John Powys - Atlantis

“But when this confusion ends, for confusion by its inherent nature cannot last, neither we three, nor the goddess Themis, whose image the Harpies broke, no, nor even the great Son of crooked-counselling Kronos, himself, will be the only arbiters of what happens. There will still remain, my dear boy, those two great Powers, and I am not talking of Eros or Dionysos, whom we all, plants and trees and beasts and birds, and fishes and reptiles and worms and insects and men and gods must obey, Necessity and Chance.”

The eyes of Atropos seemed to hold behind them, when she had done speaking, so much more than the half-named body of a little, fleshless, shrivelled, skinny old woman, that Nisos continued to stare in petrified awe into their singular depths.

The sensation they gave him was that the sky above Ithaca and indeed above all the isles in all the bays and seas and straits and gulfs of the land of the Achaeans, together with the interiorly receding depths of all that land itself, the depths, in fact, of all the various solid elements that composed the rocks and sand and earth and soil of which that land was composed, had that pair of eyes as their eyes , and were even now, those remotenesses of sky beyond limit, and those staggering recessions of terrestrial matter beyond limit, gazing at him in a positively ghastly intensity while they informed him that the real deciders of his fate and of the fate of the old hero at his side, and of the fate of Eione, the ideal loveliness of whose perfect form had been for him the living background of the whole of this wild ride, were not the Fates nor the Gods nor the sublime obstinacy and cunning of Odysseus, but, as Atropos herself had just admitted, the inescapable pressure of pitiless Necessity and the motiveless antics of causeless Chance.

The tension, as they thus met once again, between the heart of Nisos and the eyes of Atropos was however soon brought to an end by an abrupt awakening movement in the goat-legged and goat-horned Personage lying in the shadow of that rock. He didn’t wake quickly. He awoke slowly. But no sooner had he lifted a hand, not even to scratch his head but to grope with lecherous fingers amid the foliations of grey lichen that covered the base of the rock than an astonishing thing happened; and what was queerest about this thing was that it was felt by everybody and that it was inescapable.

Both the animals quite evidently felt it. Odysseus felt it. Nisos felt it. And Zeuks felt it. The fragile old figure beneath the spruce-fir on the top of the rock must at that moment have been occultly, covertly, and peremptorily summoned to some other significant parting of the ways for persons in whose destiny she was interested; for she promptly took advantage of this opportune distraction, and gathering her flimsy garments about her scrambled down from the rock and disappeared among the trees to sea-ward.

Nisos was amazed at what had begun to happen to him the very first moment that this goat-legged sleeper opened his eyes. He had been so hypnotized into a sort of philosophic acceptance of things he could only half follow, that, when he found himself shaking from head to foot in extreme panic-terror, but without the faintest notion of why the sudden fear had come upon him, he felt as if he were going mad. Was some appalling danger threatening them all, including the animals who had brought them here? And had the oldest and strongest of the Spinners of Destiny come to warn them, and had now gone to ward off from them the approaching danger?

Nisos felt certain he was not more affected by this sudden and inexplicable panic than were his companions. He could see that the horses were trembling; and indeed he experienced in the teeth of this weird terror a proud satisfaction that his own right arm which, while he was holding his colloquy with Atropos, he had kept stretched out, had not loosened or lessened the pressure of the hand with which he was supporting the great treasure-sack, propt on the back of Pegasos.

And it was clear to him that the wits of Odysseus were not in any more danger of being lost in this mysterious panic than his own. The old king calmly advanced towards the recumbent goat-man, dragging Arion with him. Nisos noticed too that he held the bridle with his left hand while he advanced, and that he gripped the Heraklean club firmly with his right.

“Hail to you,” the old king said, “whoever you may be — whether immortal or mortal, whether god or man! And I pray you, if you are a god, to pardon us for disturbing your noon-sleep before natural termination. I am Odysseus and I have come with Nisos Naubolides and with our good friend Zeuks to do honour to the daughter of the great dead Prophet Teiresias whom many-voiced Rumour declares has been brought from Thebes to a dwelling here, hard by the sea. If, therefore, whether you are a god or a man, you will assist us in finding this House, I, Odysseus, son of Laertes, will of my free heart, give you whatever your soul desires of the treasure we carry with us.”

The prostrate goat-man heard him to the end without stirring. Then he made a very quick movement. He rolled the greenish-black eye-balls of the enormous whites of his nymph-ravishing eyes, and without changing his position, or relaxing his clutch upon the lichen-tuft he was fondling, he took in everything. In fact from the look in those exploring eyes he did more than take in everything. You could have said he devoured, drank up, and erotically possessed everything; not only the old warrior with his bowsprit beard and full-bosomed club advancing upon him, but the half-winged Pegasos, the half-maned Arion, the grave, slender boy Nisos, and every bulge in the choreographic blur which the blazing sun created out of the bucolic features of Zeuks — except the great sack of treasure, across which those rolling eyes flitted without offering it the faintest attention.

Then the old king spoke again: “Are you prepared to show us the way to the house by the sea, whither these Thebans, if such they are, have brought the daughter of Teiresias?”

The goat-horned, goat-legged one suddenly leapt to his feet and with a rough and rude gesture pushed past Odysseus and seizing Zeuks by his elbows stared offensively and yet in some queer way possessively and almost paternally into his face. Over the wounded back of Pegasos, which, though still tender to the touch and not by any means healed, had been considerably soothed by its owner’s spittle, it was still possible for Nisos to see Zeuks’ expression, and it was an amazement to him to remark how quietly, and yet with a sort of comical expectation of more dramatic revelations to follow, he took the gross, yet almost cajoling stare of this horned and hairy Being.

“You are! — you are! And yet you cannot be!” blurted out the puzzled and bewildered God-Beast; and Nisos never forgot the mixture of earthy roguery, rustic guile, spontaneous magical power, along with the professional horned-ram propitiation of a cunning old shepherd, in the goat-legged creature’s tone.

But the capturer and dominator of Pegasos and Arion, the man who was more than a match for the Priest of the Mysteries, was once again completely master of the situation. With an easy assumption of authority — and yet our clever young Nisos didn’t miss the shade of something that resembled a curious spasm of play-acting in his tone — Zeuks freed himself from the God-Beast’s hold and turned to Odysseus.

“We are in the presence, O King,” he blurted out with an irresponsible chuckle, while the goat-horned creature leaned his chin upon the head of Pegasos and began whispering in one of the flying horse’s nervous and twitching ears, “of none other than the great god Pan himself. For some curious reason that I cannot explain to you, O king, this great and most benevolent deity has, ever since he first appeared to me on my farm, confused me with a lad he knew on the farm of farmer Dryops, whose favourite Nymph was Erikepaia, though we ignorant farm-labourers persisted in calling her Dryope or Dryopea, but who rejoiced to share Pan’s bed in the moss and ferns of this farmer Dryops’ Arcadian inheritance.