John Powys - Atlantis

“What Arcadian Pan feels drawn to do, as far as his treatment of a plain ignorant girl like me is concerned, is to keep his hands off me and the thing that male creatures carry about with them out of me, until what you might call ‘the ice’ is broken between us; but, to break this ‘ice’—which is of course my shyness and nervousness and pride and independence, and also, you needn’t smile, my dear! my ignorance — the great thing is for Arcadian Pan and me, and don’t ’ee ever think, Ponty my precious, that I don’t know what an honour it is for a stupid little kid like me to go about with a great immortal god, especially one with the beautifully-thin hairy legs and the firmly-planted goat-feet of my favourite of all animals! — the great thing, I say, is for Arcadian Pan and me to have the same idea of a proper ‘Cosmic Revolution’ and the same idea of the kind of Anarchy we must set up in place of this confounded hieratic ‘order’.

“What the old Dryad advised — and she told us that though her name ‘Kleta’ was given her by one of the Graces she was not displeased to bear a name that resembled Keto, the fair-cheeked sea-monster who became the wife of Phorkys, one of those honest ‘old Men of the Sea’ who cannot —and isn’t that a significant thing in itself? — tell a lie about anything.

“That’s what I said this morning to Arcadian Pan, and O! it pleased him so: and though he swore he couldn’t be as honest as all that, being a shepherd busy with ewes and nanny-goats and rams, and as a player on the flute for country-girls to follow and as the cause of those sudden, nameless, deep, strange, inexplicable, mysterious, obsessing, panic-terrors which take possession of mortal men and make them scurry and scamper away like rats out of a barn, he liked honesty, he said. And so I told him that the ‘old men of the sea,’ that is to say the old gods of the sea, were the only ‘honest’ gods in the world because they lived in water, and water I told him is the one element in the world that cannot, in its inherent nature, play dramatic tricks upon us.” “What about ships at sea?” thought Pontopereia; but she held her peace; and Eione went on. “Well! we shall want all the help we can get from the outspoken honesty of water if we are to make headway against Zeus, Poseidon, and Aidoneus, each of the three of them a superb master of lies! Yes, what Arcadian Pan and I feel is that these three Sons of Kronos are now trying to combine together, since one is the Ruler of the Sky, one of the Sea, and the other of whatever dark and dreadful world it is that lies beneath the Earth; and that what we revolutionists and rebels have to do is enlist against Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus all the subnormal and abnormal and supernormal creatures we can collect together!

“These three most powerful rulers among the Olympians have joined together to suppress with violence and magical force every rebel that is opposed to them and opposed to all the great Olympians who support them!

“Do you realize, Ponty dear, that fresh news has just reached this appalling priest Enorches from his fellow-priests of the Mysteries at Eleusis, informing him that Herakles, who has been guarding Mount Etna to keep that fire-breathing monster Typhon from breaking out, has been persuaded by Dionysos to yield himself up to an orgy of drink; and that while this has been going on, Eros, who had been chained with golden chains by Hephaistos or by some ‘Son of Hephaistos’, like the one who carved the letters ‘U. H.’ on the base of the pillar here, yes! chained to the arm of Aphrodite’s throne in Cyprus, has broken his bonds and joined Dionysos, and together they have succeeded in throwing Herakles into what amounts to a mad trance of ecstasy, in which condition he has become so completely irresponsible that the monster Typhon has got entirely loose, has left Italy and Sicily altogether, and has gone, fire-breathing, ravaging, rampaging, to where, above the Garden of Hesperides, the Titan Atlas, whose punishment from the Olympians it has been to hold up the sky, is threatening to leave his job? What do you think of all this, Ponty dear? Arcadian Pan and I think that his departure will neither mean the end of the sky nor the end of the earth, but the end of the superiority of the sky over the earth.

“You see, Ponty dear, the garden of the Hesperides lies at the western verge of the entire world where the divine streams of Okeanos encircle the earth, and where once used to be — malediction on those who submerged it! is what Arcadian Pan and I say now — the beautiful sheep-grazed meadows of Lost Atlantis. I took Arcadian Pan to the oak-tree of the King’s old Dryad who was such a friend of Laertes in his time, and the Dryad revealed to him certain secrets of the Future of which he, although an immortal, had heard nothing; ‘I am about to die’, the Dryad said to us, ‘or I shouldn’t know these things myself.’ And it was after our talk with the Dryad that we decided to intercept Typhon .”

Pontopereia’s blank amazement at these astonishing words made her whirl the purple cushion in the air before sitting down on it with a thud.

“You — and Arcadian Pan,” she gasped, “intercepting that fire-breathing monster!” As she stared dumbfounded at her young friend, she became aware that the childish innocence in Eione’s expression had suddenly changed to something else; and at this point she realized that between herself and this new Eione there was a blank space she couldn’t bridge. “How weird,” she said to herself, “are the ways by which two minds touch each other and dodge each other!”

And indeed it struck Pontopereia now as if they were the gestures of a complete stranger, when Eione suddenly stood up, opened her mouth as if to speak, but, in place of speaking, yawned, put the back of her left hand with careless indifference against her mouth, and, when her yawn was finished, with a half-smile, as if just waking from a pleasant dream in which she and Arcadian Pan might have been riding Typhon like an obedient horse, stretched both her shapely arms with clenched fists high above her straw-coloured head.

“You see, Ponty dear,” she said emphatically as she let her arms fall to her sides. “Not only has this Echidna of Arima borne children to Typhon but the dragon, Ladon, who guards the apples of the Hesperides, is her brother; and there is a good chance that when Poseidon and Aidoneus come on the scene we shall have got Prometheus himself to stand up to them.”

Pontopereia looked past her friend into far-receding space. She suddenly felt sad and lonely. Had this rash young girl, without in the least comprehending what was happening to her, fallen in love with Arcadian Pan? Was all that rather hurried and very startling and yet not completely satisfactory account of these great cosmic events an outward and visible sign of a much more personal feeling? Was it actually possible that a simple country girl like this should be subject to vibrations of emotion belonging to a superhuman conflict between Gods and Titans?

Pontopereia experienced just then a very perceptible sense of humiliation. When she had hastened their departure from Ornax she had felt without doubt the spirit of her father descend upon her and the inspiration of her father possess her soul, and she had exulted so much in this and felt so proud of it that it had seemed to her, as she bowed down in intellectual response before the gnomic humility of Zeuks, that her place in the struggle of life was with the great seers and the illumined soothsayers and not with ordinary women and girls.

But in this rough, earthy, primitive, uncomfortable rock-palace of the royal house of Ithaca she felt reduced in stature and importance. Her prophetic power seemed to have deserted her. While she had been listening to what Eione had told her of this news from the priests of Eleusis about the monster Typhon escaping from under Aetna and thundering over sea and land, till he reached the Garden of the Hesperides and the place where Atlas holds up the sky as his punishment, she felt as if without a definite inspiration from her father she had no place in these events and no power of her own to obtain such a place.