Atlantis (22 page)

“Under these conditions, as you may easily imagine, O great lion-slaying Nemean Club, to still possess a messenger like Iris is an indescribable relief, and you may be sure that Queen Hera makes the most of it, and despatches the luckless Iris on the most difficult quests. For example I happen to know that at this very moment this youthful immortal is wandering through the uttermost lands of the blameless Ethiopians searching for Pallas Athene.

“You ask me what I learn from the elements about Hermes since he no longer serves the Father of Gods and Men? Well, old companion of so many years, you who along with me have seen so many strange faces in our corridor to the palace of the king, what I have gathered from over-hearing these
communications
between the elements, which of course simply means the contact of air with water, water with fire, fire with earth, is so startling that I myself have difficulty in believing it. But what I’ve learnt I’ll tell you at once, old friend, if my voice still reaches you, as your un-winged Pegasos and your un-maned Arion whirl you to the end of the isle; and it is this.

“All the spirits of all the mortals who ever lived on earth have defied Aidoneus; and, following the ghost of Teiresias, have broken loose from Hades and are wandering at large over the
whole earth. It is now Persephone who is searching for her mother, searching frantically, searching desperately for her, through all their familiar abodes, through all their ancient haunts, by every public way, along every well-known river.

“Hast thou seen my mother?” is her cry. “Hast thou seen a stately woman with a mantle over her head and a staff in her hand?”

“But the most astonishing part of the news the elements have brought me is this. By the advice of Hermes, who it appears has been down to Hades to find the mysterious and awful Aidoneus who carried off Persephone and made her swallow those
honey-sweet
seeds of the fatal pomegranate, this dark ruler of a deserted Hades has summoned his brother Poseidon to
meet him at the utmost limit of the West where the Titan Atlas, as a punishment for opposing Zeus, holds up the sky.

“Here Aidoneus and Poseidon together may be able to persuade the Son of Kronos to join them in leaving Olympos to Hera and in restoring and building up again the shattered order of the world; in forcing the ghosts of the dead back to Hades, the Titans back to their punishment in Tartaros, and with the help of Atropos, the oldest of the Fates, getting both Eros and Dionysos under such complete control that the entire——”

It was at this crucial moment that the two insects within the bosom of the club of Herakles had to clutch each other in sheer panic. The whole cortège had stopped with a terrific jerk. There was a ghastly sound of eight equine hooves scraping against some flinty floor of rock.

In the stress of this shock the two wounded animals, Pegasos still bleeding where his lost wing had been torn out, and Arion still switching and bleeding where he had lost half his mane, drew up side by side. Odysseus as he slid down to the ground, not without a certain grim satisfaction, shifted his grasp from the reins to the bridle of Arion, while Nisos, leaving to Zeuks all real responsibility for the wounded Pegasos, pushed the treasure-sack as well as he could to the part of the creature’s back that was still unhurt.

As for Zeuks, he set himself to make a timely use of the healing properties of human saliva. He spat exhaustively upon the raw place in the creature’s side from which the wing had been plucked, and when he had finished doing this he proceeded to blow upon the glittering bubbles of his own spittle until the whole surface of the creature’s side was as iridescent as if the luckless Iris herself, exhausted by her pursuit of Athene among the blameless Ethiopians, had dissolved in fatigue upon his back.

Nisos glanced quickly round to see if the old King were using
his
spittle as balm for Arion’s shoulder from which Enorches had torn at least half of that flowing mane; but in place of anything of that sort Odysseus was leaning his own elbow upon Arion’s back together with the Nemean Club while he investigated the cause of this abrupt halt of their divine steeds.

Nisos had only to follow the tilt forward of the old king’s beard to share his discovery, and they both faced the interrupter of their ride with cautious wonder. It was at a wild, shaggy, goat-legged, goat-horned, and yet human-shaped figure lying fast asleep in the shadow of a great rock that the old man and the boy now gazed in astonishment.

And then Nisos suddenly realized that there was another figure in their path, and one with which he was already acquainted. This second figure was nobody else but the eldest of the Three Fates, the powerful Atropos herself.

Then once more the boy faced her, the same frail woman, resting her back just as she had done before against the trunk of a
spruce-fir
that grew upon the very rock beneath which the sleeping Goat-foot lay. Unlike this goat-horned, goat-legged figure, however, the little old woman with her back to the tree was
wide-awake
; nor did the tree against which she was resting break the glare of the afternoon sun for her in the manner in which the rock did for the Being below her.

“O! I never thought——” gasped Nisos the moment he met the eyes of this little old woman.

“No, you never thought, my boy, did you, that you and old Atropos would meet again so soon! In truth I never expected
it myself. You see,” she went on, keeping her eyes fixed on the boy and completely disregarding both Odysseus and Zeuks, “we Fates are not—I wish indeed we were!—the sole arbiters of destiny in this mad world. It was, for example, only in very vague shape that we Three foresaw all that’s happening upon the earth today.

“But when this confusion ends, for confusion by its inherent nature cannot last, neither we three, nor the goddess Themis, whose image the Harpies broke, no, nor even the great Son of crooked-counselling Kronos, himself, will be the only arbiters of what happens. There will still remain, my dear boy, those two great Powers, and I am not talking of Eros or Dionysos, whom we all, plants and trees and beasts and birds, and fishes and reptiles and worms and insects and men and gods must obey, Necessity and Chance.”

The eyes of Atropos seemed to hold behind them, when she had done speaking, so much more than the half-named body of a little, fleshless, shrivelled, skinny old woman, that Nisos
continued
to stare in petrified awe into their singular depths.

The sensation they gave him was that the sky above Ithaca and indeed above all the isles in all the bays and seas and straits and gulfs of the land of the Achaeans, together with the interiorly receding depths of all that land itself, the depths, in fact, of all the various solid elements that composed the rocks and sand and earth and soil of which that land was composed, had that pair of eyes
as
their
eyes
,
and were even now, those remotenesses of sky beyond limit, and those staggering recessions of terrestrial matter beyond limit, gazing at him in a positively ghastly intensity while they informed him that the real deciders of his fate and of the fate of the old hero at his side, and of the fate of Eione, the ideal loveliness of whose perfect form had been for him the living background of the whole of this wild ride, were not the Fates nor the Gods nor the sublime obstinacy and
cunning
of Odysseus, but, as Atropos herself had just admitted, the inescapable pressure of pitiless Necessity and the motiveless antics of causeless Chance.

The tension, as they thus met once again, between the heart of Nisos and the eyes of Atropos was however soon brought to an end by an abrupt awakening movement in the goat-legged and goat-horned Personage lying in the shadow of that rock. He didn’t wake quickly. He awoke slowly. But no sooner had he lifted a hand, not even to scratch his head but to grope with lecherous fingers amid the foliations of grey lichen that covered the base of the rock than an astonishing thing happened; and what was queerest about this thing was that it was felt by
everybody
and that it was inescapable.

Both the animals quite evidently felt it. Odysseus felt it. Nisos felt it. And Zeuks felt it. The fragile old figure beneath the spruce-fir on the top of the rock must at that moment have been occultly, covertly, and peremptorily summoned to some other significant parting of the ways for persons in whose destiny she was interested; for she promptly took advantage of this opportune distraction, and gathering her flimsy garments about her scrambled down from the rock and disappeared among the trees to sea-ward.

Nisos was amazed at what had begun to happen to him the very first moment that this goat-legged sleeper opened his eyes. He had been so hypnotized into a sort of philosophic acceptance of things he could only half follow, that, when he found himself shaking from head to foot in extreme panic-terror, but without the faintest notion of why the sudden fear had come upon him, he felt as if he were going mad. Was some appalling danger threatening them all, including the animals who had brought them here? And had the oldest and strongest of the Spinners of Destiny come to warn them, and had now gone to ward off from them the approaching danger?

Nisos felt certain he was not more affected by this sudden and inexplicable panic than were his companions. He could see that the horses were trembling; and indeed he experienced in the teeth of this weird terror a proud satisfaction that his own right arm which, while he was holding his colloquy with Atropos, he had kept stretched out, had not loosened or lessened the
pressure 
of the hand with which he was supporting the great
treasure-sack
, propt on the back of Pegasos.

And it was clear to him that the wits of Odysseus were not in any more danger of being lost in this mysterious panic than his own. The old king calmly advanced towards the recumbent goat-man, dragging Arion with him. Nisos noticed too that he held the bridle with his left hand while he advanced, and that he gripped the Heraklean club firmly with his right.

“Hail to you,” the old king said, “whoever you may be—whether immortal or mortal, whether god or man! And I pray you, if you are a god, to pardon us for disturbing your
noon-sleep
before natural termination. I am Odysseus and I have come with Nisos Naubolides and with our good friend Zeuks to do honour to the daughter of the great dead Prophet Teiresias whom many-voiced Rumour declares has been brought from Thebes to a dwelling here, hard by the sea. If, therefore, whether you are a god or a man, you will assist us in finding this House, I, Odysseus, son of Laertes, will of my free heart, give you
whatever
your soul desires of the treasure we carry with us.”

The prostrate goat-man heard him to the end without stirring. Then he made a very quick movement. He rolled the
greenish-black
eye-balls of the enormous whites of his nymph-ravishing eyes, and without changing his position, or relaxing his clutch upon the lichen-tuft he was fondling, he took in everything. In fact from the look in those exploring eyes he did more than take in everything. You could have said he devoured, drank up, and erotically possessed everything; not only the old warrior with his bowsprit beard and full-bosomed club advancing upon him, but the half-winged Pegasos, the half-maned Arion, the grave, slender boy Nisos, and every bulge in the choreographic blur which the blazing sun created out of the bucolic features of Zeuks—except the great sack of treasure, across which those rolling eyes flitted without offering it the faintest attention.

Then the old king spoke again: “Are you prepared to show us the way to the house by the sea, whither these Thebans, if such they are, have brought the daughter of Teiresias?”

The goat-horned, goat-legged one suddenly leapt to his feet and with a rough and rude gesture pushed past Odysseus and seizing Zeuks by his elbows stared offensively and yet in some queer way possessively and almost paternally into his face. Over the wounded back of Pegasos, which, though still tender to the touch and not by any means healed, had been considerably soothed by its owner’s spittle, it was still possible for Nisos to see Zeuks’ expression, and it was an amazement to him to remark how quietly, and yet with a sort of comical expectation of more dramatic revelations to follow, he took the gross, yet almost cajoling stare of this horned and hairy Being.

“You are!—you are! And yet you
cannot
be!” blurted out the puzzled and bewildered God-Beast; and Nisos never forgot the mixture of earthy roguery, rustic guile, spontaneous magical power, along with the professional horned-ram propitiation of a cunning old shepherd, in the goat-legged creature’s tone.

But the capturer and dominator of Pegasos and Arion, the man who was more than a match for the Priest of the Mysteries, was once again completely master of the situation. With an easy assumption of authority—and yet our clever young Nisos didn’t miss the shade of something that resembled a curious spasm of play-acting in his tone—Zeuks freed himself from the God-Beast’s hold and turned to Odysseus.

“We are in the presence, O King,” he blurted out with an irresponsible chuckle, while the goat-horned creature leaned his chin upon the head of Pegasos and began whispering in one of the flying horse’s nervous and twitching ears, “of none other than the great god Pan himself. For some curious reason that I cannot explain to you, O king, this great and most benevolent deity has, ever since he first appeared to me on my farm,
confused
me with a lad he knew on the farm of farmer Dryops, whose favourite Nymph was Erikepaia, though we ignorant
farm-labourers
persisted in calling her Dryope or Dryopea, but who rejoiced to share Pan’s bed in the moss and ferns of this farmer Dryops’ Arcadian inheritance.

“Unlike the jealous and tyrannical Dryops, whose despotic arms
Erikepaia joyfully exchanged for those of this famous god who fills the udders of Arcadian cattle with the richest milk and the hives of Arcadian bees with the sweetest honey, I have been proud, though she
was
loved by this kindly god, to have myself loved the lovely Erikepaia long and loyally, and long after she grew too old for a god’s embraces I loved her. I loved her when she grew old with the oak of her adoption, which she and I together dug up from that Arcadian valley and planted here, here by the side of this rock, here where thou, O great Pan, whether thou knewest it or not, wast sleeping a moment ago.