John Powys - Atlantis

It was with the utmost interest that Nisos watched Zeuks and tried his best to weigh him up and get to the bottom of him. The impression he first got of this eccentric farm-labourer was that he was of middle height, of middle age, and of middle social estimation. He noted how essentially Achaean he was in every detail, in dress, in manner and in general appearance; not Pelasgian, or Dorian, or Ionian but an evenly balanced middle-of-the-road Achaean, moderate in all the imponderables, in tribal habits as well as personal reactions, and conveying, wherever he went, beneath the whole paraphernalia of his comic humours an impression of dispassionate calm; a calm that was not merely temperamental, like the coolness of Odysseus, but was the deliberately arrived-at attitude of a definite metaphysical philosophy.

Watching Zeuks carefully Nisos decided that it was this unobtrusive mediocrity that enhanced to such a startling degree the peculiar features of his countenance, features for which it would be difficult to find a more accurate epithet than bulbous. Bulbous they were, and bulbous they remained, under all the contortions and distortions of his remarkable physiognomy.

Every single one of the man’s features was so to say swollen by the inordinate pressure within it of the particular purpose for which the creativeness of nature had designed it. The forehead of Zeuks seemed bursting with its overpowering plethora of thought. His nose seemed bursting with its abounding zest for smelling. His mouth with its full lips, its strong white teeth, its grandly sensuous curves, seemed to have been created by the insatiable palate and indefatigable tongue within it, a couple that were united in conjugal understanding, the palate as the female to the tongue as the male, for the tasting and enjoying of almost everything that could possibly, conceivably, indeterminably be tasted and enjoyed.

But his eyes, — “What is it in this man’s eyes,” thought Nisos, “that makes me feel so nice and warm?”—his eyes were surrounded by a thousand wrinkles and creases and rufflings of the ruddy skin round them, creases that seemed so infinitely tickled by what you had just said, or were just going to say, or simply by the way you were the self that could say such things, that merely to watch their response to you and your remarks gave you a delicious sense of having found your place in the world, a place which, the more you said, or the more entirely you put yourself behind what you said, would grow hourly, daily, monthly, yearly more agreeable to yourself, if not to all concerned!

But it was the eyes themselves, apart from those friendly and rampageously benevolent wrinkles, that were made to encourage everybody they approached to enjoy the world and to enjoy being the person who was thus enjoying it.

Zeuks’ eyes were in fact so deeply set in his bulbous head that Nisos got the feeling that they receded into a mass of substance which they themselves, in their immense zest for life, were everlastingly creating afresh behind that mediocre skull with its pair of eternally recessive holes.

Nisos couldn’t then — he put it down at first to the glare of the noonday sun, but he changed his mind later on — catch the exact colour of Zeuks’ eyes; but for that very reason he decided they were probably hazel. It was indeed, all considered, an extremely complicated moment in our clever young friend’s life. He might be seventeen and he might be the one destined by fate to become the prophet to the strong rather than to the weak, but it began to invade his mind, as he stood there, leaning on his heavy sack, which in its turn rested on a lichen-covered rock, that because a hero had won in his time almost miraculous victories and had used incredible physical strength and still more incredible mental cunning to win the victories, it did not mean that to the end of his days such an one would inevitably be the centre of every dramatic human situation that could possibly arise.

It was exactly noon on this desirable level expanse, with the homestead of Zeuks overlooking it to the East, and that high corner of the City-Wall and that gleam of the Temple’s marble roof out-topping it to the West, exactly noon on the very spot selected by the old king as the perfect site for an assembly of the people that would be swayed by his eloquence.

Well! here was Zeuks, coming dancing out of his ramshackle shed and leading, yes, actually leading, the immortal creatures they had come to buy!

The well-dressed crowd of prosperous farmer-families seemed puzzled as to where to turn to get some hint of the manner in which they ought to receive the thousand-years wonder of this smuggling into their home of these Divine Beasts. Were they to get it from Zeuks or from their king?

Alas! from neither! The Personage who was destined to direct their feelings was none other than Enorches, the Priest of Orpheus! Yes, to the absolute amazement of the seventeen-year-old “prophet to the strong”, there was not a family there, not a man or a woman there, not even a child, who did not excitedly turn to greet Enorches.

It is true there was one little toddler of about two-and-a-half who stretched out a plump arm towards the Club of Herakles, no doubt being attracted by the roundly twisted curves of that formidable bosom, in the cracked interior of which Myos the Fly was still expounding to Pyraust the Moth the metaphysical philosophy of dust and how every grain of it was a world.

But apart from the child who admired the Club and the two insects who were inside the Club, the whole of that excited assembly of well-to-do farmers with their wives and children instinctively divided itself into two parties, the largest of which gathered closely round Enorches and displayed evident hostility to Zeuks, while the other advanced with irresistible curiosity towards Zeuks and his Divine Beasts, constantly looking back, however, as they did so, the women glancing apprehensively over their shoulders, and the children alternately stumbling as they turned to stare at Enorches, or clinging to their mothers’ belts and pressing their faces against their garments.

Not a soul among that whole company made any move towards or away from their old king, though Nisos did notice two of the men whispering together with furtive glances at himself and his great sack.

“They’re saying to each other,” he thought with a faint shiver; “We’ll take that off him before they get away from here!”

Meanwhile Odysseus, having gravely turned his pointed beard to the North, the West, the South and the East, and having instructed Nisos to remain close to his side—“No! no! my boy, much nearer than that! In fact you’d better put a finger into my belt, if you can balance that thing on your shoulder with one hand”—advanced slowly straight towards the swaying and dancing Zeuks.

Neither the word “swaying” nor the word “dancing” accurately describes the sinuous movements with which this queer creature hypnotized those two animals. As in every other aspect of this singular person’s character, if you had never seen him before it was necessary for the understanding of his peculiar nature to catch not only the general expression of his face but at least a few of its special expressions; and among these it was especially important to note what his expression was when he experienced an access of respect and reverence for anyone or anything he suddenly encountered.

Nisos had the wit to realize quickly enough, when Odysseus had greeted Zeuks and was conversing with him, that what those little, searching, deep-set eyes, peering out from the receding depths of what seemed an eternally replenished background, expressed just then was a mixture of deeply affectionate respect and humorous amusement.