Atlantis (13 page)

And the echo of the voice of Atropos had the peculiarity of entering into all the substances that carried it forward, as well as using them to help it on its way towards the ultimate void. The echo entered now into the fluttering insects who were sucking the Nectar from those tiny flowers. It entered into the burning sun above those three immortals and above this one mortal just as it entered into the heart of the Lykophos-Mound.

The curious thing was that the boy accompanied his final terrific effort with his human hands and feet against the two monsters by a low-murmured, very rapidly enunciated, rational argument, defending his own and his mother’s friendly attitude towards the old king of Ithaca compared with the hostile one of his father Krateros and his brother Agelaos.

It was indeed only when he reached the culmination of this rapidly murmured, rational, and almost legal argument, with which he was punctuating, so to speak, his violent physical struggles, that he suddenly discovered that the battle had been won and that the Fury and the Gorgon had vanished. In his relief at this consummation, just when the throes of the struggle had become more than he could bear, the boy lost consciousness.

When he recovered he found that Atropos also was gone and that it required so much effort to leave the Lykophos-Mound and
to drag himself up the rest of the hill that all that had passed grew steadily more blurred and more indistinct. One thing alone limned itself clearly on his mind, like a reflected image in water amid a crowd of globular bubbles, and that was some reference made, either by himself or by the oldest of the Fates, to a certain woven stuff.

This stuff he kept visualizing; but the shock to his nerves of what he had been through had made him completely forget its name. He remembered that the whole matter of this stuff had to do with some difficulty in procuring it and some difficulty with regard to its fabrication. He could see its colour. He could sense the feel of its substance, but its name and its use, though both of these had been familiar to him from his infancy, he had completely forgotten.

The shock he had received from the sight of those two monstrous creatures had left a queer blackness, a gaping, yawning, bleeding chasm in the compact body of his natural and orderly memories.

“I am myself,” he kept repeating as he climbed the hill. “Nisos is Nisos; and Nisos is clever; and Nisos is going to be the prophet of those who are strong and healthy but who have been hit in some way—hit as I am now!—and who need a prophet rather different from former prophets.”

And then in a flash it all came back to him and the gap in his memory was filled. “Othonia” was the word; and sail-cloth was the stuff. Atropos had told him—so he had had it from the Mouth of Necessity Itself—that Zeus, alone on the summit of Mount Gargaros, deprived of his thunder-bolts and separated from Hera his Queen, had decided to unite all the will-power and wisdom he possessed with the will-power and wisdom possessed by Themis, the goddess of what was orderly and seemly, and with whatever Atropos herself, the oldest of the Fates, she who
was
Fate Itself, decided might be for the best.

And what was “for the best”, here and now in Ithaca, was that Odysseus their lord and king should hoist sail again and depart for the Isles of the Blessed whither Menelaos, the brother of Agamemnon, had already sailed.

So
that
was it! And the little black spot in his rattled brain was no more than “othonia”, a rag of sail-cloth, a woven wisp of crumpled weed, which had been completely obliterated, swept forth, cast away, blotted out from his terrestrial brain by the stench of those loathsome immortals! Othonia! Othonia! Othonia! Sails! Sails! Sails!
Sails
for whatever ship Odysseus can build, Sails for whatever crew Odysseus can find, to carry him on his last voyage across the sea!

It was in this first blush of his relief at the recovery of his memory that Nisos Naubolides suddenly felt himself seized by the wrist. He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not noticed the man approaching him; but there at his side was the mysterious Priest of Orpheus.
“COME!”
was all the man said.

Nisos, who felt that if he could only avoid looking at the fellow’s face he could cope with him perfectly, tried to pull his arm away. But this he found he couldn’t do. And how queer it was that he couldn’t look at him! Only an hour ago he had looked into the face of Euryale, the Gorgon, without being turned to stone. In the eyes of Fate Itself he had been finding comfort; but not with a secretive, intrusive wretch who wasn’t even a priest of Dionysus, or of Demeter, or of Persephone or of the authentic Mysteries of Eleusis, but only of these
newfangled
, sanctimonious, priest-invented, fabulous Mysteries, of an Orpheus who himself was more of a fantastic poet than a hero or demigod, he felt entirely paralysed.

So here was he, Nisos Naubolides, the favoured one of the oldest of the Fates, one who was fated to use his cleverness, when he became a man, to grand prophetic effect, here was he, for some mad, mystical, demoniac reason, unable even to glance at the face of this crafty intruder! “Well,” the boy said to himself, “I know I heard old Damnos Geraios, Leipephile’s grand-dad, tell mother once that there were certain papyri which absorb certain pigments and others that cannot absorb them. So I suppose my particular kind of ‘cleverness’, though it may have Fate Itself on its side, would be entirely wasted on this man.”

By this time the man in question had conducted him to a sinister-looking square building, “
Go
in
there
and
learn
reverence
!
” was all he said as he pushed him in and barred the door behind him.

Nisos was so relieved at being liberated from the man’s touch, and from the nearness of a face he felt he couldn’t bring himself even to glance at, that the first thing he did was to clap his hands. “Well!” he said to himself, “as long as I don’t have
that
filthy sod hanging around, I don’t care what happens!”

What had happened was indeed a curious experience for a young prince of the House of Naubolides. He found himself
enclosed
in an extremely small and absolutely square cell that was nakedly bare from the centre of its ceiling to the centre of its floor. Ceiling, walls, floor, were all of the same stone and this stone was of a most unusual colour. He tried in vain to think of any object he knew that was of this peculiar colour. The nearest he could get to it was a thunder-cloud he had once seen when he was very little reflected in a muddle of rain-water near the cow-sheds of his home.

He stood on one leg for a second which was a custom of his when dumbfounded. But he soon brought his foot down again and remained with his heels together and his eyes fixed on things far beyond the queer-coloured walls that surrounded him.

The point he was considering now was simply this. Why should his natural awe and pious dread in the presence of the oldest of the Fates have produced in him no shrinking at all but on the contrary an indignant protectiveness and an
unbounded
respect, while the mere touch of this Priest of Orpheus, not to speak of the appalling disgust roused by the thought of seeing his face, made him shiver all over? Without having to separate either of his heels again, remove either of his feet from that weirdly coloured stone floor, Nisos decided that what really made the difference was that Atropos, like the Goddess Athene, had been well known to him from babyhood. His cradle so to speak had been rocked to the rhythm of the Three Fates and to the Rhythm of Athene’s name. He didn’t put it to himself in
those exact words; but that was the substance of what he now thought.

But there was more in it than that. There was something else that was much harder to put into words, whether only to clear it up for himself, or to explain it, if he had to explain it later, to his mother. The oldest of the Fates was in reality much more like himself than this terrible priest of
none
knew
what.
She fought for her friends as he did. She felt pity for that poor old Zeus left lonely on the peak of Gargaros without his thunder-bolts, just as, if he ever thought of the All-Father at all, he would have felt pity himself.

And the same with Pallas Athene. She was one for telling huge palpable lies. And he had to do that himself.
That
was necessary in life’s ups and downs. He had to do it every day! When he became the Prophet of the strong and healthy who have been hurt and hit in some way, he would show them the importance of being clever! But when this Priest talked of reverence it was clear he meant something quite different from proper piety.

Did these “Orphic Mysteries” which this weird new kind of Priest celebrated mean some blasphemous and horrible change in the proper manner of worship? Once again Nisos lifted up his right foot and stood on one leg thinking hard, like a young sand-piper pretending to be a heron.

“This must be,” he said to himself, “one of those moments in the life of a clever prophet when he has to think about thinking. What the teachers at School say is always: ‘Think, Nisos! Think, Kasi! Think, Agelaos!’ But if you’re going to be a prophet—you’ve got to do more than think. Any fool can think. You’ve got to think about thinking.”

Finding however that the position in which a person thinks about thinking has an appreciable effect on his thought Nisos returned his right foot to that queerly-coloured floor with some violence. “We can’t think properly about thinking,” he thought, “without bringing in ourselves. Atropos has to be Fate
unswerving
or she cannot think. Athene has to be the natural daughter of Zeus’ brain or
she
cannot think. Was this new kind
of priest not thinking of himself at all but, busy in the
establishment
of some Secret Society, or Holy Cause, or Community Conspiracy, compared with whose dark and inhuman and impersonal purpose, he himself, the man Enorches, was as nothing?

“When I think,” the embryo prophet now told himself, “I think like Athene and like Atropos and like the old Odysseus, from myself outwards. But I have a revolting suspicion that, when this horrible Orpheus-man thinks, he thinks towards himself inwards.”

It may have been partly due to the queerly-coloured
stone-work
of this square cell, but our young friend’s mind at this point turned, as if automatically, to an interior vision of those two letters carved upon the oldest Pillar in the Porch of the Palace. He felt, as he thought of those letters, as if they were engraved upon the substance of his own soul.

“From now on,” he told himself, “I shall dodge, avoid, and undermine in every way I possibly can, these infernal ‘Mysteries of Orpheus’.” Having decided this point the youthful challenger looked round him more carefully than he had done before. Yes, this chamber into which that man had thrust him was certainly a naked one! It was as if he were imprisoned inside a hard, square, semi-precious stone: a stone that,
with
him
inside,
might have been worn by some tremendous titanic giant, a giant as big as Atlas who was reported to hold up the sky.

The boy had been thinking too hard, thinking with a
cleverness
that had become a strain. His nerves now began to behave as if they might in a little while make the sound of
popping
, after the manner of certain seed-pods. In pure nervousness he began to do funny things. He went up to the wall directly under a little square hole, that let in all the light the place had, and began to scrabble at it with his nails; at nothing in
particular
, just at the wall.

But this silliness was brought to an end by his wondering if it were possible that there might be—but this was probably only a little less silly—any scratches on these walls that resembled
that “U” and that “H” on the base of the Pillar in the
Palace-Porch
. “Apparently,” he thought, as he looked carefully about him, “to escape in soul from a Priest of Orpheus is easier than to escape in body!”

But he set himself the task of examining his prison in the manner in which he fancied his old friend, Myos the fly, would have examined it if
he
had been the one to show scant reverence to Orpheus. In his nervous excitement Nisos almost laughed aloud when he imagined Pyraust, the moth-girl, asking Myos to tell her who Orpheus was, and the fly describing him to the moth as the first original spider.

But he now meticulously examined every one of these four walls dutifully thanking as he did so the sky-god Ouranos, Zeus’ grandfather, for the light that came from a small half-a-foot-square window near the top of one of them. He was growing nervous again now. With his birthday in sight, for he would be seventeen in a few days, he felt he must hurry up with his mental
development
if he were to be recognized by the whole Island as the Prophet to the strong by the time his brother, duly married to Leipephile Pheresides, had inherited their father’s claim to be king in succession to Odysseus or even—here he looked round in real apprehension now; for where, in the name of Zeus, was the door through which he’d been thrust into this place?—even
instead
of
Odysseus!

“Oh popoi!” he groaned. “Was there ever such a fool as I am? Of course it’s to stop Odysseus from hoisting sail like a real king and to keep him petering out in his palace till he dies of idleness, or what Mummy calls ‘malakia’ or some such word, that Dad and Agelaos have been hiding up for years all the ‘othonia’ or sail-cloth they can get hold of!

“If ever,” Nisos thought, “there has been a fool in Ithaca I am that fool!” But he had no sooner “given himself to the crows”, as the island saying had it, as the greatest fool among all the “kasis” or class-mates of his age from coast to coast, than he suddenly become certain he
had
caught sight of the Pillar’s “U” and “H”.

Madly he rushed towards those scratches and pressed against them with both his bare hands. By Zeus, the Pillar
had
saved him! A great stone in the wall moved outwards, fell silently on a bed of moss outside, and lay there motionless. In the sun that stone took to itself a completely different colour from the one that had characterized it within those walls.