most recently been wreaked were strewn about him on the strip of shore beneath the rocky promontory where he lay. Sand-crusted fragments of sea-shells together with wind-tossed wisps of foam and salt-smelling ribands of slippery seaweed had drifted by pure chance and were piled up by pure chance against the rounded wooden curves of his female-looking bosom.

Just because he was the latest object to be cast up out of the deep upon that shelving shore the club of Herakles had felt in some dark and deep sense humiliated as well as ill-used.

It was curious, he thought, that this ancient feeling of humiliation should return to his consciousness at this particular moment of this February dawn; but as he tried to analyse what he felt, for the club had grown almost morbidly introspective during these long years of peaceful relaxation with his head resting sometimes against a piece of quartz to the East and sometimes against a piece of quartz to the West, he could only repeat over and over with a proud, furtive, sly, secret detachment, “I am myself”, and as he did so he felt detached not only from the service of Odysseus, but also, and this struck him as something quite new in his experience, from the service of his old master, the demi-god Herakles. He had therefore two introspective riddles about himself to ponder on as this cold pale light of this early dawn moved from pillar to pillar. Why should there be any sense of humiliation in his memory of surviving, in the way he had, the wrath of Poseidon?

And why should he be feeling this savagely cunning, ferociously sly sense of detachment from the service of any master, while at the same time he had such a self-confident sensation of power; of power to serve a mortal hero like Odysseus, quite equally with power to serve an immortal one like Herakles?

“Perhaps,” he said to himself, “I have spent so many days and months and years with my head drooping and slipping and sliding and sinking, first to the east and then to the west between these glittering blocks of quartz that when I try to form any clear-cut explanation of my real inner feelings I just swing from the extreme of shame to the extreme of self-confidence.

“But that seems a silly explanation when I think of the pride I felt in throwing my life into every blow I struck for Herakles, and when I think of the shame that shivered through me as I lay, like a swollen and bloated baby’s rattle, half-covered by seaweed, between two rock-pools, and felt the swishing of sea-gulls’ wings brush against my bare cheeks and my bare stump-end.”

But it was at that moment that the awakened consciousness in the club of Herakles decided that common decency as well as common courtesy, not to speak of prudence, demanded that he give some flicker of attention to the small brown moth that for the last half-an-hour, indeed long before any light entered that corridor, had been struggling to tell him things that concerned them all.

“ What’s that? You imp of Erebos? What’s that you’re telling me now? Isn’t it enough that for more years than I can count I’ve been listening to you, and listening to your mother’s and your grandmother’s and your great-grandmother’s chatter about this infernal Priest of Orpheus who has ousted every other prophet and seer and soothsayer and omen-reader from the Temple of Athene, that I must now treat you seriously; and begin solemnly answering a whole series of ridiculous questions about the end of the world?

“ What’s that, you silliest of insects? No, of course I’ve felt nothing of the kind! Have I felt, do you say, that the world was coming to an end as soon as the sun was up? Of course I’ve felt nothing of the kind! Don’t I feel it now, you ask, this terrible news? No! I certainly don’t feel it! I feel the confounded tickling of your tisty-wisty wings against my old life-crack; that crack from outer to inner, I mean, from what’s going on to my consciousness of what’s going on, that began when He — and if you don’t know who He is you’d better get back into your baby chrysalis as soon as you can! — hit that great roaring Beast over the head in that Nemean wood.

“It’s ever since then that my hearing’s been so good. Curious, isn’t it? Shows how wisely old Father Zeus governs the affairs of the world, eh? And so this blasted fool of an Enorches thinks the world’s coming to an end does he? He’ll soon learn the opposite if that great Son of Zeus whose business it is to purge the world of those who try to bring it to an end comes this way again!”

“Please, please, please, great Club,” pleaded the little Pyraust in her most tender tone: “Please believe me when I warn you that there is serious danger ahead for all who fear the gods.”

The voice of the club of Herakles shook with wrath. “I tell you, silliest of girl-moths, that this world of ours is founded forever on the will of Zeus the Father of All, he who wields the thunder and lightning, he who kills and makes alive, he who can cast those who refuse to serve him into the lowest depths of Tartaros; and Tartaros, you must remember, O most misled and most infatuated of small moths, is as far below the earth as the earth is below the starry heaven! Think, little whimperer, think, what it must have meant to an enemy of Zeus and of the Olympians when he felt himself falling, falling, falling, falling, even as the monster Typhon must have felt himself falling when, with Etna on the top of him to keep him perpendicular, down, down, down, down he went, down to a place — and don’t you forget it, little flutterer with a wren’s eye! — that is as far below the kingdom of the dead as that is below the earth!