John Powys - Atlantis

“Heaven and earth!” cried Zeuks. “What about impulsive fellows like me? I couldn’t tell you by day or by night what I was going to do next!” Thus speaking, the great-grandson of the Nymph Maia hesitated not to take to himself a curious chair that stood empty, with its back to one of the richly carved alcoves of that stately hall, a chair that was actually formed out of the figure of a monstrously swollen dwarf from whose head a stag’s antlers protruded and whose feet were elongated into tree-roots.

There was something about this chair so perfectly adapted to the personality of Zeuks that Odysseus seemed to accept him and the chair as if they had been one thing and not two things. In fact whenever Odysseus glanced in their direction he gave to this fantastical flesh-turned-into-wood man in a chair a half-humorous nod, a nod that seemed to say: “We are all in the same box; and if we don’t grow horns and roots we grow fins and scales.”

The easy way in which Zeuks was now enjoying life in that horned and rooted man-chair with which he had identified himself gave our friend Nisos an opportunity to take in more of the general situation than he had as yet had leisure to grasp. He noticed that more than half the seats round the table were empty but that the plates of their recent occupiers were still half full of untouched nuts and fruits and that their wine-glasses too were still only half empty.

It soon began to be clear to the young man that the cause of this desertion of the table was the simple fact that the three chief officers of Nausikaa’s crew had been persuaded by Eurycleia, along with the half-a-dozen sailors who had navigated their ship, to join our old friend Tis and the Trojan captive Arsinöe in a wine-drinking revel parallel with the one that was now ebbing feebly to its close in this dilatory teasing of Nausikaa by the crafty Okyrhöe. Gay and lively were the cries and the laughter that kept reaching that quiet hall from the echoing passage leading down to the underground kitchen and wash-house.

As Nisos watched all that was going on he soon was made to feel decidedly uncomfortable by the absence of the familiar form of the beautiful Leipephile, who, quite naturally, was away somewhere with her betrothed, the elder son of Krateros Naubolides. Little physical things, too, as so often happens on such drastic occasions, were worrying Nisos now, and these were the more annoying and irritating because of Zeuks’ excessive and exaggerated delight in identifying himself with that grotesque chair and its horns and roots.

Nisos himself, who had no chair and had begun to feel a fool as he stood alone by the side of the table like a child who has crept down from its nursery, had just got one of his bare knees into some sort of a kneeling position upon the edge of a high four-legged footstool, a position he endeavoured to render more secure by pressing his hand in the side of the table. He was unlucky in both these supports; for the footstool had once been covered by some sort of ancient rug, and an unpleasant knot left in its weaving chafed his knee to distraction, while at the precise spot where he pressed his hand on the table’s edge there happened to be two or three brass nails that hadn’t been properly hammered into the wood and one of these nails behaved as if it were trying to bite at the fleshy part at the base of his thumb.

Had Tis’s little sister been present in this dining-hall just now instead of being carried on a crazy rampage on the back of Pegasos along with Arcadian Pan and that pair of appalling Phantoms, whose eternally-whispered wrangle seemed destined to be transferred from Arima to the drowned towers of Atlantis, she would no doubt have drifted to Nisos’ aid.

Pontopereia, the daughter of Teiresias, who was present, was far too shy to speak to a soul except the punctilious Herald to whom she finally confessed her longing to climb up to one of the high windows under the roof of this great chamber and persuaded him to help her in this achievement.

While our friend Nisos was contending with knots in rugs and nails in boards there were other personalities in that hall, quite apart from the Herald and Pontopereia, who seemed to feel that the moment had come for the old little lady Atropos to draw near and give destiny a new turn. Among these other personalities were individual hairs in the beard of Odysseus: for though, like the branch of a tree, a beard, whether of a goat or a man, has its own general individual being, its separate hairs like the leaves on such a branch have identities of their own. Thus the king’s beard in its general personality was not surprised to hear its separate hairs disputing.

“A spiritual impression has reached me,” began one of its smallest hairs, addressing itself to one of the largest; “that before darkness covers the earth today you and I and every other hair in this beard may be homeless.”

“May I be permitted to enquire,” returned the big hair to the little hair, “upon what authority you base this somewhat startling prediction?”

“There’s not the least reason why you should put on that patronizing tone just because you are a little older and a little thicker than I am,” retorted the other. “The important question is whether we shall or shall not both be thrown into a bonfire of rubbish and there burnt up into invisible nothingness!” And as he spoke the smallest hair made a faintly fluttering motion, like a minute dandelion-seed, or some still more simply constructed airborne vehicle, towards the smouldering fire in the centre of the room that still contained a few red embers and a few wisps of grey smoke, and as he made this gesture he shuddered visibly through the whole length of his being; “burnt to nothingness,” he concluded. “Go,” said the biggest hair in the king’s beard to an extremely active though almost invisible insect, “go and discover for the benefit of all of us whether there is still enough life in those smouldering embers to reduce even the scurf on the navel of a wood-louse to nothingness.” The resonance of so commanding a word plunged all the hairs into silence.

“I would dearly like to see myself, Odysseus,” began Nausikaa suddenly, “some of those golden pieces of armour, just a single shin-piece perhaps, or one of the lighter sort of thigh-pieces, if your treasury is handy, of the armour of Achilles, which by the adjudication of the Olympian gods was bestowed on you in preference to Ajax, the son of Telamon.”

The bowsprit-shaped beard of the king was raised with a jerk at this demand. “Tell somebody, tell Arsinöe,” the old man commanded, “to bring up here to show, to show to the Princess any of those pieces she finds herself strong enough to carry!”

“Yes, my lord the King, certainly, my lord the King,” replied the stentorian Herald, scrambling back not only to the floor of the hall from the high window-ledge whither he had helped the daughter of Teiresias to find an uninterrupted refuge for her shy and unwordly mind, but to the reality of his own role in life from which he had been snatched by a sudden amorous illusion, “I will certainly see that the lady Arsinöe brings up at once all that in her heart the Princess covets to behold.”

It was then that young Nisos as he leant so uncomfortably against the table was led by the King’s command and the Herald’s reply to imagine that here indeed was the voice of Atropos herself. “It’s I who will be the herald to Arsinöe!” he told himself as he hurried off. He found the Trojan captive helping Eurycleia in the task of washing the most precious of the vessels that had just been used; and taking her aside out of the riotous revelry of Nausikaa’s officers and men he explained to her just what the Princess had said; nor did he hesitate to make his own comment upon Nausikaa’s request.