John Powys - Atlantis

Odysseus put down his wine-glass and looked round the room. “Nisos!” he cried. “Please go down to the kitchen and bring Eurycleia up here. I want to talk to her.”

Nisos leaned forward and whispered to the occupant of that grotesque chair, while the chair itself, as he did so, seemed to be perceptibly projecting its roots into the floor and its stag-like horns towards the roof.

“Shall I do what he says?” he whispered to Zeuks, “or shall I pretend not to hear him?”

It was Zeuks himself, however, who at that moment pretended not to hear Nisos; for in his own mind Zeuks was thinking, “Why is it that it gives me no great thrill to know I am the son of Arcadian Pan? Is it because it doesn’t make me immortal and independent of death? In such great matters we men are like animals and do not understand what is going on. If it did make me independent of death it would still be impossible for me to feel independent of it. And what benefit do I get from being the son of a god, I should like to know, when I feel exactly like everybody else?”

These thoughts so dominated Zeuks that they gave him the sensation that he was lost in them and that his personality had disappeared and that it was the chair he sat in that thought these thoughts and that he was merely the name for the language the chair used. The chair, in fact, thought in Zeuks instead of in Greek !

It was indeed the fact that Nisos had actually knelt down with both his elbows propped on the arms of this singular chair where tree-root-legs and hooded covering of stag-horn seemed so much more alive than the man who was sitting in it, that rendered both himself and Zeuks so lost to all that was going on that it wasn’t until quite a crowd of Nisos’ relations were standing round them, nor until the Midwife herself had commenced a formal supplication imploring the goddess Athene to return to them in Ithaca that the spell was broken.

Roused at length from his trance Nisos was amazed to see quite close to him not only Nosodea, the mother of Leipephile, but Leipephile’s elder sister Spartika, the priestess of Athene, as well as the old man Damnos Geraios. His amazement indeed had hardly reached its peak when lo! standing alone behind the lot of them, but with the half-protective, half-mocking gaze he knew so fatally well fixed steadily upon himself he saw his own mother!

Pandea looked just as calm, just as confident and self contained and just as serenely poised, as if she had been in her own house. That she was in the presence of the king did not apparently disturb her; nor, though her shrewd gaze was fixed on her son, did she seem at all concerned when without taking the least notice of any of the new-comers Odysseus repeated his command that the young man should hasten to the kitchen and fetch Eurycleia.

When at length Nisos did remove his elbows and release his fingers from the clasp of entranced prayer, and stiffly and painfully lifted, as if his limbs had been in peril of growing as inanimate as the wood-work above them, first one knee and then the other from the floor, he found that the wave-length of excitement was still concentrated on the almost stellar arena where the old warrior’s beard with Zodiacal precision was pointed first towards Okyrhöe and then towards Nausikaa.

It certainly was not pointing towards Zeuks or towards this enigmatic chair; though the words by which Nisos had been ordered to fetch Eurycleia were still echoing in the boy’s head. No; that bowsprit beard had turned away from them all and was now quivering like a moonlit spear-head over broken water towards the towering figure of the white-robed Spartika.

“Has the old man forgotten,” Nisos thought, “that he has told me to fetch Eurycleia; or is he getting blind and doesn’t see me at all and fancies that I’ve already gone down there? Or do the wisest old men, even when they’re as wily as he is, when between two ladies like those two and a jug of wine such as he’s got there, grow queer in the head? O gods above and gods below!” the boy’s thoughts ran on as he pretended to be too absorbed in the condition of his friend Zeuks to make any response either to his mother’s questioning concern or to the echo in his ears of the king’s unobeyed command, “What on earth”, he wondered, turning his gaze with such a rapid jerk that he made it impossible to meet his mother’s eye, “What on earth is Spartika up to?”

It was evident to everyone there, except perhaps to Zeuks, who had fallen into one of his deepest gulfs of egoistic self-questioning, that the king was amazed by this apparition of Spartika in her white robes, chanting rather than repeating her religious message to them all.

Nisos had acquired the habit, shared by most of his friends and relations, of thinking nothing of Spartika. To disparage her religion, to question her devotion, to minimize her gifts, to underrate her sincerity, to make sport of the grave intensity she always put into her worship of Athene had been the general custom ever since this girl grew up, among everybody who knew her.

It is indeed one of life’s mysteries how this can happen with certain particular young people; and it happens to young men as often as it does to young women. The Goddess herself, however, had encouraged this young priestess of hers from the very start; and it had in recent years become a familiar joke in the Temple that if you wanted to catch a glimpse of the Goddess of Wisdom you would have to cast yourself down in front of the small side-chapel altar which it was Spartika’s duty to decorate with fresh flowers.

If on the contrary you wanted to avoid any risk of encountering the formidable Goddess the thing to do was to say your prayers at her High Altar on the day when the Priest of the Mysteries of Eros and Dionysos was paying his perfunctory and conventional visit to the centre of the island’s traditional worship.

As Nisos turned at this moment towards Spartika, praying that his mother wouldn’t see through his pretence that he hadn’t seen her, and that Odysseus wouldn’t see through his pretence that he hadn’t heard his command, he was relieved of one of his nervous fears by noticing that the pregnant fugitive from Italy had gone to sleep in the chair wherein her sister had ensconced her and that, though the poor lady’s snores made old Damnos Geraios grin like a water-sprite, nobody else appeared to bother about her at all. Her midwife-sister was apparently absorbed in listening to Spartika’s speech; but whenever the impassioned priestess paused to take breath the midwife would interpolate some high-pitched moralizing of her own. Nisos however found himself in a very short time heartily wishing that the midwife would hold her tongue; for it began to strike him more and more strongly that Spartika had been grossly underrated.

“O Great Goddess of Wisdom,” prayed the white-robed figure, “send to thy faithful and devoted worshippers the power to hold fast amid all troubles and tribulations and against all enemies and traitors, and against all chances and accidents, and against all famines and pestilences and elemental disasters, that imperishable gift of pure reason which alone can assauge and mitigate and allay all the ills that our human mortality brings with it! Return, return, O greatest of all Goddesses, thou who wast born of the divine head of the son of Kronos, thou who hast merely to shake the tassels of thy glorious, equitable, thrice-holy Aegis, and all the howling, ravening, raving, blood-drinking, bone-cracking, flesh-devouring minions of mischief who serve the bigots, the dogmatists, the maniacs, the fanatics, the inquisitors who dominate this maddest of all possible worlds are scouted and routed into headlong flight!

“Here in this ancient hall while our world-famous king is entertaining two beautiful princesses and while Pontopereia the daughter of Teiresias — yes, my sweet child, I see that you’re listening to me from your perch like a sea-swallow blown inland before its time in that high window seat! — here, I say, in this old hall, while our king is entertaining his beautiful visitors, have you, his faithful people, forgotten — hast thou our wily sovereign thyself forgotten — the noble, the heroic, the pure, the devoted, the religious-hearted Telemachos, son of Odysseus, son of Laertes.