John Powys - Atlantis

What pleased our young friend Nisos in all this, especially when he noticed that both the two portions of this unconventional hill-top assembly, the part of it that had been so fascinated by Zeuks and his unusual horses as to feel definitely hostile to Enorches, and the part of it that remained under his spell, had both relaxed, was the fact that Zeuks himself had suddenly taken the initiative with Odysseus, and had advanced close up to him, trailing the long thin leather straps by which he drew the two horses after him, and that the two were now engaged, under the very nose of the excited orator in what looked like a very harmonious and mutually satisfactory bargain.

Meanwhile the speaker was approaching the culminating points of his speech, which were entirely concerned with the Mysteries.

“What is revealed to us in the Orphic Mysteries,” he was saying, “is the inner truth, the ultimate quintessence, of our whole Hellenic life. This essence, this quintessence, my dear friends, floats like an exhalation through every moment of our existence. Whither and Whence does it float? That is no simple question; for it is fed by a thousand ineffable imponderables!

“Mystery it is, and mystery it pursues. From mystery it ascends and in mystery it is engulfed. As the heat of this thrice-sacred noon dissolves in those blue waves down there, so there is a sweetly-dissolving high noon in the life of all of us Achaians towards which we are moving even as I speak; and I swear to you, brothers and sisters of this Isle of Ithaca, that it is only in the celebration of the Orphic Mysteries that you, men and women of Hellas, can rise to your full spiritual stature and rejoice in your full divine inheritance!”

Enorches was clairvoyant enough to grow aware at this point that his large audience were enjoying his speech delivered from that jagged little rock in precisely the spirit he cared least of all for it to be enjoyed, that is to say, as a theatrical performance, and he allowed his arms to sink to his side and his voice to die away.

But he didn’t come down immediately from his little rock. He looked round him with a quite special expression, the expression of a creature with the beak of a bird of prey and the body of a serpent, a creature who has bitten its prey in half, and swallowed half of it, but still feels unsatisfied.

And it happened to be just at that very moment that Pyraust, the girl-moth, implored her boy-friend, Myos the House-Fly, to remove his powerful front legs from the particular one of her languidly trailing wings which it was always easiest for her to straighten out first when she had decided to spread both her wings in flight.

“I know he’s calling for me to go to him,” she explained, “and when he’s calling so strongly it hurts me, yes it hurts me very much, not to be able to go to him! So lift up your front legs, my beautiful one, I beseech you! They are so strong and so gloriously black; and O! how weak my poor trembling brown wings seem in comparison with them! But lift them up now, I beg you!”

But the fly remained obstinate. “In a second; all in good time, all in due course!” he buzzed. “But while we are together I do so want to settle once for all this one single point. Surely you do admit, my sweet one, you can’t help it, that in the smallest atom of dust, just as in the smallest grain of sand, there is a whole world of reality. Never mind all this noisy speaking and shouting! It’s about shams and shows; not about reality at all!”

Thus speaking Myos pressed his two front legs, so black, so shining, and so extremely strong, more firmly than ever upon the quivering wing of the girl-moth. “But look who’s here!” he added presently; and, again, after another pause: “Aren’t you glad, my Crumb of Crumbs, that I didn’t let you go when he first began bawling out his blathering bluster? Why! you’d have bumped into her! And I can tell you, my leaf of longing, my flying feather of dainty fancy, if you had bumped into her it would have been the end of you!”

The brown moth ceased struggling. The fly removed his leg from her wing. They both settled themselves down as comfortably as they were able in those narrow quarters where they were only about six inches below the powerful fingers of the king of Ithaca as he went on bargaining with Zeuks. Neither Zeuks nor he paid the faintest attention to the torrent of rhetoric from the lichen-covered rock, a torrent which, as soon as the speaker realized what newcomer it was who had now appeared among them, recommenced with redoubled vigour. For the personage who had burst in upon that extemporized “ecclesia” was in fact no other than Petraia, the old-maid midwife; and it was a Petraia worked up to a considerable degree of professional indignation, not to speak of virginal vituperation.

She advanced at a pace which could only be described by the vulgar expression “at a run”. She forced her way straight through the crowd till she reached a family group whose members were pushing against each other to get as close as they could to Pegasos and Arion.

Here she singled out a woman, obviously about as far advanced in pregnancy as it is possible to be and, clutching her by the only portion of her person which was not already pre-empted by three other children in addition to the small creature as yet undelivered, she dragged her away protesting loudly, a protest shared by so many of her brood that her carrying off by Petraia caused quite a little convulsion and a sort of counter-eddy in the stream of people who surrounded those two supernatural beasts.

As she dragged the woman towards the farm-house which was nearest to Zeuks’ domain they passed so close to the club of Herakles that Myos and Pyraust could clearly catch what Patraia was saying, and she was saying a great deal.

“A self-respecting woman like you,” she was complaining, “ought to be wiser than to be so interested in these playthings of men! All that these silly boy-men want are more and more playthings! What they don’t realize is the true meaning of this great news that is now spreading through the entire world. They don’t realize, these silly boys, that during a few recent weeks there has been a revolution in Nature herself! Nature herself has decided to assert herself at last. And this means, can mean, does mean, and will mean only one thing! And that one thing is this: Women from now on are no longer subject to men.

“And it means more than that. It means that women are not only from now on freed from the yoke of men, but that men are from now on subject to women, and must learn, if they don’t want to witness the death and perishing of the entire human race, to subject themselves to their mothers and wives and daughters.

“From now on men must learn that their highest worship is their worship of women and that this worship is called Uranian because it resembles the inspiration of the Heavenly Muse!”

All this while Petraia never ceased dragging her pregnant captive towards the Bed of Delivery, the Bed which everyone present at that stupendous scene was forced by her ringing declaration to behold as the only holy and thrice-blessed Bed to be desired by all! The unfortunate or divinely fortunate woman in whom the shock of this outrageous publicity had already started the suspended pains of labour was imploring the three children who were clinging to her to let her go, as well as imploring Petraia not to drag her so fast; and so shrill was the desperate falsetto clamour of their combined voices that the man of the family following uncomfortably behind was unable to succeed in his attempt to appear to be absorbed with interest in a particular white sail on the horizon of the bay.

Just before passing out of sight Petraia called the man to the woman’s side, and, as the two of them with their children vanished from sight, she herself swung round once more and uttered, in a tone more piercing than any she had yet used, her final defiance.