John Powys - Atlantis

“No, we have not the faintest idea as to how this world of colour and form, and of solid and watery and airy and fiery substance ever appeared before us or ever inspired its favourite champions with the overpowering suggestion that we ourselves are nothing but transitory and dreamlike portions of its evanescent mirage!

“Let us suppose that at this very moment there suddenly crowded into this beautiful dining-hall twenty murderous pirates, from an unknown land beyond Ultima Thule, and carrying ropes woven of a breakable hemp! And let us imagine these pirates bind each of us, men and women alike, with their ropes, and deliberately begin chopping us to bits with their sharp knives! Call up such a scene, O great King, thou who hast known in thy vast travels worse scenes than this! Call up such a scene, sweet ladies! Call up such a scene, brave men!

“Now be absolutely honest with yourselves, every one of you here and tell yourselves, not aloud to the rest of us, but in silence, each heart to heart alone, exactly how you would feel as you watched what was going on and saw your own turn coming nearer and nearer, and heard the shrieks and groans of each particular victim.”

As Zeuks spoke in this way it was very clear what the feelings of Omphos and Kissos and Sykos would have been under the conditions he described as from behind the chair of Zenios they listened with awestruck attention. It was also clear that the three young men’s interest in what Zeuks was saying displeased their mistress Okyrhöe; for she promptly gave them a peremptory signal to go and help their mother in the kitchen; but as they discreetly followed one another out of the hall they received from Zeuks just as if they had been relatives of Zenios, and not servants at all, an extremely friendly and fraternal smile of recognizance.

Zenios himself, still absorbed in what remained on his large antique Babylonian plate, evidently considered that this drunken babbling horse-stealing bastard from a remote farm at the other end of the island whose future destiny even Atropos, unless the old lady had Anangke, or Necessity at one elbow, and Tyche, or Chance, at the other, would have been puzzled to predict, though he might propitiate a poverty-stricken king like Odysseus by his antics, was not the sort of person to interest a rich frequenter of the Bazaars and Markets of Thebes!

But Zeuks had not failed to notice that although the old King was too absorbed in his own thoughts to pay much attention to what was going on round him, there had come a moment, the same moment no doubt when the speaker had caught that response in the faces of the three sons of Nemertes, at which the old hero’s pointed beard had suddenly jerked itself up in an automatic call to battle.

It was as if the bones of his jaw had answered a physiological summons independently of his mind. And this automatic jerk of the well-trimmed beard of the blinder of Polyphemus in some profoundly subtle way so completely satisfied the kidnapper of Pegasos that he suddenly became, at least in the eyes of Nisos who was watching him carefully a completely different person.

That curious appearance of being unnaturally bloated, as if his outer skin, like a leather bottle whereof the contents had become, by reason of some sort of spiritual fermentation, too powerful to be contained in such a prison had been replaced by a singular toughening, at least that is what appeared to have occurred, of the actual flesh of his face; and the result of this was to make the expression of his face harder, firmer, and though no less humorous, much more formidable in the nature of its humour.

Nisos noticed, something else too, though if he’d tried to describe it to his brother or his parents or even to his friend Tis, he would probably have become tongue-tied and might even have retreated into that quite special silence which we associate with idiots; but what he would have wanted to explain about this more powerful humour in Zeuks’ expressive countenance was that in its inherent nature it was not proud or vain or conceited, nor did it, like almost all so-called “prophets” and “thinkers”, shut all doors but the one it came in by, and close all windows but the one it looked out of!

By this time all their eyes were fixed upon Zeuks. The large platter upon which Zenios had been concentrating was now as empty as if that insatiable collector of every possible species of plate that the artists among men have ever carved and moulded in precious metal had licked it clean that night of every stain it had acquired while the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Rising carried it beneath the earth to the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Setting!

Odysseus himself had allowed his wandering mind to return to the immediate situation; and he was now watching Zeuks with the sort of steady, quiet, amused, contemplative interest that the master of a Circus of performing animals would display in the unexpected arrival of a caravan of freshly-caught creatures from the Mountains of the Moon.

As for Okyrhöe, she had very quickly decided that Zeuks was a person who had to be treated on completely different lines from any of the other original personalities she had hitherto succeeded in dominating.

“I must take him,” she told herself, “by a direct attack. It would be no good to try to get round him.”

Old Moros was watching Zeuks very much as Tis would have done. Indeed Nisos, as he glanced at him to see how he received this unexpected oration from a plain farmer from Cuckoo-Hill, was struck by the almost exact parallel in the old man’s features to the way Tis would open his mouth wider and wider as his wonder increased at the eloquence to which he was listening.

“He can’t follow a word,” Nisos told himself. “It’s the man’s power of stringing the words together that strikes him as the marvel!”

As for the fugitive from the Cave of Egeria, Nisos was still young enough to feel an intense discomfort every time she caught his attention, a discomfort which so far he had managed to ward off by repeating mechanically a little prayer to Hera about birth that Petraia had taught him in his childhood; but since by this time he had come to regard Zeuks as his fellow-adventurer and even had begun to tell himself an extremely romantic story of their more and more intimate association as in the wake of their heroic king they would trace in the unrevealing face of the waters the grave of lost Atlantis, it annoyed him to notice that whenever the pregnant woman looked at Zeuks she gave a queer kind of involuntary shudder, as if something about this startling apparition of a neatly-attired farmer of middle height, moderate good looks, and respectfully conventional manner, abandoning himself to an obscure thaumaturgic incantation for the redemption of the world, gave her a weird shock and made her feel that she must escape such a spectacle or her pains might begin without warning.

Nisos himself as he leant forward with his elbows on the wine-spilt-board, dug the fingers of his right hand into a new loaf from Nemertes’ oven, while in his left hand he clutched tightly a small gourd. Little trickles of wine kept dripping from this latter object every time in his excitement he turned it upside-down; while fragments of sweet-smelling crust fell with almost equal frequency as he squeezed the loaf. The boy was in a queer mood; for although the immediate hoof-beat of each galloping moment of time thudded rough-shod, as you might say, over the fore-front of his consciousness, behind it there kept humming and drumming a troubled comparison, of which he felt heartily ashamed, and yet in which he was unable to stop indulging, a comparison between the daughter of Teiresias, who kept meeting his eyes and who was clearly studying him with interest, and his friend Eione, the youngest sister of Tis, the vision of whose exquisite limbs as she bent to re-arrange the folds of her dress had grown all the more vivid to him since his disturbing encounter with the goat-foot Pan.