John Powys - Atlantis

“Watch your sandals as you walk, my Lord Ajax. There are snakes in the grass.”

It was because the Trojan hero heard this instruction and obeyed it to the letter that they reached the carved tree before he lifted up his eyes to see what it was that burned before him with such a flame.

“Hector!” he cried with a ringing battle-cry; and then almost querulously as he rolled over at the feet of the son of Priam, “so its you and neither the one nor the other of us who at the end has the arms of Achilles!”

By the time the body of the white-haired son of Telamon lay still, and Zeuks, “the laughing man”, had satisfied himself that this long, lean, fleshless form, whose mighty muscles had once hurled back from the hulls and bulwarks of the Achaian ships troop after troop of Trojans and Trojan allies, was really and truly dead, the sun had begun to fall horizontally upon the golden armour of Achilles, hanging now so easily and naturally on the ash-tree carved to resemble Hector. The Image of Hector, thus blazing in its blinding splendour, seemed to be exulting over the body of Ajax, as if it had stricken down that mighty son of Telamon not from the broken towers of a darkened Ilium but from the battlements of some new aerial Troy that were now emerging victorious.

And at this moment there came over Zeuks an unusual craving to get to the bottom of the old familiar mystery of his own birth. Those particular words which Ajax had evidently uttered under the direct impact and pressure of some sudden inspiration had sunk like a lump of adamant into the mind of Zeuks. He repeated them to himself—“The son of Pan, the son of Hermes, the son of Zeus, the son of Kronos”—and he even carried this liturgical genealogy a step further, and murmured the words: “the son of Gaia and Ouranos.”

Murmuring these words like a ritualistic chant he knelt over the body before him and thrusting his arms beneath it lifted it sufficiently high as to be able to prop it up with its back against the shins and knees and thighs of the graven image of the greatest of the Trojans, still blazing like fire in the armour of Achilles.

In carving Hector’s image out of that tree-trunk his unrecognized daughter had thought more of making the man’s face resemble its original than of making his form as muscular as it actually was. So that now, when the real muscles of the tall emaciated son of Telamon were thus contrasted with the supple and pliant elegance of that sunlit golden “eidolon” of his famous enemy, there would have been plenty of excuse for Zeuks had he cried out: “Gods in Heaven! No wonder Troy was taken and destroyed if one leader was like this and the other like that !”

But the mind of Zeuks was at that moment far too full of its own private speculations to do more than place on the ground behind him his own personal weapon, which was a thick, short, double-edged dagger with a sharp point, and lifting both hands to the bowed sun-illumined white head above him that now hung down with a distinct droop towards the direction from which they had just come, that is to say towards the rocky coast where the Naiads had their cave, he began to tilt it up and thrust it back a little, so that it should be kept in an upright position by resting it against the heart of the inmost wood of the carved tree where it was supported on one side by Hector’s left knee and on the other side by his right knee; and once having got it in that position Zeuks was as careful as a woman in the considerate manner in which he closed its eyes.

The afternoon sun was now projecting such a blaze of light that the armour of Achilles reflected it from every curve, whether convex or concave. In fact the incredible and miraculous gleaming of this armour which the cajoleries of the sea-goddess had extracted from the smithy of the fire-god, was so dazzling that whether it flamed back from the closed eyes of the son of Telamon or from the golden greaves of the son of Priam it compelled Zeuks to bend down till his own head was as deeply sunk forward between the knees of the dead Ajax as the head of Ajax was sunk backwards between the knees of the image of Hector.

Thus were the three figures united, one a corpse, one a work of art, and one a living creature; and this uniting of life with death, and of life and death with a graven image of human imagination had a curious and singular effect: for there came into the already confused and naturally chaotic mind of Zeuks one of the most powerful impressions of his whole life. In embracing those dead limbs and in drawing into the depths of his being the bitter smell of the old hero’s scrotum, and the salt, sharp taste of the perspiration-soaked hairs of his motionless thighs, Zeuks completely forgot the dead man’s announcement as to his own paternity. What filled his mind now was a sudden doubt about the wisdom of his proudly proclaimed “Prokleesis” as the best of all possible war-cries for the struggle of living creatures with the mystery of life.

But was it really the best? Was this challenging and this defying of life the wisest attitude for living creatures? Zeuks had long ago found out by bitter experience that some sort of habitual life-philosophy was absolutely essential for him. But was this mood of defiance and challenge the best he could find? He began to mutter all sorts of alternatives to himself as he buried his head between the thighs of Ajax.

By degrees he felt as if he were embracing both life and death, though like a bird swimming under water he had to rise to the surface every few minutes to get a breath of air. “By the waters of the Styx,” he said, “whatever essence of living I make up my mind to embrace, it must be capable of being reduced to a simple surge of will-power and a simple clutch of enjoyment! And I must make it such a habit that I can summon it up at any moment and use it under any conditions!

“And since I’ve got to live out my destiny, whether I challenge it and defy it or simply submit to it, it seems silly to go on making this ‘prokleesis’ of mine the essence of the whole thing. No! I can now see well what the right word for my life-struggle is — not the word ‘prokleesis’, ‘defiance’, but the word Lanthanomai , or ‘I forget’, followed by the still simpler word, Terpomai or ‘I enjoy’. For by the Styx, its a question if we can enjoy anything till we’ve forgotten almost everything!

“That’s what’s the matter with Odysseus”; and at the thought of the man who had won this golden armour from the sinews and bones that here lay dead, only to lose it all again to this graven tree-trunk that would never be able to know anything of these human rivalries, Zeuks lifted up his head from between those withered but still mighty thighs. “It is,” he told himself, “as if I were embracing this corpse beneath that famous tree outside the great wall of Ilium; and as if I had been given by the gods the power to suck and draw and drain from the lapsing semen of this dead body such magnetic force into the peristaltic channel of my spirit that a fresh and a new insight into the whole of life radiates through me.”

Zeuks was not exaggerating what he felt; and indeed if the young daughter of Teiresias had been present at this moment she would have learnt as much, and perhaps more, from the motions of the man’s arms and legs just then, as she had ever learnt from his discarded clue-word “prokleesis”, or was ever likely to learn from his new clue-words, “lanthanomai” and “Terpomai”. But then Pontopereia, being, for all her prophetic gift, a natural girl, she would instinctively put less confidence in the creative impulse of a clue-word than in the simplest bodily movement.

But it was with more than his out-flung arms that this queer son of Arcadian soil proceeded now to encircle in one and the same embrace both the dead man’s neck and the base of that ash-tree out of which Hector’s shin-bones had been so exquisitely carved. It was not indeed until the moment when he saw Ajax fall at the feet of that graven image wearing the armour of Achilles, that something in him such as had never before come to the surface of the “laughing man” rose up, and dominated his whole nature. And it was on the strength of this “something” that he now pressed against his ribs in the same desperate embrace both the dead man and the carved tree.