John Powys - Atlantis

There had been no political meeting in this Ithacan “agora” for several years, nor had it been observed by any official person, or indeed by anybody, official or otherwise, before this meeting began that a couple of rungs in the wooden steps ascending the speaking-rock were missing. This gap in the ascent to the platform of oratory had been treated as negligible by Krateros. The old King too in his introductory talk, where he had briefly and succinctly suggested the possibility of every householder on the Island delivering a certain quantity of “othonia”, had totally disregarded the shaky rostrum.

On this particular occasion it was before the handsome Father of our friend Nisos had reached the middle of his blunt and rude speech that the bulk of those who were listening to him became aware of the presence of the Priest of the Orphic Mysteries among the elders who stood at the foot of that dilapidated old-fashioned wooden erection on the summit of the speaking-rock.

The moment he was caught sight of, especially by the women, who were freely sprinkled among the men throughout the whole assembly, it was clear to the shrewd weather-eye of the watchful Odysseus that there was a palpable quickening of pulses. These manifestations of feeling in crowds are very queer phenomena. But of course this man possessed psychic powers of an unusually rare kind and he was insatiable in his quest for human converts of every age up and down the island; and, while a bogey-man to some, he was a redeeming angel to others.

Thus there now appeared over that whole assembly of men and women something resembling a many-coloured wind-blown ripple moving rapidly over a wide expanse of water, a ripple that was grey when it reached our horizon but had been a deep blue-green when it left the shore.

Had Nisos Naubolides arrived at the “agora” just then, he would have plunged at once into a veritable vortex of bewildering psychic problems, the chief of which would have been the extremely complicated question as to just what constituted an important enough crisis in the general stream of events, whether a waterfall, a cataract, a tributary, a marsh, a lake, or a “delta” of several river-estuaries, to justify an interference in the situation by the little old lady he had known as Atropos, and by what subtle understandings of the forces of earth and air and water and fire messages were duly despatched to the said little old lady, so that she could draw certain hints indicating in detail the issues involved and not failing to make clear at what exact point, if care was not taken, the wanton Goddess of pure Chance, whose name is Tyche, might snatch the occasion out of wiser hands.

But queerly enough it was neither blind Chance nor the oldest of the Fates who was now the disturber of the normal stream of natural events — this stream that flowed and eddied and circled and delayed and hastened across that old “agora”. It was none other than the young girl, Pontopereia.

It was some while before Enorches fully realized that his most formidable opponent at this crucial pause in events was the awkward and ungainly damsel who was now shuffling so absent-mindedly up and down between Odysseus, who was leaning on his club, and Okyrhöe, who had accompanied them to this confused scene for some mysterious purpose of her own. As she shuffled back and forth in this odd manner Pontopereia couldn’t help noticing a great many things that she had no wish to notice.

This business of “noticing” was the very last thing she wanted to be engaged in at that particular juncture. Her entire purpose as she shuffled to and fro was indeed the extreme opposite of noticing anything. What she desired just then was to make her mind as near a blank as she possibly could so as to offer it as a pure, clean, unfurnished sanctuary, of which, free from every distraction, encumbrance, or rival, her father’s prophetic spirit might take complete possession.

But so astonishing were the forms and colours forced upon her senses by the spectacle before her that she struggled in vain to defend her attention from them. The sun just then was in mid-sky and was blazing down with such tremendous noon-day glare upon land and sea that it was difficult for her not to feel that she must yield up her whole being to the dazzling white opacity of Athene’s Temple on the one hand, and to the dazzling blue opacity of the gleaming salt water on the other.

She had never seen bluer salt water in all her life. It seemed at one moment to lift her up to a yet bluer sky-zenith in the air above, and at another moment, just as if it were some vast, hard, smooth, magnetic precious stone, to draw her down to a petrifying abyss of demonic blueness in some enchanting but dangerous dimension of existence below Tartaros itself.

It was indeed, though nobody but herself knew it, a real crisis in the life of the daughter of Teiresias, this appearance of hers before the Ithacan assembly of which Odysseus made so much. Her real antagonist in the whole thing was not the father of her new friend Nisos but the Priest of the Mysteries who was even now preparing to take a terrific advantage of the old King’s calm and unruffled assurance.

“How absolutely alone,” she said to herself, “we all are! That old hero with his projecting chin and his sharp beard sticking out from it like the horn of a fabulous beast, what is he thinking and feeling now? I shall never know. Nobody will ever know. And that red and green gnat over there, sunning itself on that half-budded greenish-yellow willow-leaf, I would bet anything it is now, at this very moment of time, wondering whether its fate is destined to come by the violence of another insect not much bigger than itself, or by the sudden downfall of a rotten branch dislodged by a gust of wind, or by being snapped up between the upper half and the lower half of the beak of a bird.

“And has it perhaps just decided,” the girl thought, “that it would be pleasanter to be trampled out of existence while it was asleep under a leaf than to perish in the disgustingly foul air of the crop of a feathery glutton? It’s gone anyway; and wherever it’s gone it’s just as absolutely alone, in a multitudinous world without end in any direction, as I am, or as this old king is, or as Mummy Okyrhöe is, or any one of these men waving their spears and whispering to their wives and to the wives of their friends! Alone, alone, alone!

“And the same applies,” thought Pontopereia, “to whatever grub that little hole contains!” And she struck with the side of her sandal a decaying fragment of tree-root that was half-covered by dark-green moss but had blotches of grey lichen on it here and there, and it was between two of these grey patches that the daughter of Teiresias detected a small orifice that was obviously the entrance to the dwelling of some grub-like creature.

“Are you at home, master?” she muttered; and then, digging her heel into the rubble beside that piece of decayed wood, she swung her whole body round, smiling to herself with a muttered exclamation. “Why,” she told herself, “I am doing just what I said a minute ago I mustn’t do! I’m noticing things! Only these things aren’t exactly what I meant. I meant marble roofs and dazzling waves! But I must, I must get into the right mood for father’s spirit!”

She straightened herself, clasped her hands behind her, stared at her sandals, and tried to imagine she was walking upon empty air. “If I can’t make my mind a blank,” she said to herself, “I must anyway get myself into the mood of being angry with this confounded Krateros who wants to make a fool of the old king by not letting him sail. I know exactly what the old man feels. He doesn’t want to slide into an ordinary, conventional, tiresome, commonplace old age. I can follow that like a map!