Atlantis (14 page)

It struck the boy, as he jumped upon it, and jumped away from it, and ran off free, that that heavy stone looked as if it were
drinking
in, in that one second, enough air and sun to give it a new colour for a thousand years!

A few days after the momentous encounter between the oldest but far the most powerful of the Three Fates and the boy Nisos who had now reached the age of seventeen, the hero Odysseus awoke in the grey “wolf-light” of the pre-dawn, and, with nothing on but his blanket, his sandals, and his broad ox-hide belt, scrambled down the ladder and shuffled across the
intervening
space to the Dryad’s hollow tree.

It must be confessed that on this occasion the old king was the awakener of the old Dryad, and not the other way round. It gave Odysseus indeed something of a shock when, in that pallid “wolf-light”, with one hand on the soft-crumbling edge of the phantom-grey orifice, he peeped down upon the crumpled heap of faded substances, patches of linen, pieces of cloth, bits of bone, fragments of withered flesh, tangled twists of
lichen-coloured
female hair, in fact all the accessories and visible
appendages
of what might well have been an aged human female’s bed, including the old lady herself reposing within it.

The patches of linen and cloth were so pitiably the kind of objects that a wandering female beggar would have picked up
in her capricious travels that Odysseus drew back with that sort of instinctive reluctance to disconcert a sleeping female that any male householder might feel who finds such an one slumbering in one of his out-houses.

But, along with this feeling, another and a very different one came over him as once more he thrust his bowsprit beard and his massive almost bald skull over the edge of that crumbling orifice.

This was a much more intimate and personal feeling, though sex and sex-shyness entered into it. It was indeed the sort of self-restrained courtesy on the relations between the sexes such as Odysseus had learnt as a child from his mother, Anticleia, the sophisticated daughter of the crafty and mischievously
magnanimous
Autolycus. In an island-palace such as theirs, crowded with alien visitors from half the coasts of Hellas, some kind of
calculated
refinement in ordinary personal contact was essential; and it was the dignified reserve of such well-brought-up behaviour that the old man felt he had outraged by peering down upon this sleeping old woman, as she lay half-naked amid her
long-accumulated
bits of human finery like some moribund
forest-fungus
that had just managed to survive the winter.

“I must wake the old creature somehow,” he thought, “for if I’m to carry through this touchy business of appealing to the people in open ‘agora’ I
must
find out more about these strangers from Thebes who’ve got the daughter of Teiresias in their keeping, and the Dryad is the only one who can help me.”

He turned his pointed beard to the West without getting any inspiration. Then he turned it to the East and despatched across all the forests and mountains and seas and swamps and deserts that separated him from the land of the blameless Ethopians what he felt to be the swiftest kind of prayer. “What actually is it that I have done,” he asked himself, “to vex her as much as this?” And he drew a sigh that really came without any pretence from the very bottom of his being, “I’ve prayed to her as if my prayer were a wave, a wave that
must
bring her back. Yes, I’ve sent a wave to the Eastern edge of the world! It’s a wave of the
sea I’ve sent; only it’s not merely making a furrow of sea-water; it’s making a furrow of earth-mould, a furrow of broken branches, a furrow through all the forests of the Mainland till the
Mainland
itself reaches the edge of the earth!”

The old man’s pointed beard seemed to follow his thought as if it possessed the power of transforming itself into the wave its owner was imagining. “But what sort of thing is the edge of the earth,” Odysseus wondered; “and do the blameless Ethiopians peep over that edge as I peeped just now at the sleep of the Dryad?”

As he pondered on this, he saw in his mind a terrific chasm of absolute darkness along the fringe of which hung suspended gigantic smoke-blackened shapeless rocks, beneath which there was nothing but a hollow bottomless abyss. And then it seemed to the king, as he imagined himself lying on his stomach on one of these blackened rocks and staring down into the abyss, that he saw the sun coming up out of that unspeakable gulf.

“Do the blameless Ethiopians,” he wondered, “ever fall over that frightful edge?” He imagined the great goddess who was his friend, standing there in all her divine beauty, with the terrible Aegis-shield on her arm, its magic tassels dark with the darkness of the gulf of Erebos, while from her breastplate glared forth upon all who dared approach her the dreadful head of Medusa, the dead Gorgon, with the still living hair of its twining serpents feeding on the obscure mystery of its human fate.

Standing motionless the old man gazed for a long moment over that imaginary world’s edge. “She would be with me if she could,” he murmured aloud; and then shrugged his shoulders. “The gods with me or the gods against me,” he thought, “I shall do what I shall do; and what will come of it will be what will come of it!”

He then swung round but instead of leaning against the
uneven
edge of crumbling and rotten wood and peering down at the sleeping old creature as he had done at first, he now proceeded to call upon her by name; thus giving her an opportunity to arrange her appearance a little before presenting herself. There
was enough light to catch her expression fully and clearly when, after a couple of minutes delay, she appeared at the entrance to her hollow tree.

“What—is—it?” she groaned hoarsely. “Has Krateros
Naubolides
attacked the Palace?”

The old king smiled under cover of his beard. “Not yet, my friend, not
quite
yet. But no doubt if the Palace doesn’t take precautions and take them quickly too he
will
attack us before we know where we are. And
that,
my dear old friend, is precisely why I have come to disturb you so early. I feel ashamed of myself for breaking up your dream but there’s something I’m very anxious to know, and you are the only mortal or immortal, the only Nymph of land or sea, who can help me to attain this knowledge.”

Never in all his days had the crafty old wanderer seen such a look of unmitigated beatitude as rushed into the haggard face of Dryad! “O my dear child!” she cried, “I never thought the Olympians would give me a chance to”—Here the ancient creature had to struggle grimly with a rush of up-surging sobs—“to help the son of Laertes at a real crisis in his life. And I never would have presumed to push myself forward, whatever
knowledge
I might happen to have, without some sign, some invitation, some request, at least some permission, some opportunity, some door ajar. But now that you yourself have spoken, my dear lord, and have as the Persians say, stretched out your sceptre towards me, I can tell you all I know.”

“Tell me, old friend, tell me quick; so that I can act at once. It has become fatally clear to me at last, though it took many days to make me believe it, that my wise goddess and
ever-faithful
protectress must have hurried away in anger and
contempt
from our wretched and ignoble quarrels and from this ‘complicated world-crisis’ as our more pompous contemporaries will love to call it, though of course, as you and I know well, if every battle between Gods and Titans is a ‘world-crisis’ our poor old world has never been free from one. Yes, it is natural enough that she should do what our great Olympians have
always done at a crisis, gone off; gone off to recover her faith in the natural piety of humanity by enjoying for a while the innocent worship of these guileless races. And so, my dear friend, I’ll put to you without further delay, the question I should have implored our great Goddess to answer. It is this.

“I have been assured by Eurycleia that the maiden Eione who has lately come to serve in our household, and who is, she herself declared, when I found her in the Cave of the Naiads, a sister of our excellent herdsman Tis, has revealed in recent conversations the discovery of an extremely important secret.

“It was to reveal this discovery to her faithful brother Tis that Eione came here from the opposite end of Ithaca. Eurycleia indeed assures me that Moros, who is Eione’s grandfather and also the grandfather of our faithful Tis, has discovered that there is a formidable pair of foreigners, calling themselves Zenios and Okyrhöe, who have occupied for several years—nobody seems to know exactly for how long—a lonely and desolate farm-house on the extreme sea-verge of a rocky headland that has been deserted for generations and left to fall into ruin. There are springs of fresh water in that lonely place, there are remains of several walls and even the remnants of a few wooden fences but the ground that was once protected by these things has been so blighted by sea-winds that it is doubtful if any grain would grow there now; and, if it did, it is certain its chance of its surviving the
depredations
of beasts and birds would be small.

“But grand-dad Moros swore to Eione—you’re listening to me, aren’t you, old friend?—that this queer foreign couple came here from Thebes after the death of Cadmus and that they brought with them enough treasure to keep them for a hundred years. And grand-dad Moros declares further that he has spoken with both Zenios and Okyrhöe and has learnt from them that they have under their protection in their half-ruined dwelling a young maiden who is the living daughter of the great prophet Teiresias.

“Eione’s grand-dad swears he has been told by this couple, who have several times welcomed him to a lavish meal in their lonely
refuge, whose local name is Ornax, that this young daughter of Teiresias, who has inherited from her father a startling amount of his prophetic inspiration, declares that if Odysseus does not sail from Ithaca this Spring on his last voyage he will die miserably in his bed, yes! in his bed in his ancient palace, of an ignoble disease flung upon him out of the deep sea by his deadly enemy Poseidon. Unlike other youthful prophets this young girl has never once contradicted, never once altered by a single breath, this terrible prediction. Her protectors Zenios and Okyrhöe swore to old Moros again and again, so Eione tells Eurycleia, that if ever Teiresias’ daughter whose name, it seems is
Pontopereia
, came here, with this prophecy of hers, she would
inevitably
convince us all of its truth.”

The aged Dryad gave two or three jerky hops forward till she stood on a heap of last year’s dead oak-leaves. Here she became more erect than Odysseus had ever seen her; and raising her withered arms above her head she began clasping and unclasping her gnarled fingers tightly round the back of her neck.

“O my child, my child,” she murmured. “Say the words, only say the words, and I will help you to the limit of my power and—and——” Here the old lady broke off, under the strength of her emotion. “——and beyond the limit!” she added in a gasping whisper.

“You mean, my dear friend,” said Odysseus quietly, “that by the laws of decency and order that the world owes to Themis and to which Zeus himself bows, it would be improper for you, a mortal Nymph, to help me, a mortal man, before I had prayed and implored you to do so?”

The Dryad nodded furiously. “And we are further,” he went on, “since both of us are doomed to die, we are further obligated by the ineluctable courtesies of the cosmos to accept whatever comes of such an appeal for help made by a mortal man to a mortal Nymph? Isn’t that so, old friend?”

And once more the Dryad nodded; but this time resignedly rather than passionately.

“Well then, old sweetheart,” the crafty hero concluded, “I
do most earnestly beg your help in this difficult situation, but unluckily”—and it would have been clear enough to Penelope, had it been she who was just then listening to the old king, that this heroic courtesy in face of the unregulated chaos of life was extremely unpalatable to the old creature to whom it was offered—“it looks to me as if, since I am a man who cannot escape death, by reason of my association with the body of my mother, and since you are not one of these immortal nymphs of fountain and grove and cave and river but like myself are doomed to old age, it seems that even working together we shall find it no easy task to get out of this appalling dilemma: but easy or hard, I
will
lay it before you, old friend, exactly as it is.”

He made a sign with his hand towards a large mossy stone a few paces to the North of her decayed and crumbling tree-trunk; and here they both sat down. “I understand from Eurycleia,” he went on, “and she of course gets all her knowledge of the tricks of our enemies from”—but catching a look on his
companion’s
face that he knew only too well, Odysseus interrupted his appeal for help and his tale of difficulties by reminding the Dryad that the aged Eurycleia was being assisted in the palace by the boy Nisos who was the younger son of Krateros
Naubolides
, the chief enemy of their House, as well as by the
simple-minded
maiden Leipephile who was betrothed to Krateros’ elder son.

“You see, old friend, we over-praised warriors of the last war before the last, are reduced, when our hoards of golden loot are exhausted, to living upon our native acres with very scanty attendants and upon pretty meagre fare, and if among these attendants there are some like the girl Arsinöe, who are captives of our bow and our spear, most of them are no different from the ordinary retainers of any well-do-do landowner.”

What he had seen in his old friend’s face that led him into reminding her of all this was a dark-scaled shadow of coiling jealousy that at the mention of Eurycleia’s name rose like the crest of a venomous tree-toad into the Dryad’s eyes.

But he hurried on now, speaking much faster, and clearly
hoping by the mere rush of his words to drive back this moribund demon into its hiding-place amid the rotting roots of ancient hate.

“What I’ve decided to do now, my friend, is what I’ve been planning in the marrow of my bones for many and many a day; yes! you can guess what I mean. I’ve decided to call such an assembly of the men of Ithaca as there has not been for twenty years! To this assembly held in the agora, just as was the one about which they’ve so often told me when Telemachos made his great speech—and it’s ironical to think how absolutely impossible it is even to imagine his making a speech like that today—I’ve decided to appeal in person on behalf of my desire to hoist sail for the last time. I’ve decided to implore the people to help me finish the ship I’ve begun in the Cave of the Naiads. I’ve decided to implore them to furnish me with all the sail-cloth I need.