John Powys: Atlantis

One was Eurybia, whose name means “far-flung force”; and the other was Echidna whose name simply means “the Serpent”. Eurybia was the grandmother of Hecate; while Echidna was the mother of the Chimera and of the Hydra and of Cerberus, and also of the Lion of Nemea, not so very long since destroyed in its savage old age by the introspective Club of Herakles, whose repose between his two quartz pillows had been disturbed only an hour ago by this tragic captive concerned with nothing but her carving-tool and the mysterious bronze object wrapped so carefully in its linen cloth.

The shrine of the Grandmother of Hecate was on the lower level of this mile of unfertile land. Indeed it overlooked the most frightening portion of the haunted swamp where any imaginative intruder might well fancy that he caught shadows and reflections in the black water and among the swaying reeds of hovering ghosts that had drifted down the ages from an epoch in which mortal men by day as well as by night had to struggle with creatures whose limbs were not only deathly cold but had a saurian effluvium from centuries of reptilian life in salt-marshes, where terraqueous abortions of both sexes embraced and devoured one another. The shrine of the Mother of the Chimera was in a different position, although there was only a quarter of a mile between them.

This portion of that “holy ground” stood under a tall black rock of some primeval adamantine stone, at once much smoother and much darker than all the other geological strata in Ithaca. In substance as well as in appearance the “eidolon” of Echidna was completely different from the image of Eurybia. Neither of them possessed a realistic human shape, but each was a misty phantom, associated with a material and movable object. At close quarters Eurybia was nothing but a thick wooden stump; while Echidna “the Serpent” was a short but very massive pillar of clearly articulated white stones, each one of which contained, embedded in the texture of its substance, a noticeable array of fossils, many of which, though by no means all of them, had originally been shell-fish.

Above and around each of these two Images or Idols there swayed and wavered and hovered and moved and shook, sometimes growing thicker and sometimes lighter, a tremulous body of palpable vapour unmistakably resembling a female human shape. Both shapes not only grew darker and lighter, thicker and thinner according to the occasion but they also contracted and expanded in actual size.

There was, however, one very curious thing about them. The mist that composed them was entirely impervious to the wildest winds. The wind might flow from North, South, East or West, and blow so softly that it would scarcely stir a feather, or so violently that it would rock the pinnacles of a mountain or upheave the roots of a deep-grown forest: in neither case was its presence so much as visible, however closely you watched, by any effect it had upon these two superhuman phantoms of mist. They exchanged human speech in the language common to both Achaeans and Trojans; speech that could be heard and understood by any native of that island who entered this unconsecrated, this unholy, this unwalled, unguarded, undefended, unassailable tract of demonic ground.

Yes, any reckless child, any rebellious prowler, any philosophical tramp, any desperate bandit, any life-weary beggar, any obsessed youth in pursuit of his ideal vision, could cross at will the boundary of this weird spot. Especially could any daring novice in religion, anxious to obtain supernatural support for his own particular interpretation of the Mysteries of Orpheus or of the Mysteries of Eleusis come stealthily and humbly to a smooth lawn equidistant between these two Beings, or between the wavering pillars of vapour that represented them, and, as he listened to the wind-impervious, storm-immune, rain-indifferent, unbridled and unholy dialogue between them, either be upheld in his special vein of mystical revelation about the secrets of the cosmos or be driven in a wild reaction against every spiritual cult in the civilised world to the desperate madness of parricide or matricide or to some astounding incest or bestiality or perhaps even some unheard-of attempt to side-track or undermine the very fountain-spring of human sexual life and to pervert the unmistakable intentions of nature.

But the absorbed intensity of the daughter of Hector, whose uncle Dolon was the son of Eumedes of Troy, was as unaffected by this undying dialogue of the dead as was the carving-tool she carried in that special fold of her garment which was the mark of the highest-born maidens of Ilium. She went straight into the centre of a grove of Ash-Trees, or Meliai, just as if she herself had been one of those Melian Nymphs born of the Great Mother at the first separation of Heaven from Earth, a grove of trees that grew on the eastern margin of the smooth lawn of delicate grass that lay midway between those two demonic pillars of cloud. Had Tis the cow-herd and Nisos the princely young house-help been following her at this moment they would certainly have stopped in horrified amazement at what they saw.

Both of them knew well as indeed did all the retainers of the royal House of Odysseus that the long-cherished divinely sacred arms of Achilles had been kept in the treasure-crypt beneath the palace ever since by the influence of the goddess Athene over merchant-sailors, they had reached Odysseus’ island home.

Whether voyaging eastward or voyaging westward, they had been brought safe to Ithaca five years after his own miraculous return. But who would have believed that Arsinöe, the youngest niece of Dolon the Trojan spy, could have carried the divine art of carving to such a pitch that she could carve an Ash-Tree, devoid of branches though it was and standing erect in its death, into the actual shape and form, as he was when he lived, of Hector, son of Priam, husband of Andromache, defender of Ilium?

And where and how could the girl have learnt such a god-given gift? Had she strayed as a child, while following the chorus of the maidens of Troy in their Orphic worship and received secret lessons from some outlawed offspring of Hephaistos, the son of Zeus? But learn the great art to some purpose she had, and this grand figure of Hector himself, standing tall and stately in the heart of this Melian Grove, was the result.

And now upon this noble image, carved though it was in perishable wood rather than in immemorial marble, this sad, lost, helpless Trojan maid had hung all those Hephaestian fragments of divine workmanship upon which the rising sun was already beginning to pour its pure blood-sprinkled gold. Holding it high with both her hands, as if it were a goblet of the very nectar of the Olympians, Arsinöe now disentangled the horse-hair-nodding helmet from its covering of white linen and placed it on the Trojan hero’s majestically moulded head.

Then at last carefully removing her carving-tool from that proud fold in her garment that marked her as having been a privileged attendant at Priam’s Court, the Trojan girl set to work to suggest by a series of delicate scoopings and indentations the precise appearance of Hector’s forehead — so un-Hellenic in its curious curves but so pitiably well-known to every dweller in Ilium — as its outlines, partly concealed and partly emphasized by the horse-hair helmet, emerged as if newly created to greet the glory of the sun’s first rays which now pierced with a long stream of golden light that little group of ancient ash-trees.

The moment she had completed her final touches to the dead, whose figure was now entirely accoutred in the divine armour of Achilles, which, piece by golden piece, save only the world-renowned shield which had never reached Ithaca, she had brought from the palace to that ash-grove, at first doing this month by month, and later week by week, as her purpose in its prosperous secrecy gathered momentum, she wrapped the linen cloth about her carving-tool and without giving her finished work any final glance turned to retrace her steps.