John Powys - Atlantis

The oarsmen in the second deck, above sea-level, were not at that moment using their long, thick, heavy oars, which were the largest oars to be seen at that epoch in any harbour in the world, but had pulled them out of the water and were holding them across their knees while they themselves leant back in their seats, talking, or throwing “astragaloi”, the special kind of dice that sailors preferred, or just settling themselves to sleep. There were four of these oarsmen, a couple for each side of the “Teras” as she breasted the waves, Klytos and Teknon on her starboard side, and Euros and Halios on her port side.

All these four men came from the immediate vicinity of the palace of Nausikaa’s parents and their families were personally well-known to her. It was down on the third deck that the passengers’ cabins were situated; and the present possessors of these cabins had to be selected without any exhausting consideration of personal feelings. One of them for instance was shared between Nausikaa and Okyrhöe; and another between Pontopereia and Eione; while a third was given up entirely to Odysseus.

The most striking thing about the “Teras” however was not the number of her decks nor the number of her cabins. It was her Figure-Head. If the beard of Odysseus, which already had played its part in one of the queerest palace-plots ever revealed by a chronicler, bore, as has already been noted, a strong resemblance to a ship’s bowsprit, the real bowsprit of the “Teras’, had no sooner entered the harbours of the world than it was recognized as the most striking of all figure-heads known to civilization. It represented a unique creature whose form and shape had been invented by the Ruler of Lost Atlantis who had concluded the work by placing on the creature’s scaly neck his or her own head with all its striking features.

The name of this Ruler was unknown and the peculiarity of its unusual head was that it was hard to imagine it as the head of any mortal or immortal man, and still harder to accept it as the head of a god or head of the horribly scaly neck to which it was and is attached. This mysterious Being, whose extraordinary features were not those of a man or a god or a beast or a monster, was the author of a long poem about the beginning and the end of everything, a poem which still remains the greatest oracle of man’s destiny existing upon the earth.

The unfortunate thing about this tremendous hieroglyph is that by reason of the drowning of the continent that produced it, and by reason of its being chained with golden chains to the altar of the Hundred and Twenty-Five Gods of that sunken continent, only those who were permitted to read it before the waves covered the altar to which it was bound know anything of its secret; and among these only the Seven Wise Men of Italy have so much as begun to penetrate its contents; and these have only revealed the fact that it is landscape superimposed upon landscape rather than rhythm upon rhythm that is the method of its message.

Since, however, when any of these Seven Wise Men perish the remaining ones appoint successors there is still a hope that in spite of the punishment inflicted by Zeus, the wisdom of Atlantis-will never be entirely lost.

While Nisos was struggling to be as prophetic as he could in his talk to the Master of the “Teras”, Pontopereia, the daughter of a prophet, was doing the same sort of thing, only with more subtlety, in regard to Eione, as the two girls sipped the well-made red wine, mixed with plenty of pure spring-water, with which Nausikaa’s stores provided them, not to mention nibbling a few particularly well-spiced biscuits from Arabia, a taste for which the princess inherited from her mother.

“Oh don’t say that, darling Eione! I know so well the feeling you have that drives you to say it; but we women really must learn to slip under or slip over these crude urges of Nature that lift us off our feet and force us to utter things like that! The great thing is, I know I’m right in that anyway, the great thing is always to have two lives going; one of them the life we share with our friends, and the other the life we enjoy with our own mind and with our own senses.

“To keep this secret second life going, even while we are living the other to the full, is the supreme trick of existence for girls such as you and I.”

Eione lifted up her shapely legs from the couch where hitherto the two girls had been lying face to face, each pair of bare feet resting motionless against the neck of the owner of the other pair. But the easy nonchalance of that chaste yet familiar position was completely broken up by this provocative movement on the part of Tis’s sister. Their position blotted out from the daughter of Teiresias all view of her companion’s face. All she could see of her now was a couple of white shins and the extremely intimate shadows and outlines between them.

“When you talk of the life we ‘share with our friends’,” enquired a girlish voice from behind these uplifted knees, “do you mean our lovers?”

“Certainly I do,” replied Pontopereia almost sharply, “if we have such idiots; but what was in my mind was nothing as sexual as that.”

“Would you advocate living this double life even after marriage?”

“Most certainly I would! Don’t you see, my sweet, it is only after the actual moment of union has been consummated by the loss of our virginity that men, and women, can make love, as people call it, on equal terms. But does the ecstasy of such embraces so absorb us both as to completely blot out and obliterate our separate identities? Don’t you suppose, my lovely one, that we still go on — I won’t say thinking thoughts that have have no connection with the passionate pleasure we’re enjoying, but thinking such a thought as—‘oh how utterly and entirely this heavenly, this divine sensation beats all other sensations I’ve ever known!’”

“But,” came the voice from behind the upraised legs, that is to say from behind the whole of Eione from the waist down, “but doesn’t what you’re now saying, my friend, reduce the passion of love to an extremity of purely selfish sensation?”

Pontopereia at this drew up her own legs with an abrupt jerk; but straightened her back as she did so, and leaned forward, sitting on her heels, and resting the palms of both her hands upon the uplifted knees of the girl before her.

“I confess, my dear,” she said, “that I’m talking of something of which I’ve had no experience. But surely if this ecstasy of love’s embrace, of which such a lot is made, is as transporting and enthralling as we’re always being told it is, neither of the parties concerned can possibly have the detachment of consciousness left inside them to say anything to themselves around or about or above or beneath the absolutely absorbing sensation they are caught up in and which is blinding them to all else?”

A sudden outburst of silvery laughter came from the girlish face upon which, with her hands on the young creature’s knees, Pontopereia now gazed with unpretended admiration.

“Aren’t you confusing,” were the words that issued from that radiant but extremely simple countenance, “what we feel when we’re imagining a love-ecstasy in some hot exciting trance of deliciousness when alone by ourselves with what we feel in our first real love-night?”

“You mean, Eione darling, that when we’re in the act of making love we think more of our lover and more of his feelings than of our own?”

“The gods forbid!” cried the excited girl. “Did I hear you utter the word ‘more’? Of course we think ‘more’ of his feelings for us than of ours for him! Isn’t it the delicious heat of his feelings for us that rouses ours and that alone has the power to arouse ours?” Pontopereia perceived that she had indeed entered a sphere of philosophic analysis where more intimate experience than had yet been hers was required if she were to see the thing in proper perspective.