John Powys - Atlantis

Halios lowered his great oar with rapid effectiveness as well as with exquisite nicety and helped Nisos to his feet while all their six eyes, joined now by the four eyes of Teknon and Klytos on the starboard side, turned simultaneously seaward, totally forgetting Pontopereia’s wild cry.

And what they saw was indeed a sufficient marvel to justify any creature’s obliviousness to all else. For on one side a flaming red sun sank behind the horizon; and on the other a pale full moon rose above the horizon.

What was indeed curious in this sudden possession by the sinking Sun and the rising Moon of the entire consciousness of four middle-aged men and one young man was the fact that each of the two celestial luminaries was only visible through one of the oar-holes on one of the two sides of the ship.

In each case the bulk of the hole was filled by its particular oar; and, since each of the heavenly bodies was of a circular shape, the golden segment of the moon, which encircled the oar of Euros on one side, and the blood-red segment of the sun which encircled the oar of Teknon on the other side, produced, when the eyes of all five men moved from one to the other, a visual effect so strange that it was doubtful if any of them would ever, though he lived as long as the Ithacan palace Dryad, see such a sight again. Each of the five men received the startlingness of this queer vision in a different way. Euros, for instance, felt pure annoyance over the advantage that the deck-hands who dealt with the ropes and the sail had over themselves in regard to what they could see, and this feeling was increased when first on one side and then on the other the oar-holes were not only lined and inlaid with bloody sickles and golden crescents but crossed and re-crossed by the obstinate and greedy flight of a small sea-bird, for whose feather-covered cranium these creaking orifices were associated neither with the sun nor with the moon, but purely and solely with the fragments of terrestial garbage which the oarsmen got rid of through them. As for Nisos, he played with the crazy and fantastic fancy that the whole universe was the body of the giant Atlas, that great Titan whom the Son of Saturn compelled to hold up the sky lest it fall upon the earth.

And Nisos imagined himself following his hero Odysseus in a winged ship that had the power of forcing its way through the body of the earth, as well as through the body of the sun, as well as through the body of the moon; but in his present fancy these three bodies were one body, the body that is to say of the entire universe, which was simply the body of Titan Atlas. His pet hawk was with him; and in his fancy he and his hawk kept flying through the whole body of Atlas and out on the other side: that is to say — into the void and back again into Atlas.

It was not long, however, before this Atlas fancy of our youthful prophet developed into a much bolder imagination; the idea namely, that he himself was a universe-devouring dragon who lived on the elements and fed on earth and fire and water as he hurled himself through the air from one universe to another, devouring each one in turn, while, out of his excrement, vast-trailing protoplasmic embryos of new universes were eternally coagulated afresh.

The queer trance into which all five men on the rowing-deck of the “Teras” had fallen may have been caused by the fact that in their awareness that the ship was sailing mid-way between sinking sun and rising moon each man felt he was being pitilessly pulled in opposite directions by two sanguinary opponents and that the end of it could only be that he would be torn into two halves. He could already feel himself becoming both these two half-selves which were now feebly drifting in opposite directions, their ragged edges raw and bloody while the flesh nearest those edges grew more and more gangrened. Was it perhaps that the screams of this sea-hawk, a bird that might easily have seemed to a prophetess, like that Nymph in the Italian cave, to be the return of a creature that had for hundreds of thousands of years been visiting and re-visiting the earth, stirred up in Nisos a desire to plunge deeper and deeper into the mystery of matter?

At any rate one thing was certainly clear, namely that the wood-work of the “Teras” herself was slowly being aroused to a sort of semi-human consciousness. Whether this would have a good effect on those who were voyaging in her, who could say?

But Nisos now set himself to scramble down to that lowest deck of all, from whence Pontopereia’s cry had ascended. It occurred to him, as he now rushed down, to wonder whether his delay in obeying her cry had hurt the feelings of the daughter of Teiresias, and as he climbed down the ladder, feeling slightly uncomfortable in his mind from remorse at not obeying her more quickly and slightly uncomfortable in his body from his crashing fall he cursed himself as a prize fool. “Where in the name of all the Harpies and Gorgons is the girl?” he muttered as he entered their cabin and found Tis’s sister asleep on their couch and not a sign of the other one. “Has she,” he thought, and as this fear shot through him he felt a queer sensation that he knew was different from any other feeling he had ever had before, “has she climbed up the ladder and thrown herself into the sea? And did she do this,” and he addressed his remark not to himself but to the sleeping figure of Eione, “because of something you said to her?”

He stood staring at the sleeping girl in the bed with what he pretended to himself was a look of fierce dramatic reproach. The sleeping girl would have been gratified however to observe that this fierce look was directed solely at her face and that upon her incredibly well-moulded limbs, as fully exposed to his view as her extremely rustic and almost grotesquely simple features, the look that was drawn out of him was of quite a different kind.

Different or not, all that Pontopereia knew about Nisos’ expression when she crept up silently behind him from her hiding-place among the hampers and nets and wicker cases and javelin-holders and quivers made of twisted root-fibres full of feathered arrows, which Odysseus had piled up outside his cabin and which — for the lowest deck of the “Teras” was anything but spacious — did more than just impinge upon the cabin of the two girls — all indeed that Pontopereia could possibly know of the feelings of Nisos as he stood staring at her enemy-friend and incorrigible rival was the simple fact that he did stand thus staring. And so when she spoke to him and he swung round to face her as if she had pricked him with one of Odysseus’s darts, the look that was exchanged between them was one of those looks that young men and young maids exchange now and again and that are as the primeval Welsh Prose Epic expresses it, “like the colour of lightning upon a sword-blade”.

But it was at this moment that Odysseus himself appeared on the scene, emerging from his solitary cabin with bare feet, and entirely naked save for the blanket he had wrapped round him and the extraordinary Helmet of Proteus which he had just clapped on his head.

“I want one of you,” he whispered hoarsely, “to come here a second!”

“What in the name of Aidoneus,” thought Nisos, “is in the king’s mind?”

But Eione, who had already leapt from her couch so quickly that the imprint left by her head on the pillow contained a twisted couple of tiny fair hairs held together by an infinitesimal flake of cinder-dust that must have adhered to them when she was recently heating water for her bath, had not lived all her life with old Morus for nothing. She would naturally divine the sort of thing that the practical cunning of a wily old man would urge him to do at a crisis like this. She had therefore, in reading the mind of Odysseus, an advantage over both the daughter of a prophet and the young aspirant to be himself a prophet.