John Powys - Atlantis

“Heaven and earth! If I had a chance to sail in a ship over the drowned cities of Atlantis, wouldn’t I snatch at it!”

She shuffled on, after that, with her head bent, repeating the word “Atlantis” over and over again. What she obscurely felt in her deepest consciousness was that, since this word contained the concentrated desire of the old hero who had appealed to her for aid at this crisis of his life, the best way of emptying her mind so as to make it a medium for the spirit of the dead prophet was to dissolve this actual word into a sacred mist, or even, and her eyes grew larger when she thought of this, into a sort of nectar such as would help to banish every emotion from her mind save the will to prophesy.

“Atlantis! Atlantis.” Atlantis! And from the lovely head balanced on the ungainly little body, all the whole teeming mass of that portentous gathering, with its hosts of sullen-sultry spearmen and its agitated mothers and excited children in their blood-bright gaily-coloured clothes, and beneath them those blue waters that drew her down, and above them those white walls that lifted her up, were wholly and absolutely banished.

And it was at that very moment, for at such times strange vibrations can pass between the oldest and the youngest among us, that Odysseus beckoned Pontopereia to his side.

Leaning with his right hand on his club, from the crack in whose breast both the moth and the fly were now gazing with absorbed interest at everything within the circuit of their vision, Odysseus told the daughter of Teiresias to use his left hand in place of the broken rung of that rotten ladder; “and make the devils, my brave girl,” he muttered, “give me a good pile of sound ‘othonia’ instead of all this false flattery about ‘wise old rulers’.”

With this physical help and moral stimulus Pontopereia did manage in spite of her awkward legs and heavy thighs to get to her feet on that absurd wooden erection. But, once mounted there, a tragedy took place that was completely unknown to every consciousness in the whole world except the girl’s own, a tragedy the mere existence of which justified up to the hilt what she had been feeling all that morning about the abysmal loneliness of every creature born into what we call “life”.

For Pontopereia, as she gazed at those shining spears, and at that blue sea-pavement, that kept drawing her down, and at those white walls that kept lifting her up, was suddenly seized by a fit of appalling shyness. This convulsion of shyness paralysed her mouth as if with a ghost-fish’s monstrous fins. It pressed against her throat as if with a bilge-smelling flattened-out whale-bone snout.

And finally it brought the thousand-times despairing ship-wrecked eye of a girl’s frustrated life-hope to fix itself upon her! Yes, it brought it closer and closer and closer to the self within the self, to the Pontopereia within Pontopereia, to the living, shrinking soul inside the innermost sheath of her calyx-like identity, so that nothing less than what was all she was should be exposed to this searching, reducing, unsympathetic, sardonic eye, the eye of a shyness that at that moment had gone stark mad.

The poor girl was helpless. What had suddenly come over her could no more be struggled against than she could have regained her right arm if somebody had cut it off. And now quite independently of that fit of grotesque sub-human shyness, as if she had been a sparrow imagining itself a swan, she felt a natural, normal, overpowering human shame. She wanted nothing but to be allowed to hide her head and cry piteously. She could not even remember now, with the tears running down her cheeks and tasting salt on her lips and blotting out her sight, how she managed to slide down from that ridiculous wooden platform. But she did remember how the beard of Odysseus tickled her chin as the old king bent over her and tried to comfort her as she wept on the ground.

It was at that moment that the Priest of the Mysteries, who, like a holy and consecrated wolf, had been waiting for his chance to spring, snatched at his opportunity. And such was the power of this man’s demonic personality that although the collapse of Teiresias’ daughter had been followed by quite a lot of shouting and rushing hither and thither, accompanied by the angry brandishing of many spears in male hands and much high-pitched expostulation from female throats, the moment it was realized who it was who was now pulling himself up to the top of that shaky erection and using such obstinate determination in treading upon each broken rung and in clinging to each wretched bit of balustrade there was another of those queer gasps of mass-attention where the actual crowd itself seems to create for itself a unified Being with ears and eyes that can take things in, and get shocks of feeling from taking things in, just as ordinary personalities can.

Quite a considerable crowd of these islanders with spears, whose number had so impressed the moth that she had whispered the startling syllables “a thousand”, were close enough to the speech-rock to see what a teasing thing it was to mount that platform. Pontopereia had only managed it by the help of the old king.

It was the complete absence of anything traditional or romantic about that wholly silly erection that took the heart out of its ascent and may even have been the cause of the girl’s collapse when she had ascended it. One of the prices that had to be paid for the Trojan War by the Island of Ithaca was that there was neither time nor money to obliterate the finger-prints of the flagrant bad taste left by the rich citizens of that particular epoch.

It was lucky that most of the work of that bad time was not done in materials that by their own nature were especially lasting. It should also be noted that since then, the general taste of the islanders had improved so much that had any of the younger men, even the eldest son of Krateros Naubolides for instance, been called upon to speak they would have certainly spoken from among the old traditional stone-seats and not approached that fatal erection of ill-chosen wood. It was just because these preposterous platforms had already become laughing-stocks, that, when the Priest of the Mysteries in his struggle to ascend was observed to be hanging by one arm from the balustrade with his “chlaines”, or professional philosophic cloak, flapping in the wind about his rump, till the wood-work broke and deposited him on his back on the ground, quite a number of the men in the crowd gave a vent to a rude burst of laughter.

The sound of this must have reached the priest’s ears for he leapt to his feet in one of his fits of blind rage, fits that always endowed him with superhuman strength and were therefore an advantage to him rather than anything else. At this moment what he did was to seize the actual main floor of the platform with both his hands and to shake it for a while, as if he were a besotted giant capable of shaking a king’s palace to dust and ashes.

Then with one grand shattering, heaving spasm what he did was to bring the whole erection crashing to the ground in pieces. This done the astonishing man completely regained his self-control, in fact more than his self-control, for he became a supernaturally competent commander with all the resources of an exceptionally brilliant orator at the absolute disposal of a perfect strategist.

He coolly kicked aside the relics of the dilapidated platform he had demolished, and advancing to the front of the marble eminence on which the thing had been erected, he made just the right gesture and uttered just the right appeal to the crowd to command total attention. Indeed he did much more: for he allowed no second to pass, no pulse-beat to intervene, between this beginning of things and the torrential flow of burning words that followed it.