John Powys - Atlantis

The moth groaned. “I must, but O! it’s so hard, learn to love Eternity;” and she stroked with her left antenna one of the fly’s wings.

But the fly said to himself. “What shall I do if the King takes us down into Atlantis itself? There must be millions of dead flies down there.”

Meanwhile Nisos was walking round and round the great table thinking out very carefully just what he would say to Eione to persuade her to go with them. In his heart he was so indescribably relieved at the disappearance not only of his own relations, such as his brother and his brother’s betrothed, together with Pandea, his mother, and Nosodea, along with Spartika and the midwife, but of almost all the disputants and contenders of the general public of Ithaca, that he could only listen with amused and sympathetic satisfaction while the King explained to Zeuks that he had decided to put him into full, absolute, and complete charge of the Palace, the Temple, the chief Harbour, the lesser harbours, and all the caves, shrines, sanctuaries, and sacred places of the Island of Ithaca to guard, to hold and to sustain intact, until he, its only lawful sovereign and ruler, should return from his Voyage across the drowned Atlantis; “and take from you again the rights and privileges he now makes over to you and leaves unchallenged in your possession”.

At this point Odysseus laid his hand upon the strange object brought to him by Eione. “The Princess Nausikaa, here present,” he went on, “has consented to accept my company and that of my armour-bearer and Hetairos, Nisos Naubolides, together with my friend Okyrhöe the Theban and together with Pontopereia the daughter of Teiresias. At the moment I cannot tell you whether Eione, the sister of my Herdsman Tis, will also come with us; but I have the Princess’s permission to invite her to do so, and my impression is she will do so. Just as I make thee, Zeuks, my vice-regent and sole representative among men, so, among women I leave my old Nurse Eurycleia in absolute and unchallenged control. I must add that there has just come into my possession the Helmet of Proteus, wearing which it will be possible for me to visit drowned Atlantis beneath the very waters that drowned her.”

It was then that Nausikaa rose to her feet and said: “What my Lord Odysseus has told you is the truth.”

“Well,” said Nisos to Akron, the Master of the ship “Teras”, “she’s got through that anyway!”

“O she’s a sly old bird, our good black ship, when matters get really serious,” replied Akron, “and there’s another thing about her which I wonder if you’ve noticed; I mean about her motion?”

“I may have noticed it and again I may not. Different eyes notice different things.”

“They sure do; and they are also blind to different things. I was blind myself just now when the Pillars of Herakles vanished over the Eastern Horizon.”

“Why, so they have! And I’d been watching so steadily to see them go! It’s no use. You’ll never make a sailor of me.”

“I used to say that very thing once myself! But it passes, Nisos, it passes!”

Nisos looked at him gravely. “I take it you don’t feel the slightest sensation of nervousness, or strangeness, not to speak of simple terror, when from this old black ship of yours you can see no sign or hint or trace of land? Don’t you feel any fear, master, when with nothing between you and this black abyss but a few scrabbled bits of wood, if you don’t mind my saying so, and a few shaky planks blown by the wind and tossed on the wave, you give yourself up to whatever fate awaits you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t deny, my dear lad,” replied Akron, the ship’s master, “that sometimes, now and then, I have that feeling, just as we all have when a spear or an arrow comes too close to our head! I get it, for instance, when I see the spouting of a whale, or catch sight of one of those great sharks, or one of those terrifying Hekatoncheiroi, such as Briareos must have looked when he smuggled down in the throne of the heavenly father and spread out on all sides his appalling suckers, each one of which would be capable of squeezing to death a man like you or me.

“But I really think I’ve got over those first sensations of what you might call pure elemental panic. I think I’ve come to be more or less reconciled to there being, as you say, Nisos, so much water under us and so much air above us! But such a lot of water and such an immensity of empty air does make a person feel small.”

“I don’t think,” Nisos went on in a meditative tone, “that its exactly the mass of water, or the infinity of air, that makes us feel small. I think it is the ceasing of accustomed labour and the idleness that leaves the mind free to follow its fancies.”

The ship’s master watched his young passenger with a shrewd eye as he talked in this way. He thought Nisos was trying to make him believe that he was analysing his feelings with the utmost calm, like an experienced traveller recording his reactions when the most dangerous and agitating moments of what he was going through had arrived and passed.

“The kid would like me to think,” he told himself, “that he accepts these monstrous enormities of air and water without one single natural shiver.”

Their ship was named the “Teras” or the “Prodigy” and its master with whom Nisos had already made friends was a man called Akron who came from Lilaia, a town in Phokis, and was of a reserved and reticent but of a decidedly philosophical turn of mind. Akron came, like Tis, of farming stock, and although his father had kept an Inn in the main street of Lilaia, he had a great-uncle, of about the same age as old Moros, who continued running the family farm.

The second officer, whose name was Thon, had quite a different temperament from Akron and a very different bringing-up. He came of an old military family in Phrygia with a long and turbulent history. The “Teras” had two decks below the top one on which Nisos was standing as he talked with Akron. It was from the upper one of these that the four long oars projected that kept the “Teras” moving when the wind failed.

The mast was fixed in the keel of the vessel and reached up through both the two lower decks to where, on the top-deck, quite close to the spot on which our friend was now talking with Akron, the huge sail, made of the same sort of cloth that Odysseus had tried so desperately to obtain in Ithaca, was now carrying the “Teras” over the waves in a style that must have delighted every true sailor’s heart on board.

The way the vessel was behaving at this moment in a wind almost straight from the South-East, was certainly especially pleasing to the two men who just then were supervising the “protonoi” or “forestays”, the “kaloi” or “halliards”, and the “huperoi” or “braces”. These men were a pair of brothers, whose names, Pontos and Proros, were enough in themselves to suggest seafaring ability, but whose home-harbour, Skandeia in Kythera, was known over all Hellas to breed the best deck-hands in the world.

As he listened attentively and politely, though it must be confessed just a little cynically, to our friend Nisos’ rather prolonged but eloquent discourse on what particular feelings, whether enjoyable or the reverse, were aroused in him by air and water, Akron remained, according to the custom then prevalent in that best of all sea-going Hellenic circles, quietly, though not unsympathetically, detached from the chatter that was proceeding so happily between Pontos and Proros.

Both the brothers from Kythera were small in regard to their bodily form but they were smaller still in regard to the size of their skulls. Indeed so diminutive were these Kytharean craniums that the most studious and experienced of phrenologists would have been puzzled to say where there was room for any sort of bump of worship or for any sort of bump of mathematics or for any sort of bump of metaphysics in these quaint little rondures that resembled a couple of oak-apples as they kept bobbing up and down, rallying each other and making sport of the entire universe.