John Powys: Atlantis

“Aren’t you ashamed,” piped that thin voice, “to talk so loud that a person can’t hear Echidna’s answer to Eurybia? Is it nothing to you what has caused this terrible Pandemonium that is shaking the bowels of the universe, cracking the kernel of the cosmos, splitting the fundament of the crustaceous globe and disturbing every civilized and scholarly and sophisticated and weaponless worm who dwells below the vulgar and brutal surface of this blood-stained and desecrated earth?”

As Trojan maids, whether young or old, were addicted to become when crossed in any personal quest, Arsinöe became rude. “And who may you be?” she enquired.

“I happen to be,” replied the unruffled worm, “what below the surface of the earth we call a philosopher. I pursue the purpose of all true philosophy which is to live happily without helmet or breast-plate or greaves or shield or sword or spear or claws or teeth or sting or poison. But the human race refuses to let us stay quietly underground. It digs us up. It impales us on fish-hooks.

“And this invasion of our right as individual souls to pursue truth in our own fashion began early in the history of this planet and is not confined to the cruel race of men. As serpents practise it upon toads, so do toads upon us. Contemptible little birds swallow us whole and we perish in their loathsome little stomachs.

“Primeval saurians from the aboriginal swamps delight in swallowing us and love to feel us wriggling to death in the fearful stench of their foul entrails. Are you not ashamed to bring your blood-shedding absurdities, your ridiculous feuds, your childish armour, and your murderous weapons into Arima, so that a person cannot even hear the drift of the metaphysical argument between Eurybia and Echidna and hearing it judge calmly for himself whether what is happening is the long-expected revolt, so welcome to us worms, of women against men, or is a revival of the ancient struggle between Kronos of the Golden Age and his ‘Peace to all Beings’ and the reign of these accursed Olympians with their infantile motto: ‘The Devil take the Hindmost?’ Are you not ashamed of yourself, you carver of dead trees?’ Arsinöe touched carelessly with the tip of her right sandal Heirax’s squeezed-up corpse that had the appearance, after the way she had handled it, of a feathered tortoise.

“Is it permitted,” she enquired sarcastically, “to a humble carver of images who has not yet learnt that the earth belongs to those beneath it, to ask the name of the person who is addressing me?”

“I am the Worm of—” But the mysterious syllables “Arima” never reached her ears from the uplifted point of soft-wrinkled redness emerging from its crumpled collars of pink skin that diminished in tapering elasticity till they reached that prehensile projection: for she was off at a pace that was almost a run. “I must just go and see,” she told herself, “what that little devil Nisos is up to now.”

As she hurried away she took care to adjust the “Palace-of-Priam” fold neatly against her breast with the carving-tool wrapped tightly in the linen cloth she had used for the helmet. Not for one second had it occurred to her that, exquisitely as she had caught the curves of her hero’s skull, the way she had armed him would certainly have made Hector’s brother, the wanton Paris, smile; for that Trojan helmet by no means went well with the armour of Achilles while the absence of the famous Hephaistian shield hindered the separate pieces of the golden armour from producing their proper cumulative effect.

“Have you got a mug or a cup of any kind with you, Tis?” she asked boldly as she passed the open door of the shed where Babba’s large, warm-blooded black-and-white body was being milked. “Come in, lady! Come in lady! Certainly I’ve got the best possible cup here for a beautiful maid like thy precious self!”

Thus speaking, and squeezing the final drop of milk from Babba’s depleted udder, Tis gave the cow a friendly slap, followed by a vigorous propulsion towards the hay at the head of her stall, and without further delay proceeded to dip into the brimming pail between his knees a great battered silver ladle, which, as his only valuable possession in the world, he kept hidden in a secret place in that ramshackle shed.

“Here ye be, lady,” he chuckled, “’Tain’t every day old Tis has a fair lass to entertain in’s own banquet-hall! ’Tisn’t wine, as dost know of thyself, being as ye too, like Babba, must suckle offspring when the man and the hour be come; and it aint spiced with nard or thicked out with Pramnian cheese. But right good milk it be, warm from Babba’s teats and properer for a maid like thee than any of the rosy!”

The Herdsman went on with his quaint compliments long after the Trojan captive had possessed herself of the ladle’s gleaming handle and taken a satisfying sip of its warm contents. When she had restored to its owner the one and only heir-loom in his family except their name, for Tis’s Father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, who all worked on their own farm at the other end of the island, were never known as anything but Daddy Tis, Grand-Pa Tis, and Old Tis, she begged this middle-aged youngest and simplest of the Tisses to tell her if he knew whether Nisos Naubolides had gone back to the palace.

Without the faintest hesitation — for what did this middle-aged youngest of the Tisses know about cosmogonic upheavals and Trojan second-births? — the herdsman informed her that the young princeling of the great House of Naubolides hadn’t yet returned from visiting Aulion his ancestral home. “He said something,” continued the innocent herdsman, “about running in to Druinos on his way back. My lady Pandea,” he said, “loves a gossip with my lady Nosodea.”

“But Master Tis,” protested the Trojan girl, aware that there was an obscure shadow wavering across the path she was now travelling though keeping well out of her immediate reach and as unable to shake her new secret triumph as it would have been to touch the adamantine unhappiness of her former mood, “how do you explain this business of the Priest of Orpheus being able—”

But the girl stopped short. What was the use of trying to make a man like this see what she could or couldn’t understand among the confused doings of these infernal Achaians? “One thing’s clear,” her thoughts ran on: “Telemachos was, is, and ever will be my most dangerous enemy here. He is a priest in Athene’s temple; and suppose he heard rumours that I’d been seen at work in that grove of Ash-Trees within the confines of Arima, he might come himself and get hold of me, independently altogether of Odysseus, and treat me exactly in the same cruel way he treated those others at the killing of the Suitors.”

The lonely Trojan woman stood like a statue between Tis, who was now wiping his silver ladle with fresh-plucked moss and Babba who was switching her tail in growing impatience to be out, in the sunshine, cropping grass. The girl’s eyes were fixed upon empty space, while before a secret judgment-seat in her hidden soul each of the island-leaders connected with the Palace or the Temple appeared one by one.

She thought of the great statue of Themis, daughter of heaven and earth, and sister of Okeanos, which stood at the foot of the grassy slope leading up to the porch of the Temple. This goddess of humane Law and Order, and of the righteous customs and traditions of mankind, had been worshipped in Ilium as devoutly as she was worshipped here; and Arsinöe’s chief links between her youthful happiness and her mature servitude were the many gods of Hellas that were worshipped by both races.

Once or twice when the moon was full she had even slipped out of the palace-porch, and stealing down to the Temple barefooted, so that no grass-stain on her sandals, or gossamer-seed caught in the knots of the threads that fastened them, would betray her daring to the sharp eyes of old Eurycleia, had gone so far as to pay a visit to the stone image of this Goddess of divided mankind and to kiss the earth at its base.