John Powys - Atlantis

“When this ship first entered the harbour of Ithaca was there not one single soul who saw her? When she was anchored in the harbour of Ithaca did no barge or boat or canoe or raft pass in front of her? Did no swimmer, swimming round her, look up at that face? Why haven’t I asked this question of Odysseus, of Zeuks, of Princess Nausikaa herself to whom the ship belongs? There is certainly something queer about all this.”

Nisos shuffled his uncomfortable body a little further still to the rear, until his back was pressed against the actual jet-black cross-bar of the ship’s stern, in which position every time Eumolpos of Kephallenia gave the rudder the particular push that swung the “Teras” prow to the North our friend’s thigh received something of a shock.

At one point indeed Eumolpos became aware of some sort of obstacle at the extreme reach of his helm’s thrust, and turning his head for, as a man of good stock in Kephallenia, he was naturally courteous, he murmured an apology.

“O that’s all right!” cried our friend. “It’s only that I’m so unused to a ship. All I can do is to follow the master around.”

But his word with the helmsman gave him the required incentive to put to Akron the question that was seething in his mind.

“By the way, Master, I suppose you’ve often examined the face of your ship’s figure-head? Does it look like the face of a great philosopher, or like the face of a great poet, or like the face of a great scientist?”

Akron didn’t even turn his head. “If I answered him properly you might never be able, aye, Eumolpos, to steer a ship again, all your days? But come along, Nisos! You said just now you were following me around! Well, I’ve got a bit of a job for you now.”

Nisos disengaged himself from his cramped observation-post at the extreme stern of the “Teras” and followed Akron forward.

“No, seriously, my dear boy,” the skipper said quietly, as they approached Odysseus, “it would never have done to start on all that business just then. The truth of it is that there’s something funny about the whole thing.” He grasped Nisos by the arm and they stood side by side for a minute, both of them watching, while he spoke, the wild half-naked figure of Enorches, the Priest, who was clearly haranguing the old king about something; something that made it necessary for Odysseus to sit down again on his coiled ropes.

“He wants me,” said Akron, “to put the Island of Wone well behind us before night. His hope is that a cloud may cover up this confounded Moon before dawn and leave us free to get a good vision of the special stars by which he wants us to sail or to row — whichever may be necessary— due West. No, my dear boy, we of the ‘Teras’ have a natural instinct against talking about that matter of which you enquired just now; I mean about the face of our Figure-Head. The truth of it is there has been ‘borne in upon us’, as one of us called it the other night, an absolute conviction that only someone who in everything else was so simple, so much of an innocent that people felt they must treat him as if he were a vegetable or an animal or a fish of some kind or an inanimate thing, would be able to face that face without ‘getting’, as we say, ‘the horrors’.

“If you were such an animal-like innocent I’d let you, if we had our anchor out, swim backwards and forward in front of our bows till you could look face to face at this enemy of the Olympians; but you my dear boy are anything but an innocent! On the contrary in most things you’re a damned lot cleverer than I am or any of the rest of us who run this old ship.”

“What kind of horrors would come upon anyone who wasn’t an innocent, and who dared to face the face?”

“Do you want a straight answer, lad?”

“Of course.”

“Well, as it happens, I, who now am talking with you, can tell you of one case.”

“O quick, quick, captain! Tell me, before that face, scaring the gulls, gets round the next rock!”

The master didn’t turn his eyes away from their steadily advancing mast, with all its ropes in order, though without a sail, but as he spoke it was clear to Nisos that ninety per cent of his consciousness was at that moment in his words.

“It was the officer I had before we got Thuon. Poor old Thuon can’t bear even to look at the thing’s neck from this side after what he’s been told. The man’s name was Teterix and he came from Zante and it was while I let them cast anchor for a while to catch some fish that this randy fool of a Zante-man began playing his games and swimming round the prow. I’d told him he weren’t to do it, but he wanted to show off to the others; so as he swam he not only stared at the face but made faces at the face: and, in no time at all, there he was, climbing up on deck and dancing about in front of us with all his fingers pointing at his head. And such was the power of the horror on him that he forced us to see him as he saw himself and as he felt himself ; that is to say with no human head at all, but with a raw bleeding neck out of which three bloated worms hung down who swayed to and fro and kept turning and twisting round.

“After this had gone on for several minutes the unfortunate Zante-man uttered one last piercing shriek, ran to the side of the ship and dived into the sea. So strong was the wretch’s conviction that for a neck he had nothing but a gaping bloody hole with three bloated worms hanging out of it that it infected most of us who watched his dive; so that what we saw when he disappeared — and nothing of him ever reappeared — was a pool of blood on the water, with what looked like a blur of red worms squirming about within it.”

“And you really and truly saw all that?”

“I really and truly saw all that,” replied Akron.

Then it was that they both saw Odysseus beckoning to them and when they reached him they were, for the twentieth time that eventful evening, impressed to the depths of their souls by the old wanderer’s self-control.

The excited priest of Orpheus, now entirely naked, was waving his long thin white arms, on which there was not a single black hair and which the moon seemed determined to turn to ivory. The madman was calling upon the whole universe to join him in his desperate incantation to Nothingness!

Not all the words of the priest’s incantation reached Nisos; but those that did so sounded to him somewhat like this:

“Nothing! O Nothing! Thou god of all gods, thou creator of Silence!

God of all gods, and creator of Silence, thy daughter!

Nothing! O holy Nothing! O sacred Nothing, and Silence!

Swallow, great Nothing, all else but thyself and thy daughter!

Swallow air, swallow water, swallow fire, swallow earth and her children!

Swallow land, swallow sea, swallow all that in land and sea dwelleth!

Let the whole world be empty of all but thyself and thy daughter

Empty of all but thyself and thy daughter and darling!

Let nothing move in the height or the depth or the length or the breadth,

Save only thyself, great Nothing, thyself and thy daughter,

Only thyself and Silence, thy daughter and darling.

Let nothing sound in the earth or the air or the water or fire;

Let the whole world be empty of all but thyself and thy daughter,

All but thyself and Silence thy daughter and darling.”

Nisos expected that Odysseus would react in some definite way to this nihilistic incantation; but he behaved as if he had not heard a word of what the Priest had been chanting, and as soon as Enorches realized that he was totally alone in his worship of Non-Existence he clung to the mast and became absolutely silent and still.

Meanwhile Odysseus had begun a long geological rigmarole on the chemical constituents of various kinds of scoriae substance; and he did this, Nisos decided, so as to reduce Enorches to the Nothingness he worshipped.