John Powys - Atlantis

And when he had finished his job he stamped heavily and obstinately on the rubble round the top of the corpse’s head, leaving, however, for the benefit of his own private and secret knowledge and information, but only just recognizable even by himself, the little bronze spike on the top of the small bull’s-hide head-piece that continued to surmount, even after all the knocking about that that warrior-body had undergone, the snow-white head of the dead chieftain.

With his lips still sucked into his mouth in that odd way Zeuks spent several minutes covering and revealing, revealing and once more covering, that little bronze spike, to conceal which finally, and it was almost dark by now, he made use of a cracked oyster-shell.

All this accomplished, he made the special ritual gesture practised for a thousand years at ceremonies where the dead had been buried rather than burnt, and when this had been done he moved cautiously through the olive-garden and bent his head in the darkness lower than he need have done before passing beneath the arch into the corridor of pillars. He felt in some odd way humbled; and every sort of pride, whether human or godlike, seemed to have been drained out of him simply by the fact of having lived all these hours with Ajax, who, whether alive or dead, was so natural and so true to his essential self, that he made any other persons seem vacillating and wayward.

“Didn’t somebody tell me‚” Zeuks said to himself, as he emerged from under the low-bowed arch into the corridor of pillars, “that there was an olive-stump inside here ready to discuss the newest and the most difficult problems in philosophy? But I smell meat! The old king must be already at dinner. Hades! But I mustn’t make a sound or I’ll have them all rushing out!” His sandals were of tougher leather than those worn by his neighbours on Cuckoo-Hill and he suddenly became fearful of their creaking. He felt better when he had slipped them off and was holding them in his left hand; but he felt better still when he had extricated with some difficulty from the lining of his outer vest or “chiton” his two-edged dagger, whose small bronze handle was covered with a particular kind of cloth specially adapted to soak up blood without letting it drip.

But the odd thing with Zeuks just then, as inhaling the rich waftures from Eurycleia’s ancestral cooking he stared wildly at the Club of Herakles propped up between its two projecting quartz-stones, was the fact that his irresolution at that critical moment connected itself with a feeling that went beyond humility.

“What has happened,” he cried out from the depths of his heart with a wordless, soundless cry, “what has happened to you, O Maia, the Nymph who gave birth to Hermes, the begetter of Pan? You were not one, O Maia my own, O Maia, my more than Mother! You were not one of those tragic mortal ones who die, as the old Dryad here must have died along with her aged oak! Of the fate of the Nymph of Master Dryops I know something; and of the fate of the Nymph who bore Pan to Hermes I have heard much: but whither, I implore you to answer me, whither, O whither, have you fled, immortal mother of my father’s father, you for whose sake the lyre was first strung? Are you still being visited by the son of Kronos in some hidden cave in Arcady? Or perhaps at this very moment, beyond the reach of us all, caught by the rising flood in some royal chamber in Atlantis, your far-floating, filmy-textured, chestnut-coloured hair is washing backwards and forwards, while stiff-finned fish and scaly-tailed sea-snakes press their snouts against your cold breasts?

“Have I prayed in vain to you all my life as an immortal, and have you all the time been cold and dead as Atlantis itself? Surely you are immortal among the Nymphs, oh mother of my father’s father? Don’t they say that the great earth-mother bore you at the beginning of all things, before she was over-shadowed by Ouranos or knew what it was to have connexion with any elemental power beyond herself? Aren’t you, along with all the Nymphs of the Mountains and the Springs and the Lakes and the Seas, different altogether in the hierarchies of the gods from a pathetic old creature like the family-Dryad of this place who has now perished with her oak?”

He must have been himself at that moment, poor Zeuks, a somewhat pathetic figure, with one hand clutching that double-edged weapon under his “chiton” and with the other pressing his sandals against his ribs. At any rate the easily moved moth murmured to her friend the fly: “I do so, so wish, my dear friend, that we knew whence this fellow Zeuks originally came. I don’t mean just now, for, of course, we know that well enough! I mean at the beginning of his life. Do, for Heaven’s sake, Myos, wake up, ‘and see’, as rude boys learn to say at school, ‘what the cat has brought in’! I’m afraid you ate far too much of that beautifully-cooked bread-sauce! I warned you against it. Oh how I did warn you against it! For the same thing has happened to you before. It shows how we cannot be trusted not to fall into the sin of gluttony when we are safe at home and in no danger of being swallowed up alive by voracious insectivorous monsters. Listen to me, Myos, my only friend! Listen to me, most learned of revered teachers! I hate to speak of such tragic things: but don’t you remember how often we’ve seen dead flies, lying mute and silent, never to hum, never to buzz, never to murmur again? And where, I ask you, have we seen them?

“On plates and under plates! On tables and under tables! On window sills and under window sills! You flies are far too sensitive and intellectual and highly-strung to take risks with your food. It’s different altogether with us. We’re made for risks like that! If we don’t take risks every day of our lives we very quickly degenerate. I oughtn’t to scold you, my precious wise one”—here the beautiful moth showed signs of emotion, for her right wing quivered and her left antenna groped freebly in a whiff of steam-infected air from the hall within—“because I have myself been yielding so weakly to my admiration for your learning that I have not yet, though I heard his inspired speech, flown to enquire how the noble Priest of the Mysteries has borne up after his exhausting oration.

“But, O thou wisest of flies, I do feel such shame when I think”—It was then that there broke in upon their conversation the voice of their living and moving tent, namely the Club of Herakles, who when in the company of his special and most privileged associates always called himself “Dokeesis” a name which in that dark Nemean Forest, where he was brought up, has the meaning of “seeming”, because there are so many shadows there that it is often hard to distinguish between appearance and reality.

“It is I who am speaking to you, again, Sixth Pillar, yes it is I, the Slayer of the Nemean Lion, and I want to know whether I heard you correctly, Sixth Pillar, when you spoke of receiving the news that the great Goddess Hera the Queen of Heaven, had suddenly left Olympos empty of her divine presence and had gone to Gargaros, the summit of Ida, with the intention of persuading the Son of Kronos, by the help of Desire, and by the help of Sleep after the satisfaction of Desire, to yield up his third portion of Power over the Kingdoms of this World to his two Brothers Aidoneus and Poseidon?

“And if I heard you correctly, O illustrious Sixth Pillar, who bear on your pedestal the signature of a son of Hephaistos, I would like to ask you if you could tell me what in your opinion was the secret purpose of the wife of Zeus in thus betraying her husband, the Ruler of the Upper Air, and through the air of the whole surface of the earth?”

There was no need for the little shame-faced silky-winged Pyraust to prod her friend the fly to listen to this dialogue whose reverberation shook the corridor. Indeed the fly’s big eyes had begun to bulge to such an extent that the anxious moth-girl feared they might fall out of his head leaving two bloody apertures through which she would be staring into her friend’s “frontal lobe”, the last thing she wished to do.