John Powys - Atlantis

She even began to feel a doubt in her mind whether the beautiful and formidable Okyrhöe herself would be able to deal with this rock-hewn palace to which she had insisted on being brought.

With an intellectual candour that went further than the emotional simplicity of her friend she decided that the prophetic power within her must depend on the special atmosphere of particular places. “I don’t believe,” she told herself, “it will sweep me away at all here. Well, if I’m not destined, after all, to be a prophetess, I ’ m not, and that’s all there is to be said! But I wish Nisos was here .”

This frank admission, so nakedly expressed, was a great relief to her; she felt as if in the midst of putting on the ritualistic robes for the worship of one of the greater Olympians she had suddenly snatched the things off and thrown them on the floor and rushing out into the open air danced on the grass the first dancing-steps she had learnt as a child.

Meanwhile since Nisos’ brother had carried away the other virginal attendant it was natural that the two woman who had known Ilium and the Court of King Priam should drift off together. As may be imagined with one like Okyrhöe to deal with, it did not take Arsinöe very long to discover that this lovely creature who put on the skin of the fabulous “Podandrikon” to accompany her to the haunted area of Arima and who seemed to find that to talk about the importance of accentuating the syllable “dand” in this harsh word was the best way of keeping their Trojan emotion in its place, had the same will as herself to thwart, frustrate and bring to a disastrous and contemptible end, the one single aim of the old age of Odysseus, his desire to sail across the sunken towers of Atlantis into the Unknown West.

Over their bowed feminine heads as they moved through Arima, defying the dark influences of that sinister region, there moaned and wailed, just as over the drowned temples of Atlantis Odysseus might have heard his ship’s rigging respond to the wind, the eternally monotonous dialogue between Echidna the mother of the Hound of Hell, and Eurybia the grandmother of Hekate.

But when, in the golden afternoon light, Okyrhöe was led by her new ally into the very presence of what looked like the absolute reality of the fully-armed Hector himself, her nerves did for an instant, for all their superhuman control, break into a choking gasp. For not only were Hector’s lineaments represented in exact correspondence to the living truth but there was something about the curves of his broad low forehead that exactly resembled the shape of Arsinöe’s head. She recovered quickly however; and they were returning in a deliberately loitering fashion; for Arsinöe had begun to explain to the visitor that Odysseus grew irritable if he had to speak to guests or even to catch sight of guests while dinner was preparing though she admitted that the old hero had come by this time to look upon his unaristocratic companion, Zeuks, as an intimate; but the two women’s leisureliness at this moment received a shock that was as disturbing as it was startling.

By a grotesque piece of ill-luck they encountered the old Dryad Kleta; an encounter which brought them both down with a disagreeable jolt to the very things in Odysseus’ life that they would have preferred to ignore just then, that is to say to the human pathos of his present situation, as an extremely old man without a wife, or a daughter, or a grand-daughter, whose only son had become an austere, inhuman, unsympathetic recluse and a devotee of some contemplative cult, about which, save that it had nothing to do with Dionysos or Eros, and was in no favour with Enorches, it was very hard to get any information.

The old Dryad stood in front of them for a perceptible number of pulse-beats, staring at them as if they were trespassers and intruders of an extremely suspicious kind; not necessarily outsiders to be crushed as we crush black-beetles but entities to beware of and to be guarded against.

The old lady already knew Arsinöe by sight and was fully aware she was Trojan; and her first thought was that Okyrhöe must have just arrived by sea from the same part of the country. It may be believed she did not miss the royal eccentricity of the fabulous Podandrikon skin; and her mind began vaguely flapping like an aged phantom albatross from one to another of all the far-off harbours of which she had ever heard, leaving, as it flew, a feather caught in the sea-weed of one promontory and a splash of white dropping upon the rocks of another.

“Take notice, proud visitor,” she murmured, and then, with a quick glance at Arsinöe, “but you’ve been warned already, that we have to guard our renowned Odysseus from every agitating shock until the moment comes when he has got his ship ready to hoist sail and to sail away whither none of us will ever know! But sail he must and sail he will — away — away — away; and our duty now is to make everything as easy for him as we can until that heaven-appointed moment. Therefore, proud one, from far off, the best thing I can say to you is to bid you go — go quickly — go quietly — go at once! If you came by sea, find a ship and be off!

“There are ships sailing from this side of our island and there are ships sailing from the other side of our island. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t gold to pay your way. Well, stranger, find a ship and pay the master of that ship to take you to the harbour nearest the place where you would be!”

Okyrhöe made an effort to look more than humanly lovely and her features had certainly never been as goddess-like as at that moment. The sun was still overhead, though his tremendous arsenal of refulgence had sunk sufficiently from the Zenith to pour itself into every curve and cranny of Okyrhöe’s countenance.

There are faces that cannot endure exposure of this kind, but Okyrhöe’s face could endure anything. Indeed it looked to Arsinöe as she glanced at her companion that the intense emotion in the old Dryad’s voice stirred up in the beautiful wearer of the Podandrikon skin a quivering vibration of self-assertion that rushed like a sea-breath touched by fire through nerves and veins and muscles and fibres and cells.

But if this rush of abnormal magnetism affected the recipient of the old Dryad’s words, it also affected the Dryad herself. It did more than affect her. Leaving them helplessly standing there — and where she left them they remained; for nothing else at that moment seemed possible — she rushed wildly, blindly, desperately into the centre of Arima. Midway between the two figures of Eurybia and Echidna she paused for a moment, staring at them both like one deprived of speech by reason of the intensity of the feeling that possessed her. Then she cried out in a resonant voice that rang from end to end of that haunted enclosure, “Goddesses! Goddesses! Goddesses! Goddesses! worshipped for fifty thousand years in Argos and Ionia and Crete and Achaia and Lakedaimon! There is a battle going on that will never be repeated if it is not won now!

“It is a battle to restore to us women the ruling position we held at the beginning of things! In the reign of Kronos we held it — and that age was the Age of Gold. But it is Zeus the son of Kronos who has taken it from us, partly by his thunderbolts and partly by the cunning and strength of his two sons, Hermes and Herakles. Goddesses! My goddesses! You who have been worshipped in Ithaca for fifty-thousand years, harken unto me now!

“Persephone, the Queen of Hades, has left her Lord Aidoneus, and is now roaming the world seeking for her mother Demeter. But Hermes, that cunning one, has gone to both Aidoneus and Poseidon, yes! both to the Lord of Hades and the Lord of the Sea, and has brought them to the Garden of the Hesperides near the place where Atlas, as a punishment from Zeus, holds up the sky. And from there the three Olympian brothers, Zeus, Lord of the Sky, Poseidon Lord of the Sea, and Aidoneus, Lord of the Underworld, have resolved to resist this attempt of us women, led by Persephone, to seize again the universal rule and power that we once possessed. The great Olympian goddesses are wavering and have hidden themselves away. Athene has gone to Ethiopia.