John Powys - Atlantis

“At last,” said the Club to himself, “I hear the language uttered, which, if I were the ruler of the world, I would cause to be the language of the world!”

What the club heard as articulate speech could not be set down in the syllables of any tongue that was spoken then on the surface of the earth or has been spoken since; but it consisted of a groaningly murmured, thickly muttered, grindingly hoarse, creakingly wooden, scrapingly rocky, clangingly metallic, and also, naturally enough considering that our friend was rhapsodizing into the hardness of his own knee, a satisfyingly onomatopaeic paean.

The drift of what Zeuks was chanting had undoubtedly to do with that same “prokleesis” whose secret he had tried to interpret; only this was an attempt to turn his own body into a drum or trumpet or clarionet, or whatever it might be, that like some vocal sea-shell or land-shell transformed the heavy material sounds of rock against rock, root against root, earth-mass against earth-mass, sea-sand against sea-sand, through which the sixth Pillar from its fixed abode in that old corridor at home was able to communicate with the club of Herakles.

“Enorches”—Zeuks chanted at last, in a deep, rich, resonant voice, lifting his head from his knee and clasping that symbol of eternal supplication with the fingers of both his hands—“Enorches is the unhappiest man on earth! Anyone who understood to the full the real nature of the unhappiness of Enorches would die of pity. But this much, my friends, it is permitted to me to tell you; and tell it you I must since the knowledge of it is of the very essence of the supreme ‘prokleesis’ you are making with me, or if you prefer, I am making with you, here tonight.

“Enorches is deliberately lying when he says that Eros and Dionysos together redeem the world. He implies that they do this, one or the other of them, or both together, as the salvation of mankind, by means of mystical love or mystical intoxication. He implies they do it so utterly and completely that ordinary self-control, ordinary kindness, ordinary decency, ordinary honesty, ordinary courtesy, ordinary generosity, are rendered totally and wholly unimportant when these two mystical ecstasies are at work; and that it is in fact as an alternative to the good, the true, and the beautiful, that these celestial manias and heavenly drugs fill the entire stage and obsess the whole nature of man’s consciousness.

“Now the diabolical lie beneath all this is the implicit assumption that we love to the point of ecstasy and drink to the point of ecstasy in order that life shall go on in the universe indefinitely and without end. Now the real secret purpose and the real secret motive actuating Enorches is the extreme opposite of this.

“What he really hates with a hatred that is co-existent with his uttermost being and with the uttermost being of what he hates is nothing less than Life itself. His praise of Eros and Dionysos, that is to say his glorification of Love and Intoxication as Substitutes for all other forms of Worship, is really a grand and supreme indulgence in deliberate lying. The one secret aim and the one final intention of this crafty Priest of Orpheus is to destroy all Life utterly and forever!

“In the depths of his own being he is so scooped-out by despair, so bled white by abysmal unhappiness that he has only one desire left, the desire that Life once and for all and in every place under the sun and moon, and upon and within and below the earth, should be destroyed and brought to an end forever!

“Yes, what this Priest of the Mysteries aims at is that there shall no longer be any Mystery — in other words that there should no longer be any life. What he recognizes as the uttermost reality of his own destructive and negative nature is a fathomless, yawning void, an open mouth, a gulf, an abysmal hole; and this in-sucking shaft leads not to any kind of Being, but to that nameless opposite of all existence that can only be called Not-Being.

“Here, therefore, down in the depths of this priest’s nature, is something much deeper and much nearer an absolute than Death; for Death, after all, implies that something has lived or it could not have died; but in this man’s nature, when we go down to the very depths of it, we find that which can in reality have no ‘nature’ of any sort at all, for it is Nothingness Itself.

“Yes! What this self-styled Priest of Orpheus really feels, in his absolute and abysmal despair, is that it would have been infinitely better if there had never been any Life at all. But since life has appeared, what this Priest of the Mysteries would wish to see happen would be for the whole miserable mass of it to plunge headlong down and vanish in the Nothingness out of which it ought never to have emerged!”

While Zeuks let himself go in this sweeping diatribe they all watched him carefully in their different ways — Odysseus watched him as a steersman in dubious weather watches a distant horizon. Nisos watched him as an amorist might watch the eyes of one girl through the transparent body of another. The pregnant woman watched him as if he were a cock crowing on a dung-heap. Old Moros watched him as if he were a dog going too close to a trap that ought long ago to have been sprung. Zenios watched him as if he were an itinerant musician, spoiling an opportunity for a good stroke of business.

Okyrhöe watched him, thinking: “I must make them stay and I must give him something to lie on in the Mirror-Room.” Pontoporeia watched him, thinking: “Yes, I agree with this absurd ‘prokleesis’ up to a point; but he doesn’t make it personal enough, for it ought to be some way, some mood, some turn of the mind, some twist of the reason, that would help you when you wanted to make friends with a person.”

And finally, while the club of Herakles, still leaning against the elbow of that narrow seat cut out of the pre-historic wall, watched him, thinking: “how annoying if he starts a vibration that brings me crashing down!” Zeuks felt as if an irresistible unseen power compelled him to fling back his head and to gaze out into the darkness through a half-open door; and though the lights about him made the darkness outside absolute, the same power that compelled him to lift his head forced him to treat that darkness as if it were the whole vast immeasurable bulk of the massed material of the thick-ribbed earth, ridge upon ridge, hill upon hill, mountain upon mountain, towering up in its enormity to a toppling height, high above the encircling ocean that encompasses all, forced him to treat it as if it were this, and at the same time forced him to plunge into it and with his soul gathered together to break through it, to cleave it, to wrench his way through it, until he reached a certain particular spot on the earth’s surface.

What particular spot? Ah! That’s the point! “That’s what has been”—and it was Zeuks himself who flung this jaggedly-splintered shaft of rending interjection into the thick bulk of that darkness—“What has been led up to in all this”—for the spot he was being forced to visit was nothing less than a stone shed near-by with a massively-closed iron-barred door in which Pegasos had been imprisoned ever since Odysseus released him.

In this shed, tied by the neck, Pegasos was at that moment groaning piteously and twisting his head from side to side; for the rope that tied him crossed and re-crossed and chafed abominably that raw part of his shoulder from which the wing had been torn and from which even yet dark drops of blood, mingled with ichor, were trickling down.

Slowly therefore now, in spite of all the eyes that were upon him, Zeuks rose, and deliberately crossing the hall to the open door through which that unknown force had just drawn his soul into the palpable darkness, he resolutely, but still slowly and very quietly, left the company and went out. Once outside and alone in the air it was not nearly so dark, and it didn’t take him long to discover the stone shed where in the haste of their arrival Pegasos had been tied up. It was still necessary, however, to get some kind of torch or lantern; and with this in view he made his way, led by the smell of the fragrant smoke to where Nemertes was already drying, after having cleaned and washed with the exquisite care and nicety exacted by Zenios of all who touched his possessions, the vast array of plates and dishes used at tonight’s supper.