John Powys - Atlantis

So with a view to changing the subject she changed her physical position and sliding both her own feet to the floor she edged herself along the side of the bed, till bending down above her friend she was able to smooth the girl’s fair hair from her forehead.

“You haven’t half told me, you know, what happened after you rode off with Arcadian Pan and with Eurybia and Echidna. Where on earth did those two leave you? What happened to the horse with the flowing mane? Did Pan himself go down under the waves when you got to the place where the land of Atlantis had been drowned?”

Before beginning any answer to all this Eione thrust her friend’s hand away. “Don’t do that! It makes me nervous! It’s what Thrasonika our school-teacher used to do.”

Pontopereia hurriedly withdrew her hand. She had received such a shock that, hardly aware of what she was doing, she licked the longest finger of the hand that had not been to blame and with it gently stroked the erring hand as if to cure it of its impetuosity.

“I can tell you of course,” went on Eione, seized by a sudden gust of confidential school-girlishness, “because you weren’t at school in Ithaca. But it was because of Thrasonica going on stroking her hair that Amaryllis Leporides drowned herself.”

Pontopereia’s face expressed all the astonishment she felt, though by no means all the moral indignation she felt. Eione nodded vigorously. “Nobody but the three youngest of us know,” she repeated; throwing into her tone the implication that in Ithaca a girl’s sophistication decreased rather than increased as she grew up.

And indeed this was a view of insular as compared with continental education which struck Pontopereia as entirely correct.

“Nisos told me,” announced Pontopereia, standing on her feet now, and sufficiently disturbed by the rebuff Eione had given her to hit back — woman versus woman — by dragging in Nisos, “that the great Epic Poem about the Beginning of All Things by the Ruler of Atlantis brings in the little island where Arcadian Pan must have given you the Helmet of Proteus and told Pegasos to carry you to Odysseus! But Nisos tells me this little island, which he says is called ‘Wone’ and must be pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘tone’ is really the top of the tallest of the mountains of drowned Atlantis, a mountain which used to be called Kunthorax and whose foot-hills rose from a vast fir-forest which was only a couple of days’ ride from the great city of Gom which was — and I suppose still is, only it’s under the water — the capital of Atlantis.”

Eione had listened to all this with her eyes tightly shut and her whole face quiescent, as if, though perhaps not actually asleep, the treatment of this crucial subject by her philosophic friend had a somnolent effect upon her. But she was compelled to open her eyes, and open them pretty wide too, when Pontopereia seized the pole, with which they regulated the sky-light to the deck above, the sky-light from which came most of their air and, when they hadn’t lit their oil-lamp, all their light, and opening it wider than they had ever done before, shouted in a shrill voice: “Is Nisos Naubolides up there? If he is, for the sake of all the gods tell him to come down here for a moment!”

So loudly did the youthful voice of the daughter of Teiresias ring through the whole interior of the “Teras” that it crossed the mind of Odysseus as he swung himself backwards and forwards in his cabin that it was possible that one of these two young creatures might have tried to put an end to the life of the other; and vaguely endeavouring to allow this imaginary supposition its full weight the old adventurer caused his hammock of small cords to swing rhythmically backwards and forwards to a sort of musical argument in favour of the advantage of being alive compared with the advantage of being dead.

The four oarsmen who while so fresh a wind filled the great sail were able to take their pleasure with their special dice or “astragaloi”, and had just decided that until supper-time they would make the game more lively by making it less individualistic, turning it in fact into a battle between the starboard and larboard oarsmen of the “Teras”, with Teknon and Klytos on the starboard side, and Euros and Halios on the larboard or port side; and it was this new and more communal game that was broken up by Pontopereia’s cry.

Having put its violent lid upon the dicing of these astragoloi-players the girl’s quivering cry rang from end to end of the top-most deck where Proros and Pontos, who were managing the ropes which held the great bulging sail upon whose one, taut, open curve their speed and safety of their speed entirely depended, repeated the cry at once, and not content with repeating it, they both imitated it, and did this so successfully that the first officer, Thon, who by general consent rather than by professional succession had become the outlookman of the “Teras”, ransacked the sea’s surface with his eyes in search of some broken-winged siren before he made it known to Akron the ship’s master, that the young man to whom that same skipper was courteously listening was wanted below.

“Better go down at once, my boy! There’s some serious trouble among your women-folk! I pray it’s between those young ones, and not between those older ones! Down with you, my son! Down with you! No! no! Don’t wait a second, lad ! These troubles inside the ship are far more serious than anything that goes on in the City of Gom or at the top of Kunthorax; or on the Island of Wone. Oh, you’ll settle this trouble, my lad, whatever it is! You’ve got the look of an ambassador. Down with you now; and quick about it!”

But it was several minutes before Nisos, buoyed up by feeling that it was especially exciting to be called upon to decide a quarrel between the daughter of Teiresias and the sister of Tis, managed to reach even the second deck of the “Teras”; and it was perhaps just because he kept telling himself that it was so quaint that a son of Krateros and Pandea should be the one destined by Atropos to hold these uncertain scales that he didn’t clamber down the ship’s first ladder with more headlong speed.

The ladder from the second deck to the third deck was at the stern of the vessel, whereas the one he had just descended was near the prow and the astonishing neck, scaled, feathered, wrinkled, infundibular, that belonged to the figure-head of the “Teras”, the figure-head which so far he had only seen from the rear but which Akron assured him, when seen from the front, represented the most intellectual visage ever carved out of any substance upon earth by flint or stone or bronze or iron and was the face of “the unknown ruler” of Atlantis. Thus in order to reach the ladder to the lowest deck of the “Teras” where were the three cabins occupied at present by Nausikaa and Okyrhöe, by Eione and Pontopereia, and by Odysseus himself, Nisos had to step over the big round oars, either of Teknon and Klytos on the starboard side, or of Euros and Halios on the port side; and he selected the latter.

He did this, as we so often say, “for a trivial reason” but as we all, especially those of us who are historians, know only too well, reasons like this always appear to everybody trivial before the result is revealed, and the event which is the result monumentalized, made clear to all. His “trivial reason” was that the oarsman Euros had that deep indentation behind his skull and above his neck, which certain experiences had taught our young prophet was an infallible sign of refinement and of quite special sensitivity.

Greeting Euros therefore with diffidence and respect and half-turning to address the man’s up-tilted face as he paused, before stepping over the oar of Halios he continued to see, even while glancing into the man’s eyes, that particular indentation at the back of his head which he held in such high regard, while behind it as if it were a symbol of all that was delicate and vulnerable in humanity, as opposed to all that was inhuman in Nature, rolled the enormous weight of waters. But it is dangerous, as his hero Odysseus could have told him, to philosophize too minutely when you are acting with a rush: and his pause at that second made him trip up so blindly over Halios’ oar that down he came with a crash, sprawling absurdly on the carefully scrubbed deck, and uttering a blasphemous curse on the vindictive ways of Poseidon.