John Powys - Atlantis

Odysseus and Nisos, as well as Akron, became aware at this crucial moment of agitated and extremely jerky words being exchanged between Pontos and Proros as they tugged at the outstretched sail of the “Teras”. And, simultaneously with this dialogue between Pontos and Proros, Akron, the ship’s master, gave expression to a long deep-drawn weirdly hopeless whistle and clapt his other hand upon the mast, to which he now seemed to be clinging, as if expectant of some terrific shock.

Meanwhile the Club of Herakles whose private and personal name was either “Dokeesis”, “Seeming”, or “Prosdokia”, “Expectation”, translated the startling news he was getting from the Sixth Pillar for the benefit of the aged but absolutely normal human brain that now bent low above it. And the words from the Sixth Pillar that the Club of Herakles now repeated for the benefit of his King were terribly simple.

“The ship ‘Teras’ at this moment is running into extreme danger. The moon is full. And as she shines upon the water and as the water reflects her, the spirit of the Being at the ship’s bow is stirred within that Being as it remembers all the long nights it watched from the summit of the mountain Kunthorax the moon as a crescent, sharpening her horns of inversion, and rounding her horns of reversion, in creating and uncreating herself as the orb she is; and this stirring of whatever it may be of the spirit of this Being that still clings to its image is full of peril for the ship ‘Teras’, and indeed in a moment or two she may be shattered to pieces upon the Island of Wone.”

It was naturally only a weird murmuring that Nisos caught of all this; but there was something about the reverberation of the syllable “Wone” that struck his imagination as well as his ear; nor could he help being interested as well as faintly amused as he watched that familiar crack, in the very throat, as it were, of the great weapon the king was clutching, to see a beautiful moth flutter forth and fly straight to the troubled forehead of Enorches, who was now squatting on the deck, and, apparently absorbed in thought, was tearing into pieces a considerable handful of the particular kind of seaweed that has so many of those slippery little bladders growing out of it, which look as if they might explode at a touch.

Arrived at the forehead of Enorches which was such a prominent feature that it seemed to overhang the rest of the man’s face like a menacing avalanche, the moth fluttered restlessly up and down as if asking for permission to enter this recondite citadel of metaphysical mystery. Getting no apparent response it flew straight back to the club of Herakles.

And now at last our young would-be prophet was rewarded for the trouble he had taken on first catching the finger-nails of the Harpies at work on the Image of the Goddess of Order, the trouble to memorize a few words of the language of Insects.

“Moan for the Island of Wone!” was what Nisos heard. But the Fly heard more. So much did it hear that it straightway flew to the ear of Nisos to inform him and to force him to understand. This took some time. But when he did understand Nisos felt it to be his duty as a loyal adherent of the House of Odysseus to let that hero, who was already on his feet with one hand upon the shoulder of Akron and the other on the broad head of “Dokeesis”, know what he had learnt.

“When he sees,” the Fly had buzzed: and Nisos knew that it was of Enorches he was speaking, “that terrible pair from Arima, facing each other and arguing about the drowned city of Gom, he will reveal his secret.”

But it now came to pass that both Okyrhöe and Nausikaa sprang to their feet, while Akron, the master of the ship, uttering his commands to the brothers Pontos and Proros as if a great wave were at that moment hanging above their heads, joined with them to pull down the body of the sail, till it slapped the deck, as though it were slapping the back of some martial “hetairos”, or comrade-in-arms, at the start of a dangerous crisis.

It can be imagined how the brown moth awaited in their moving citadel within the “life-crack” of the club of Herakles the return of her friend the Fly. She had slipped out of his clutches to flutter to the help of Enorches so swiftly and unexpectedly, that he hadn’t been able to stop her. On his return therefore she greeted him with a protesting cry; pointing out how unfair it was that after scolding her for supporting the Priest of the Mysteries he yet should hasten to display just the same sort of partisan activity on behalf of those who were opposed to the Priest.

But the moth soon found that this particular moment was too tense with opposing currents of feeling to allow for their usual verbal dispute. “Hush, sweet fool!” cried the fly. And then, when she tried again: “Hold your tongue you flapperty twitter-thighs! Don’t you sec, little fool, that your friend the Priest is going to prick his own bubble?”

And indeed it was then that Nisos saw the Priest of the Mysteries leap up from the deck, throw away the seaweed with which he had been playing, and point with a pair of long bony arms at the flat, level, rocky Island that had suddenly risen out of the salt deep in front of them and now extended itself before the prow of the “Teras”.

“There they are!” cried the Priest hoarsely. “But it’s only another big ship with two tall masts!” screamed Okyrhöe. “It must be another ship! It shall be another ship! Those two things sticking up there, I say those two things there, shan’t be anything else than two thick ugly Cretan masts!”

But Odysseus had suddenly swung round and was now addressing a quiet figure whose head, emerging from the ladder leading to the lower deck, had been followed by a pair of easily-shrugged shoulders and an active mobile body, clad, for this special occasion it would almost seem, in the most conventional attire.

“Zeuks! Zeuks! My good friend! Do you mind coming here for a second!” cried the old hero; and in all this whirligig of a phantasmagoric pandemonium Nisos was so hit by the old man’s calm that while Zeuks hurried to their side he began scolding himself for the agitation he felt and for the fit of trembling that had seized him.

“Pray to Atropos, you immeasurable ass,” he muttered to himself. “Pray that you may never forget what you now see, or, by the gods! that it may be the last thing you do see, before we’re all drowned! … just a feeble old man with a pointed beard and this ‘Jack-O-Lanthorn’ on his head reducing the howling chaos of a wilderness of waters to something comparatively unimportant!”

“Can you catch,” the king was now asking Zeuks, “what this priest of Orpheus is saying as he watches us strike this island?”

And Zeuks answered: “He is confessing to you and to Eros and to Dionysos and to all those he has drawn after him that he has only used his praise of Love and Drink and his Priesthood of Orpheus and of the Mysteries to conceal his advocacy of universal Death. Life ought never, he says, to have started; and the sooner it sinks back into Nothingness the better for us all!”

For all his good seamanship the skipper of the “Teras” or “Prodigy” was at heart, much more than his second-in-command and much more than any of his crew, whether their business was with oar or with sail, a born carpenter.

Thus it was his, Akron’s, crouching back that was the first object to arrest the attention of our friend Nisos when, not without having to overcome several physical and even a few mental impediments, he reached the bottom of the hold and was separated from the bottom of the sea by nothing but salt water and a double layer of inch-thick planks.

“More ‘Kolla’ I tell you! I must have a lot more ‘Kolla!’” was the cry that issued from beneath that hunched-over spine. “Glue! More glue!” was in fact the word that in hoarsely groaned accents emerged from that massive head and hooked nose. These were bent so low between the pair of formidable hands now at work squeezing the stuff into place, that the image presented by the red flames beneath the cauldron of melting glue as they flickered over the kneeling man and over the group of dark-skinned boys who were helping him was really like that of a huge Raven, who, with its beak and claws working together, was engaged in the construction of the Gods alone knew what sort of impregnable nest.