John Powys - Atlantis

Our friend Nisos, who still retained at the back of his consciousness an obstinate determination to be a real prophet before he died, and who was still alert to catch the most intimate ways of the mental rulers of our race, was deeply struck by the manner in which Spartika kept them all standing where they were, as if she had thrown a spell over each of them, while she delivered what evidently was a long-prepared and legally-involved discourse on the precise attitude she intended to take between the run-away goddess of that formidable “aegis”, whose very “tassels” could bring new life to the half-dead, and that Priest of the Mysteries who had so successfully usurped the position of Telemachos.

And suddenly Nisos noticed, and he felt that he had really made a step forward in his private self-education in the art of prophesying by having resisted Spartika’s priestess-spell sufficiently to be able to notice such a thing at all, that while with one hand she caressed Pegasos, preparatory to giving him the recognizable signal that would make him shake out his eagle wings and gather up his equine hooves beneath him, with the other hand she was active in helping some quite carefully shrouded human figure to edge itself off the horse’s back on to the deck where the others were now standing.

Nisos alone among all the onlookers was therefore spared the shock of surprise when two startling events occurred simultaneously: Pegasos suddenly spread his wings and rose into the air with Spartika leaning forward, and clinging to his mane with both hands. And like a living bundle of villainously dirty rags the figure of Enorches rolled upon the deck, and after a minute or two of absolutely solitary twisting and turning, rose to its feet, took up its wrappings and conveyed them to the rail of the ship.

Here, with what struck Nisos as a deadly curse upon the whole gamut of existence, this destructive Priest of the Mysteries flung his bundle of filthy rags into the water; and then, leaning over the edge himself, just as if he were hugging the thought of following his garments — and how had he managed to make them heavy enough to sink? — he plunged his thought, if nothing else, after what he had thrown.

And while the Priest of Eros and Dionysos was staring blindly after his own imaginary corpse, that corpse of living thought which he evidently pretended to himself he could see sinking down and down and down, till it found the slit at the bottom of the ocean which led to the slit at the bottom of the world which led to the slit at the bottom of the universe, Odysseus, whose outward nerves, equally with the imperturbable recesses of his being, were totally unaffected by any of these mental horrors, addressed a quiet request to Zeuks that he relate to him what had actually happened in Ithaca since the “Teras” set sail.

Nisos never forgot the scene that followed this natural demand. All the living persons on board save Akron the Master of the ship were gathered round the mast from which that pair of perfect sailors, Pontos and Proros from Skandeia in Kythara, had wisely lowered all but a small fold of the great sail.

Thus the “Teras”, or “Prodigy”, was running lightly, easily, freely, but comparatively slowly before a gentle and cool easterly wind; while the full moon, which was now moving with that motionless movement which is unlike any other movement in the universe, over, under, and straight through cloud after cloud, after cloud, after cloud, flooded the whole of what was visible, as well as — at least that was what came suddenly into Nisos’ head — the whole of what was invisible, with an enchantment that separated the real life of each separate living thing from the life imagined as its life by all other living things.

Nisos noted very definitely the extraordinary manner in which this flood of moonlight, which was as spiritual and mental as it was physical and emotional, held everybody at that crisis under such a spell that when the quiet voice of Odysseus called upon Zeuks to speak there came a strangely universal sigh from all present. The thoughts and feelings of Odysseus himself as he made this quiet request were more direct and simple, as they were more massively impenetrable and impervious to influence of any sort or kind, than his young follower Nisos could have believed possible.

Odysseus was prepared to humour and indulge to the limit all those who needed humouring and indulging if they were to be useful to him in the fulfilment of his purpose. He was also prepared to obliterate totally from his consideration, leaving them to go their way just as they liked, as he intended to go his way just as he liked, all those persons, creatures, tendencies, and forces, over whom or over which he had no control.

Unlike Zeuks as a man, and unlike Pegasos as an animal, there was, in spite of all the rumours to the contrary, no trustworthy evidence that any seed save that from the loins of Laertes was responsible for his begetting. What separated him from other mortal men was the adamantine weight and solid mass of what might be called Being, or Existence, or Entity, thickening out his Personality, which he put behind the purpose, whatever purpose it might be, upon which at the moment he was engaged.

The real essence of the man’s shrewdness, for it was more like the measured sagacity of some huge sea-lion than it was like the wily cunning of a fox or the crafty vigilance of a hungry hyaena or the distracted desperation of a solitary wolf, had a super-animal obstinacy in it which had the power of keeping intact, like some monumental idol, the achievement towards which he kept advancing.

He had done precisely that with the taking and looting of Troy. The sack of this royal city must have occupied the attention of his whole essential Being and this perfectly calm yet terrific preoccupation, nourished on the very marrow of his bones, was the thing that made it possible for him to indulge in the most outrageous lies and monstrous deceptions, without, as the saying is, turning a hair.

And now it was the same with this voyage above the waters under which lay the lost Atlantis. Odysseus had the power of “jollying along” every mortal person and thing, whether divine, or human, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, that could possibly, by any imaginable twist or turn of coaxing, cajoling, cozening, condensing, dilating, liquifying, vaporizing, euhemerizing, metamorphosing be made use of to help forward his individual purpose.

What would have needed the genius of Pontopereia’s progenitor himself, yes! even of the great Teiresias, to unravel, was the convoluted connection between the definite, concrete, actual, realistic achievement at which Odysseus was aiming and the glory, honour and fame he would get by this achievement.

It seems to the present chronicler, though it is only too likely that both Homer and Hesiod would take a different view, that the grape-juice of the glory of achieving, and the fir-tree sap of having achieved, when the achievement has been accomplished, are so inextricably intermingled that not all the Sirens, Harpies, Gorgons and Erinyes in the whole cosmos could unravel them.

To capture Troy, to return to Ithaca while Penelope still lived, to plunge down among the sunken temples and altars and streets and markets of drowned Atlantis, each one of these triumphs of the individual will over all that opposes it, had become so completely all that was, all that is, all that shall be for evermore, to the man Odysseus, that to separate these events from this man would be like separating the moon from its light or the water from the waves.

Thus it was when Odysseus required of Zeuks that he should speak, Zeuks himself seemed conscious of some special quality in the moonlight as well as conscious of the abnormally dramatic weight of what he had to tell, for it struck Nisos who was watching Zeuks closely that this latter gave a sort of half-shrug of his broad shoulders and although he didn’t remove his hands from his sides he opened them wide, with their palms exposed and their fingers widely extended, as if he were commencing to disclaim all possible responsibility for all conceivable events in this mad world.