John Powys - Atlantis

“And do you see how that noble Fir-tree up there stretches a horizontal branch from its very heart towards that other tree — I can’t quite make out what tree it is — down there against the blue water of the bay? O yes! And when I come to address the assembly here — I tell you, my boy, it’ll be like that very first assembly ever held in Ithaca, about which I used to hear from my mother before I was your age.

“Heavens! I’ll make them sit up. Hermes! But I’ll make them acclaim you, my dear lad, above your stupid brother, to rule in my place when I have hoisted sail. By Olympos yes! you shall look down past all these farmers in their richly-dyed cloth at that divine tree yearning to exchange its sap with that great pine; and as you see the sails of those fishing-boats on those blue waves you’ll think of your old king looking down through the water of an unknown sea at the sunken palaces of Atlantis!

“Yes! By the ‘aegis’ of the Son of Kronos which is now the ‘aegis’ of Pallas Athene! when once, with the help of Pegasos and Arion, we’ve got Teiresias’ daughter here, we will drag enough sail-cloth out of them to carry me to the shores of the unknown West! By the Olympians, yes! Why should this rustic father of yours, why should this stupid brother of yours, not be forced to give up their place to you, my dear boy? It worked before in this island, that sort of change; and it can be brought about again. O! if I could only get all the men of Ithaca assembled here I would know how to persuade them! Haven’t I seen—”

He was interrupted by a wild rush of all the crowd round them towards the sheds and barns of the homestead “whose name”, as they had heard so often that day, “was Agdos”. Enorches himself followed the crowd, passing both Odysseus and Nisos without a word: and there, before them all, walking, each of them on his four legs, quietly, obediently, tamely, patiently, came the winged dark-skinned horse, Pegasos, and the much smaller whitish-grey horse, with a sweeping black mane, known far less widely through Argos and all the mainland, but known well in the islands nearest to Ithaca, under the name of Arion.

Yes, quietly, gently, obediently, those two imperishable and immortal creatures walked forth from their stable towards Odysseus; while Nisos, who soon had his great sack of treasures, heavy as a king’s ransom as they were, hoisted on his shoulders, opened his mouth and breathed in gasps while he awaited what would happen. And there, sometimes behind his immortal captives, and sometimes beside them, and sometimes even before them, was Zeuks himself!

Zeuks was a man of middle height according to ordinary human measurement; but among his other peculiarities he possessed an astonishingly natural power of appearing to be taller or shorter according to the convenience, as you might put it, of the particular occasion. It was as if the occasion itself became a sorcerer who called up, out of the abyss of the uncreated, exactly the right puppet-homunculus that the trick required.

Evidently what was required at this moment by the inevitable situation was to get these unusual creatures safely, quietly, and in docile subjection, into the immediate presence of the king of Ithaca. Meanwhile within that unclosable, unhealable, impenetrable, almost invisible crack, that extended down the whole length of the Club of Herakles, an intense argument was going on between Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth.

They had not been caught asleep, these two members of the royal household of Ithaca. In fact they had both been awakened by the stir in every inhabited portion of the palace, even before Odysseus had to end his emotional talk with the old Dryad which was the chief cause of his being where he was now.

Tis had been the first to disturb them. He had gone earlier than usual to milk Babba, for he wanted to get the pail of fresh milk safely into the palace before he drove the cow to a fresh strip of pasture, well the other side of the haunted Arima, upon whose devilish soil nothing would have induced him to tread. Then Arsinöe had flicked and flapped with one of the last scraps of a particular Pelasgian veil that she had surreptitiously extracted from Eurycleia’s private treasure-box but took care to use before the old lady got up.

It was only after this event that she used a piece of the common stuff which the old nurse was wont to dole out for dealing with the dust which in both corridor and hall gathered with special heaviness owing to the nature of the rocky substances out of which Ithaca’s royal cave had been originally and primevally dug.

It was indeed of dust that the two insects were arguing in their accustomed hiding-place within that warm perambulating retreat. Dust played as large a part in their life as wind and rain played in the life of the king of Ithaca; and so, while Enorches was striving to cast whatever devilish spell he fancied would be most effective against the creations of the blood of Medusa and the horse-play of Poseidon, the fly Myos was explaining to the moth Pyraust that every grain of dust was an actual world and that it was foolish to philosophize about the universe until you stopped talking about Etna being flung upon Typhon and talked about Arsinöe disturbing worlds with her duster.

Meanwhile Nisos also, like his newly-made student-pal or Kasi-kid, was philosophizing after his fashion. What struck him, as this dancing Zeuks led his magnetized captives towards them, was the smooth-sliding manner in which each separate event or incident or occurrence, whether it was of cosmogonic importance, or was of the faintest and most attenuated significance, a mere ripple, you might say, crossing the surface of the oceanic time-mirror of life, was accepted by Odysseus with the same unalterable equanimity.

Here was the winged horse Pegasos, born of the blood of the Gorgon, and here was the black-maned Arion, born of Demeter herself when she took the form of a mare to escape Poseidon; and dancing round these Divine Abortions was the queer individual who had the power of hypnotizing any equivocal creation who crossed his path and yet was no Bellerephon or Perseus or cast at all in the heroic mould; and here, beside them, surveying these lusty apparitions with the eye of an executioner was the Priest of the immemorial Mysteries who looked as if there were nothing in sight he would not gladly offer up to his chthonian divinities.

And yet what was this amazing old king pointing out to him now — to him whom he had recently been considering as his successor in the kingship over the heads of a father and elder brother — but some casually noted aesthetic point about the contrasting beauty of a certain massive tower of greyish-yellow stone, to the North-East of where they stood and rising from a corner of the city wall, and a glittering roof of white marble to their North-West belonging to the Temple of Athene, pictorial elements that justified still further, the old man explained, the idea of this particular spot as a new assembly place.

“Don’t let me ever forget,” the boy prayed in his heart, though to no particular deity, “the calm he shows at a moment like this!” And it really was, this time, without any thought of it being “clever” of him to notice such things that Nisos followed up his secret prayer by telling himself that though those weirdly startling wings rising from the shoulders of that submissive great horse, and that black mane sweeping the ground belonging to the other animal, were striking phenomena of creative nature’s power, it was really a more striking thing that a king who lived alone in his palace with his old nurse and a couple of maids should be so completely equal to occasions like this.

Was it, Nisos asked himself, that that great massive skull possessed an imperviousness to shocks denied to other human craniums? Well, anyway that bowsprit-like and carefully trimmed beard accentuated the quality of the man’s self-possession. And Nisos decided that when once his beard began to grow he would treat it with exquisite care. “A prophet,” he told, himself, “can clearly hide a great many natural feelings behind a well-managed beard, and if he can hide them, cannot he rule them, cannot he force them to obey him, as this horse with wings and this other with a trailing black mane have been forced to obey this madman Zeuks?”