John Powys - Atlantis

With this natural but luckless urge propelling him the horse Arion started off with a bound before the old king, being a poor horseman since the isle was too rocky and mountainous to breed horses, had properly settled himself on its back; with the result that the old man, feeling himself to be slipping, tugged violently at the bridle, causing the creature to rear up on its hind legs.

Here was Enorches’ chance, and “the well-hung one”, as his fellow mystagogues called him, who was now beside himself with blind fury, seized Pegasos by his nearest wing, and Arion by the nearest portion of his flowing mane, and with a mighty wrench and a superhuman tearing and rending, of which the maddest follower of Dionysos would have been proud, pulled out a whole quarter of that flowing mane by the roots and the whole of the left wing of the Flying Horse by its roots, screaming, as he did so, in a voice that seemed to whirl like a sea-vulture round their heads in strident circles: “By all that’s beyond our knowledge, and beyond our powers of knowledge, I curse you both!”

But they were no ordinary mortal horses these two; and after a quick exchange of equine-heart to equine-heart commentary on the situation with their heads touching, disregarding the Priest of Orpheus as completely as if he were an inanimate reproduction of the male organ that had simultaneously come to life and become inebriated, but whose antics were of no interest to creatures of their immortal breed, they leapt forward on their dedicated journey.

Thus it was that in spite of the abundant mixture of ichor and blood which dripped from the two horses’ injured sides, and in spite of the insecure seat and bad horsemanship of the aged king, and in spite of the weight of the sack of treasure and its uneasy balancing by so young a rider as Nisos, and in spite of the fooling and jesting of Zeuks, who astraddle on Pegasos’ rump, began murmuring a bawdy Bœotian ditty at the expense of the defeated priest, it was long before the sun showed any sign of sinking that this unusual group of living souls reached the rocky harbour-town of Reithron Paipalöenton. The laziest loiterers round the water-front of this town must have realized as they saw them, if they had not done so before, that something had happened, in the heaven, or in the earth, or in Erebos beneath the earth, that had materially altered the normal adjustment of the celestial and terrestial order, causing the most weird concatenations of persons and things.

Here they saw, for instance, these Reithron spectators of their harbour’s routine, two mysteriously unusual horses, both dripping with blood, one of them with a single useless wing of many cubits length and a bleeding hole where its fellow had been and the other with a ghastly raw place where half of its sweeping black mane had been plucked out from its neck, so that its skin, though naturally of a greyish tinge, showed like white ivory blotched with blood, while riding upon one of these creatures was the most famous of all the heroes of the Trojan War save the swift-footed Achilles, and riding on the other, with a handsome boy in front of him, was a figure of comedy so extravagant that he might have been the tipsy Silenos himself, fresh from following Dionysos across the world!

And if the philosophic observers of Reithron Paipalöenton were struck by the outward appearance of our travellers, what about the Moth and Fly within the life-crack of the Heraklean Club?

“Are we still ourselves, Pyraust, my sweet friend?” enquired Myos, the house-fly, of his bewildered companion, while the west wind rushed wildly past them and the waves broke under the hooves of their two steeds, as they followed the jagged coast-line of that long and narrow island from one extremity to the other; but there was a tense moment of speechlessness within the bosom of the club of Herakles until after several convulsive and deep-drawn shivers the brown moth collected strength enough to reply.

“ You are yourself, O imperturbable invertebrate! But, alas for me! I haven’t got the courage, nor the personality, to follow my own purposes and go my own way — O how wild this wind is! It would blow me into the forest if I were out in it; or if it were from the East I’d be drowned in the sea! — no! I haven’t got the strength of will to live my own life for myself in my own way; and even now my conscience is all worried because I didn’t go to help the Priest when he was surrounded by enemies! How brave he was to stand up for himself against them all and not even be afraid of tearing the feathers out of one of them and the hairs out of the other!

“O the poor, lonely, holy, heavenly man! O the wildly-loving, desperate man! O the great, erotic champion of blind, beautiful, abandoned drunken passion! O divine intoxicator! O the blessed inspirer of eternal hatred carried to a point beyond all understanding! How could I have borne to see a Priest of the Love of very Love and the Hate of very Hate frustrated in the ecstatic piety of his revenge, just when his beautiful anger had become a devouring Worm that could not be destroyed and a consuming Flame that could not be put out?

“I was a wretched disciple not to fly over to him, a miserable hand-maid not to whisper to him with my fluttering wings how much I admired him, how deeply I venerated his mighty, his majestic, his mysterious anger!”

The house-fly, who had listened to this outburst with troubled concentration, was now turning the subject over and over in his great heavy black head. At last he hummed: “I am afraid, my dear Pyraust, that I can’t quite follow your reasoning — but, heavens! how right you are about this terrible wind! I almost feel as if our living protector, this immortal club of Herakles, must soon be blown out of the king’s hand!—

“That priest of yours certainly was beside himself with anger; that much I cannot deny: and when men are like that, whatever it may be that has roused their fury, they are all alike. They fall into a fit of abandoned rage and every kind of reason vanishes.

“But have you noticed, Pyraust, my pretty one, how this great weapon in which we’re travelling so fast, yes! this club of Herakles itself and nothing less, has been for some time, as we have been whirling along this infernal coast, conversing with the rocky ground itself, yes! actually with the very ground against which the eight hooves of our bearers have been striking, and very often striking fiery sparks?

“Have you noticed this queer fact, O soft-hearted one?”

Both the insects were quiet for a minute listening intently. Then Pyraust murmured in rapt admiration: “Yes, Myos most clever, Myos most discerning, Myos most sage, you are perfectly right! Our thrice-blest travelling shrine is talking to somebody or something. How marvellous of you to have found that out! I suppose we could scarcely dare — eh, my wise one? — to speak to our sacred Sanctuary and ask point-blank — no! I fear that would be too rude and impertinent! What do you feel?

“ Could we dare?”—and the brown moth turned to the black fly the yearning of her whole quivering being. Again they were silent, listening to the wind whirling past them as they huddled together in the deepest shadow they could find in that narrow refuge.

“Why can’t we listen to them without asking leave?” whispered the moth a moment later.

The fly made no answer. But his dark and corrugated countenance contorted itself into creases that could have been naturally interpreted as the tension of a profoundly scientific brain interrogating and interpreting Nature according to an elaborately technical process of his own invention.

“He’s talking to our Sixth Pillar,” he whispered at last—“O! O! how nice and out of the glare it is now! Do you know how that comes about, Pyraust?”