John Powys - Atlantis

Nisos looked at the old lady in admiration. “By the gods,” he cried, “I’d completely forgotten that curst sack! Why! You’re a soothsayer too, though you do work in this old kitchen! I certainly will do just what you say, and see what’s happened to that great golden mixing-bowl! I can tell your master, anyway, something about it — though whether the old king got it from his queen’s father or whether Alkinoos gave it him in the land of the Phaeakeans I forget at this moment; but if I see it and touch it I daresay I’ll remember what Eurycleia told me about it! Old as she is, her memory never fails her! Yes, I’ll go straight down those steps and talk to Zenios!

“O I do thank you, lady, for putting it into my head! What I expect has been in our old king’s mind all along is some sort of an idea, though it seems horrid to say so,”—at this point Nisos lowered his voice; not so much in order that his hearer’s three sons shouldn’t hear, as from an instinctive courtesy — proof, thought Nemertes, as she listened to him, of how well he’d been brought up—“some sort of an idea,” he threw out in a hurried whisper as he rushed off—“of paying some sort of ransom or tribute for Pontopereia!”

As Nisos hastened to the northern edge of the pre-historic semicircle of stone ruins that these unscrupulous explorers from Kadmean Thebes had modernized and made habitable, he said to himself: “Tribute? Ransom? I wonder I didn’t say ‘Offering’. What of course it will really be, if the old king leaves that treasure behind without a word, will be buying the girl from him as we buy slaves in the market.”

It was when he was feeling his way down those steps, and though it was quite dark he could see a light between door and doorpost at the foot of the stairs, that he stopped short, with one foot on the third and the other on the fourth step, and the extended fingers of his left hand spread out against the wall, for he had a sudden inspiration. “I’ll suggest to Odysseus,” he thought, “that I ought to visit Tis’s home along with old Moros, now I’m so near, and that it might be a good thing if I went into the Naiads’ Cave on my way back to see if the ship-keel is still as it was.”

Meanwhile if Nemertes could have observed what was going on in her master’s chamber at the bottom of that staircase she would have felt, well! not, as people say, “completely justified”, for Nemertes had seen too much of the treacheries of life ever to feel precisely that, but she would have felt that she had not been far wrong in her knowledge of the ways of her master, as a collector of pre-historic treasures.

Long before Nisos had begun to make his way down those steps Zenios had been sitting on a low, rough, oblong couch of fir-planks covered with several layers of sheep-skins, a couch which in his lonely moods he preferred to any other. He was holding in his hands the heaviest and most precious of that sack’s marvels. This was an unusually large Mixing-Bowl; the sort of Mixing-Bowl that among the more civilized Achaean tribes was generally known as a “Depas”.

This particular “Depas” was an enormous one. It had a flat stand at its base and a circular handle on each side of its circumference and it was made of solid gold. It was in fact made of gold so heavy, so massive, and so purged of every kind of alloy, that as Zenios caressed it it gave him the feeling that it was something so totally different from all other things in the world and so absolutely divided from all other things in the world that when he gave himself up wholly and entirely to the pure sensation of this feel of it, he himself became isolated from everything else on earth. The handling of real gold, massive gold, pure gold, solid gold, had become the one positive lust, the one supreme indulgence, the one ecstatic cult, the one ultimate paradise of Zenios’ existence; and when he did so, as he was doing now, he grew so identified with the precious thing he held, that with no effort other than passive surrender to bliss he became what, save for a few blameless Ethiopeans both in the extreme East and in the extreme West, a man seldom becomes, namely a motionless orb of convulsed sunlight, or even starlight, for whom the mere alternation of inbreathing and outbreathing is not only a sufficient satisfaction for one life, but a sufficient satisfaction to justify an infinite series of lives.

But meanwhile, very cautiously, and inch by inch, Nisos was descending the stairs towards this absorbed gold-worshipper. Now the approach of the aboriginal wild creatures in the forests of the earth towards one another has been from the beginning the cause of innumerable invisible vibrations across various expanses of earth and air and such primeval vibrations, whether of attraction or repulsion, or of pure warning, have never completely vanished from the human scene all the way down the ages.

It must have been some such vibration, and of pure warning too, that caused young Nisos, before he had reached the fourth step in his stealthy descent towards that chink of light between door and door-post, to change his mind completely, and, avoiding with exquisite care the least shiver of disturbing sound, to ascend those steps twice as quickly as he had descended them, and, once clear of that quarter of the restored ruins of Ornax, to set off as fast as possible to find Odysseus.

Even Zeuks would not have been able to interpret for the benefit of any other person seated on that broad back all the thoughts of Pegasos as the two of them waited patiently for their start from Ornax on their homeward journey. The whole thing is conjectural of course, but it does seem unlikely that an immortal creature however wounded could feel quite as agitated‚ as did Okyrhöe for example, when she discovered that she was really going to perch herself on the still bleeding back of a one-winged unflying flier, “with this low peasant”, as she told herself “who out of vulgar blasphemy calls himself Zeuks’’, in front of her, “and this silly old King-Hero who won’t be able to see more of me than my back”, behind her.

The whole thing was a surprise and a shock to this beautiful designer of elaborate schemes; for the last thing she expected was to have to make her plunge into the innermost circle of Odysseus’ life without the least preparation, indeed with what might almost be called a “hippodromic” leap. However! If she had to do it she had to do it, and with a courage and recklessness that would have drawn from her cautious slow-moving husband a very straight look, she rushed to one of the innermost chests in the furthest corner of her Mirror-Room and dragged forth from it a garment that Zenios had never known she had bought, for she had managed the transaction in secret with a Phoenician Merchant during a mighty purchase of golden cups.

No sooner now had she dragged out this garment and wrapped her lovely body in it than in a flash all her annoyance disappeared! It was exactly suited to the occasion. Nothing on earth could have answered this unexpected situation better. Even though the immortal creature she rode on was wet with ichor and blood, and even though “with this on” the old hero could not even see how shapely her back was, the effect of her face looking forth from that feathery cloud of heavenly whiteness was beyond what even she herself had ever dreamed of!

She walked up and down in front of Kadmos’ Mirror-Shield. She arranged herself, with this wonderful thing about her, first on a couch, then on a chair, then on the couch again, and once more on a chair. Okyrhöe had never in her whole life felt so inspired by her own beauty. And the remarkable thing about it was that her head, her critical, fastidious, detached, acquisitive, unscrupulous head, remained absolutely clear and cold.