John Powys: Atlantis

“But what can you expect from two elderly well-to-do mothers with trained servants and children as grown-up as Stratonika and Leipephile on the one hand and my brother Angelaos on the other, and with nothing to do but comment on what other people are doing and saying?

“I call it perfectly natural and right. Why shouldn’t our mothers have their little pleasures when they are too old to make love? I don’t like these Temple-chanters who blame Nosodea and my mother for exchanging tales about their husbands and children. I know well how stupid Dad and Agelaos are; and we all know what a funny old customer Damnos Pheresides is! who in the name of Aidoneus can say what goes on in that queer-shaped head?

“If I were Leipephile’s mother I should certainly want to talk to somebody about my husband.” The shrill boyish voice of Nisos Naubolides drifted away between the olive-trees till it was lost among the slaves’ graves. Very soon both that youthful voice and the cow-herd’s hoarse responses to it were lost in Babba’s call to be milked.

Even the Sixth Pillar, whose unusual consciousness had been at once fortified and dulled by its bewildered ponderings upon those two deeply-engraved letters, that “U” and that “H”, which had in the early times appeared on its base, could no longer hear a sound.

Little big-eyed Myos the house-fly, was gone; indeed he was at this moment waylaying in the porch of Athene’s Temple in defiance of the Priest of Orpheus his pathetically frail acquaintance Pyraust, the brown moth. Thus the most intelligent consciousness left just then in the Porch of the Palace — for the five younger Pillars were even more lacking in response to anything outside their own substance than their venerable comrade the Sixth Pillar who at least had kept up an interest in the letters “U” and “H” for a few thousand years — was the half-burnt pine-wood Club of Herakles, whose heavy head and almost feminine bosom as they rested between those fragments of quartz while the movements of the man and boy were still causing vibrations through the substance of the flagstone, lost no opportunity of swaying consequentially, and pontifically, first to one side and then to the other of their narrow enclosure.

It was indeed with almost a sacerdotal alternation between east and west or left and right, and with a quaint blend of judicial finality and suspended fatalism, that the Club of Herakles acted the part of Guardian of the Gate that early Spring morning.

Thus it was with a shrewdly expectant acceptance of the worst rather than a mischievous enjoyment of what was happening at the moment that the Club listened to a light step descending the unseen stairs to the door behind the throne and watched the stealthy opening of this same door and the emergence therefrom of a plaintively wistful middle-aged woman who looked as if she would have more willingly reconciled herself to welcoming the last dawn that would ever reach this earth than the particular one which was now removing the kindly veil of darkness from the repetitive horror of life.

The Pillars in the corridor were by no means evenly placed. They were indeed so divergently and so erratically arranged that they resembled the sort of massive supports that might have been found in the crypt of some sea-king’s palace beneath the floor of the ocean, the building of which had been disturbed by the movement of sea-monsters.

The expression in the woman’s face as she made her way from the inner door to the entrance was only too familiar to all the dwellers in that house. It was indeed the expression of such an enduring quarrel with existence that there was not one among them who would not — whatever words he or she might utter with their lips — breathe a sigh of gratitude to the gods on her behalf if they heard of her death. “The poor thing has gone whither she longed to go!” would have been the instinctive feeling of them all.

As the woman now threaded her way to the entrance she glanced apprehensively at every pillar she encountered; and in the case of the second one and the fourth one she slipped cautiously round them, as if to make sure that nobody was watching her. She wore the sort of robe or “peplos” that by means of the way a certain fold was draped over the curve of one of her breasts left room for a secret pocket at that particular place where a pair of scissors, or a knife, or a dagger, could be quite comfortably and easily concealed.

What this forlorn creature carried hidden in the fold of her foreign-looking garment on this eventful morning was as a matter of fact known to none, not even to the Club of Herakles. It was a carefully sharpened carving-tool of the sort used by wood-carvers. But what increased the self-conscious caution of this secretive woman’s movements was the awkward bundle she carried in her bare arms wrapped in a linen cloth.

Whatever this object may have been it agitated the forest nerves of the once root-inspired club; for the club was naturally, since its flesh was made of wood, hostile to every metallic object and it recognized at once that whatever the girl was carrying it was something made of bronze. Bronze or not bronze the woman kept pressing it tightly to the pit of her stomach, while every now and then she gave a sharp jerk with her bare shoulder when that carving-tool in the fold of her robe scraped against her soft skin through its covering.

Safely past the great club, whose judicial watchfulness changed to angry perturbation as it felt her passing, Arsinöe, the Trojan, whose father was Hector, and her mother a sister of that Dolon who had been slaughtered so unmercifully by Diomed so that his weapons and all he wore might be offered up by Odysseus as a pious offering to Athene, found herself among the graves of the slaves and among the olive-trees that bordered on the graves.

Safely past both graves and olives, and clearly keeping a definite purpose in her tense brain the Trojan captive directed her steps to an uncultivated tract of wild country, about a mile square, which was avoided by all the people of Ithaca.

This particular expanse of ground was unploughed and unsown; nor was it planted with fruit-bearing trees or with nut-bearing trees or with any grain or any flowers. A few very ancient oaks and ash-trees and poplars had grown there for ages and there were several reedy swamps where the mud had a brackish smell though the sea was more than a mile away and where there were strangely-stalked mosses that looked as if they had grown there along with antediluvian marsh-lichens which had been the food of creatures so monstrous that the mind shrinks from picturing them.

At any rate the natives of Ithaca had for unchronicled generations avoided this particular square mile. It had come to be known as Rima or Arima, though these musical syllables had no known connection with the mysterious tribe of a similar-sounding name to which reference is made in certain ancient poems; and it was avoided for a very definite and particular reason. It had, as a matter of fact, become the “Temenos”, or consecrated shrine, of two fearful Beings who must have been worshipped as Deities in Ithaca long before the Golden Age of Kronos, and long before any dweller in the island had so much as heard of Zeus and his thunderbolts.

Not only was this weird expanse of haunted ground the “Temenos” or dedicated shrine of these two strange Beings, but it was the immemorial stage of an unending argument between them, a sort of phantom-ritual, not between two worshippers but between two objects of worship. They were both female Deities and what must have been in pre-historic days their unqualified hideousness had been blurred and clouded, and, if such a word can be used, be-ghosted, by the passing of time, as the most horribly shaped rocks can be overgrown by congenial funguses.