John Powys - Atlantis

The moth shook her head; while her eyes opened wider still in dumb amazement that there should exist in the world anyone as wise as her friend the fly.

“The cause of this particular obscuration of dazzlement,” announced that philosopher with the shrill certainty of a successful scientist, “is simply a human hand. Yes, whenever the old king who is holding the weapon that is our travelling equipage changes the position of his fingers, owing probably, but we can’t be perfectly certain on that point, to some faint feeling of cramp, there occurs an over-powering alteration in the nature of our environment.”

The moth bowed her small head and folded her silky wings in a paroxysm of passionate humility before such insight. But the sound of a very curious humming and drumming now presented itself to the startled attention of both of them.

“Do you hear that , my beautiful one?” enquired the fly.

“I most certainly do,” replied the moth. “Can you explain this also? Has this any connection with the way our ancient king holds his club of Hercules?”

Very gravely did the fly consider this simple question; and then he said, speaking very slowly: “My own feeling is that this curious sound has no connection at all with our heroic old king, or with the way he is holding the weapon which at this moment is our hiding-place.

No, precious one; my feeling is that this sound has to do with a conversation that is actually going on now, between the weapon which is our most blessed vehicle and the ground itself, including all the rocks and pebbles and even the very grains of sand, over which these astonishing horses are carrying us all on their backs.”

The brown moth uncurled her silky wings a little and stretched out her tiny legs with an even less noticeable movement. Then with one of her antennae she touched the precise centre of her friend’s heavy forehead and after having done so she licked the spot she had touched; and then instead of withdrawing her tongue and curling it up she made vague motions with it in the air as if inscribing upon that most elusive of all elements her unspeakable reverence for the wisdom of the fly.

Since it was the black-maned son of Poseidon, by the Earth-Mother in her disguise as a Mare, who was leading this singular cortège, and since Odysseus, who was holding Arion’s bridle-reins, along with the club of Herakles, at outstretched arm’s length, was, of all the warriors of that age, owing to the rockiness of Ithaca, the least acquainted with horses, it was natural that, quite apart from the dazzlement of the burning afternoon sun and the aridity of the rocks and sands and shelving stretches of bituminous gravel and shingly marl over which those eight unusual hooves clattered, there should be several abrupt arrests in their advance, and not a few perilous debouchings from the simpler direction indicated by commonsense.

But something or other, either the imperturbable spirit of the old king or the resolution of both the horses, kept them going. The bloody wound in Arion’s shoulder made by the rape of half his mane did not seem to unsettle his mind; nor did the stream of bantering railleries addressed to the badly injured Pegasos by the incorrigible Zeuks diminish that godlike creature’s speed.

And the pace they were going seemed to accelerate the scientific conclusions of the alert Fly. “No, by Aidoneus!” he suddenly cried; “No! my precious Pyraust! I was right in calling that weird sound we hear all the time a conversation or colloquy; but I made a mistake as to the identity of one of the interlocutors to whose dramatic secrets we have been listening.

“I took it for a simple dialogue between our Heraklean Club and the curving sea-banks of our sacred isle. But do you know who it is with whom our House of “Rest in Motion” is conversing?”

The brown Moth fluttered the feathery points of both her wings and allowed the proboscean sucker at the tip of her tongue to make a receptive gesture. “Yes?” she whispered, “yes? O I can’t wait to hear!”

“It’s none other,” announced the triumphant Fly, “than our old Sixth Pillar in the Corridor at home! So I really am a Discoverer! Eh? What?”

The astounded Moth could only feel herself grow an infinitesimal portion of an inch smaller.

“What,” she murmured, “does our Protector say to the Pillar? Isn’t there a danger that the startling news of our being carried to the other end of the island by Pegasos and Arion may give the Pillar such a shock that its marble frame will split open, as that image of Themis did when the Harpies attacked it with their nails?”

But the Fly, after licking the sensitized tip of each of its front legs and after drying these delicate members on its transparent wings, made use of them with exquisite care and chivalrous nicety as dainty brushes to remove any feathery film that might be obstructing the hearing of the brown Moth, and ordered her to give herself up to listening and not to forget all that the Pillar itself had taught them about the universal language of matter in use even by its minutest particles.

“Don’t ’ee forget, dear Pyraust,” he added, “how when we began our study of the alphabet of matter we learnt how much more important the sensations that certain words convey to us are than the precise nature of the words used or the number of syllables they contain.

“Above all, my dear girl, don’t forget what the Olive-Shoot always tells us, how in the science of language it is a combination of assonance and alliteration that conveys the idea; and thus it is only in poetry that the real secret of what is happening is revealed.”

They were both silent, listening intently; and it is clear that the club of Herakles, now held tight in the old hero’s hand, must have been putting some very crucial questions to the Sixth Pillar; and it struck both our listening insects, not to speak of the club itself, that it was really a masterpiece of technical triumph this invention of the “Son of Hephaistos”, whoever he was, who divulged the open secret of the long-hidden language, whereby the four elements, earth and air and fire and water, could hold converse together.

At this moment Pyraust and Myos had not to wait a second before they could hear it, the clear unmistakable voice, so familiar to them in that old corridor of their royal cave, of the Sixth Pillar.

“No,” came the voice. “There is not a word, not a sign from Pallas Athene. It is universally accepted that she is in one of her shrines among the blameless Ethiopians; but how long she will remain there or what particular thing it was that roused her wrath against us all in Hellas, nobody has the faintest idea.

“As to the other gods, news has come that the rumour was true which declared that Typhon, the most powerful and monstrous and terrifying of all the titanic brood of the Great Mother, Typhon whom Zeus only just managed to overcome by means of the thunder and lightning given him by that weird Cyclopean race of one-eyed half-gods, to which Polyphemus belonged, Typhon who was buried under Etna, had truly and indeed broken loose from his dungeon.

“It is said he is now confronted by Herakles himself, Herakles the son of Zeus, and has been stopped by Herakles from advancing more than a few miles from the fiery crater out of which he has burst.

“There is no need for you, O great Club of Herakles, who have lived with us so long, and whom we of the palace-corridor have come to regard as one of ourselves, to feel hurt that it is not yourself who are now in the strong hand of Herakles as he holds back this monstrous Demigod from destroying the whole population of Italy and Greece and from advancing upon Asia and Africa.

“They say that the Three Fates have long ago decided that it is only by the metal iron that Typhon can be defeated and they further tell me that Hephaistos has now forged for Herakles out of iron a weapon as deadly if not as shapely and supple as you are yourself! If you ask me what has happened to great Hermes, the cunning messenger of Zeus, and the subtle intermediary between men and gods and between the living and the dead, I can only tell you what my messengers tell me; and as you know my messengers are the fiery, aqueous, aerial, terrestrial, magnetic quiverings through the elements that are swifter than the feet of Hermes or the wings of Iris, the murmur, that is to say, of element to element, and, where the earth is concerned, the whisper of rock to rock, and of grain of sand to grain of sand!