Atlantis (33 page)

“What on earth is the fellow staring at?” she asked herself. “Is someone lying dead at his feet? Has he killed some intruder—the first of Zeuks’ pirates to enter the palace?”

Tis was undoubtedly—she could divine that much from the general pose of his figure—a trifle scared as well as intensely interested and arrested; and Pontopereia, herself stiff with nervous excitement, breathed quickly as she watched him. While all this was going on, little old Eurycleia, who, under all her weight of years, moved as lightly as Atropos, the oldest, smallest, but most to be feared and most to be relied upon of all the Fates, was now leaning against the door-post of the interior entrance to the dining-hall. Her expression as she leant there was one of concern but it was not an expression of alarm. Nor was it an expression of tremulous or jumpy nerves.

What her face showed was pure and simple annoyance. The old nurse felt indignant. Indeed you might say she felt extremely angry. For two, if not for three generations she had been
compelled
to behold her own peculiar and special world crumble down. She did not see it fall with a crash. She saw it
disintegrate
and crumble down. And she saw this happen without being able to lift a finger to stop it. What she was doing now was typical of the whole situation. She was simply standing with her back against the cold stones of the passage wall just as if they, these inanimate fragments of flint and quartz and these bits of chilly marble were arrogantly and in a new kind of
contemptuous
aristocratic haughtiness cold-shouldering her into an oblivious grave.

All this waiting lasted for a far less space of time than it takes to describe the emotions of the persons who were waiting; and when the waiting ended, the general relief that everybody felt,
though great enough, was not as heavenly as it would have been had the thoughts and feelings involved gone on for as long as any chronicler, using those unwieldy hieroglyphs we call “words” to inscribe them, was bound to go on.

Whether it was a real son of Hephaistos who had carved the letters “U” for
uios,
and “H” for the aspirated vowel at the beginning of the name of the great god of fire, nobody could ever be absolutely sure, but that the Pillar on which those letters were engraved had had breathed into it some sort of sub-human or super-human consciousness was undeniable.

And at this particular veering between serious apprehension and immense relief it was given to the consciousness of the Pillar to note the difference between the attitudes to life and death of the three men in that dining-hall; how Odysseus never gave to either life or death a single thought, pondering only and solely on how best to carry out his immediate purpose, how Telemachos, although temperamentally longing to be quit of the whole business, kept forcing himself to retain, with regard to the meaning of life, and with regard to the question whether there was any life for the individual soul after its body was dead, a position of rigid agnosticism; and finally how Zeuks with his motto of
Prokleesis
or “defiance” and his practice of
Terpsis
or “enjoyment” held strongly to the annihilation of the soul with the death of the body.

Shamelessly chuckling, as he had seldom dared to do in the presence of Odysseus, and never before had done in the presence of lady-visitors to the palace, Tis came back into the dining-hall from the Corridor, and at the sight of him the whole company except Odysseus and Okyrhöe moved forward to learn what had caused that resounding crash. There was now no physical barrier between the king on his throne with his wine-cup in his hand and the low arch at the end of the Corridor of Pillars that led out into the olive-garden, out into the grave-yard of the slaves, and out into the darkness of night.

“It were thee wone club what fell, my King,” explained Tis, as having mounted the two marble steps that led into the hall
he advanced towards the foot of the throne; “and it did strike me silly old mind, as I did see the waves of darkness pouring in at far end, and these here lights of banquet pouring out at near end, that if us were all lying in the dirt, man-deep, under they olive-stumps outside thik arch, ’stead of meat-dazed and
urine-dizzened
inside these here luscious walls, that what made the old club fall was fear of summat happening to all on us when this night’s over and we get the people’s word at the ‘agora’!

“To say the truth I felt durned funny, my king, just now, when I seed thee’s girt club lying face-down on they stones near
olive-branch
what have come up bold and straight, as you might say, out of floor!”

The first thought of Odysseus, when he heard all this, was the entirely practical and personal one of making sure that his most useful weapon was in its usual place and ready to his hand when needed.

“You propped it up again exactly where it always used to be, I hope—I mean between those bits of white stone in the wall?”

“Sure I did, my King, sure I did! Club do now bide exactly where club always did bide; I reckon about five feet away from that there up-growing olive-shoot.”

And then, when Odysseus had nodded his obvious satisfaction at this statement, and when Telemachos had re-hung the antique sword picked up by his grand-dad upon its nail and resumed his seat, and when the combined voices of Tis and Eurycleia had died away in lively comment upon the club’s fall as the speakers withdrew into the kitchen, it was left to Zeuks to swing the conversation back to the extraordinary expedition which the dead Dryad had originated.

“I’ve heard from some quarter,” he told them all, “that the hundred-armed Monsters, Briareos, Kottos, and Gyes are now swimming about in the sunken cities of Atlantis, feeding upon the innumerable corpses of their drowned populations; and, do you know, the idea has crossed my mind that what the dead Dryad really hoped to bring about was that Typhon should join them down there. But how a fire-breathing creature like
Typhon could live under water like those Monsters is as much beyond my comprehension as——”

“As many other things, Master Zeuks!” murmured Okyrhöe with her silvery laugh. And it was during the general
amusement
that followed this sally that the Fly, having rejoined the Moth in their usual retreat, which was now safely propped up again, implored his lovely friend to listen intently. “For,” said he, “the Pillar is now telling the club what is happening down there.”

“You mean down in Atlantis?” enquired the Moth.

“Certainly I do,” replied the Fly. “For you mustn’t be so absurdly man-loving as to think that because the human
population
of a continent is drowned with that continent, nothing interesting can go on down there any more. There are the fish, my pretty one, there are the fish. Do try to realize that life doesn’t end, Pyraust darling, when the human race ends. There
are
philosophers in the world—I won’t at this moment emphasize their names or their species—who hold the view that it will only be when the tribes of mortal men are sunk into complete oblivion that the real drama of the Cosmos will properly begin.”

“But,” whispered the Moth anxiously, “and forgive my stupidity if this is a silly question, what I cannot see is how this drama of the future will be recorded if there’s nobody to record it.”

“Unrecorded things are as important as recorded things,” said the Fly.

“But who hears of them?” commented the Moth sadly.

“How many are they?”

“How many of what, my beautiful one? Are you speaking of sea-gulls or crows?”

“People of course!” answered the Moth irritably. “Did you think I meant flies?”

“You’d have to count me out if you did,” replied her friend grimly. “For I don’t, and I believe it is a peculiarity shared by most of my species, at any rate those of the male sex, at all like being included in any plural category. Yes, indeed, my lovely one, I believe you’ll find, as your experience thickens and your years increase, that you’ll seldom meet a male who isn’t at heart, though under various circumstances he may not appear so, an ingrained individualist. When I was younger I used to flirt with the wanton notion that to be really ourselves we had to move about in circles. I also played with the
spiritual
thought, as I understand they call it, that only when there are two or three of us the wind can be cozened and coaxed and cajoled to carry us to particular places, to certain river-banks, for instance, and to certain ponds full of special sorts of rushes, where we can find those extra delicate morsels of refreshment which our exacting senses crave.

“But after all the horrors I’ve seen, and after all the dangers from which I’ve been saved only by my constant and obsequious flattery of the goddess of Chance, I have learnt the supreme lesson of my life, that there is only one thing upon which a Fly can depend, namely himself.”

“Do look what a lot of people there are! There must be more than a thousand! A thousand warriors who are skilled with the spear, not counting women and children!”

It was clear to the fly that his emotional friend was so
hopelessly
impressed by the number of the listeners that no appeal to reason was possible. So, giving it up, he confined himself to gazing out of the club’s “life-crack” at that awe-inspired mass of islanders and to endeavouring to follow the words of the orator. This shepherd of the people was none other than Nisos’ Father, Krateros Naubolides, who, mounted on an extremely
old-fashioned
and extremely shaky platform that had been erected by democratic settlers in Ithaca some sixty odd years ago, with the glittering marble Temple of Athene to its West and the deep blue
water of the bay to its East, was explaining in a rough homely directness of speech, whose lack of intellectual subtlety and manifest honesty of feeling made his argument formidable, how bad for them it would be to use up all their precious sail-cloth, this divine “othonia” that took such expense to grow, such trouble to weave, and such art to prepare, for the ill-advised and indeed the absolutely crazy purpose of seeing off their aged and infirm king, in times when all experienced rulers were needed at home, on a wild fantastic voyage of his own eccentric fancy.

“It is our King’s actual presence,” Krateros bluntly and crudely shouted, “that we need at this juncture of our Island’s life, not some fabulous glory from a mad adventure undertaken in a demented old warrior’s last days!”

It was clear to the attentive fly that these rough and rude words uttered by a farmer, whose local breed was a good deal more purely local and insular than was that of Odysseus, was making a deep impression upon those among the islanders, both men and women, who were near enough to hear him; for they kept turning their heads to look at one another, and a considerable number of them actually clashed their brazen-pointed spears together in more than ordinary agreement.

Indeed the speaker himself, as the fly could catch in the tone of his voice, took it to be an indication that they were prepared, if this doting old hero went on insisting on his mad scheme, to rise in arms and dethrone both him and his philosophy-besotted son in favour of the more sensible if more insular stock of the House of Naubolides itself.

It was evident to Pontopereia that Odysseus was watching the assembly with inexhaustible attention, and was making, the girl decided, some special calculation with regard, not only to
numbers
and weapons, but to the quality and significance of the various farming families who were gathered here today, even if some were only represented by a male spearman whose relatives were all on the mainland. He had not dared to change the place of meeting and the girl could clearly see what were the chief
impediments
to this sort of democratic assembly in an “agora” that was at
once old-fashioned in an unseemly, ramshackle, slovenly way, and modernistic in a cold, remote, indifferent way. For one thing, she noticed that however forcibly Odysseus had just now pressed his demand upon them for contributions of sail-cloth as if he were exacting the payment of tribute, it was only those quite near who could catch what he meant because of the purer language he used.

She noticed too that although Krateros Naubolides made
himself
heard, the agitation he created by the rough boldness of his rejection of the old king’s claim was so great that little groups of men from nearby positions kept hurrying to further-off vantage-grounds where they would ardently enlarge on what had been said.

No sooner had the Father of our young friend Nisos
Naubolides
swung himself down from the platform of his Ithacan “agora”, an erection that was really much too high to be a
suitable
speaking-place, than there ensued a rushing to and fro that made of the whole assembly a confusing if not a confounding hubbub of human bodies and human voices.

When “Government by Discussion”, as you might call the flexible and casual manner in which the Ithacan natives had settled their affairs half a century ago, was working well, the population of the island was much smaller, and the half-circle of stone-seats for listeners had a much less extended circumference.

The result of this increase in numbers was that many of the most eloquent speakers took care to avoid the grotesquely elevated wooden erection on the speaking-rock and made their speeches from the ground, which meant that they often had to stand a good deal too near their antagonists, who frequently were a closely-packed crowd of angry and excited spearmen.

There had been no political meeting in this Ithacan “agora” for several years, nor had it been observed by any official person, or indeed by anybody, official or otherwise, before this meeting began that a couple of rungs in the wooden steps ascending the speaking-rock were missing. This gap in the ascent to the
platform
of oratory had been treated as negligible by Krateros. The
old King too in his introductory talk, where he had briefly and succinctly suggested the possibility of every householder on the Island delivering a certain quantity of “othonia”, had totally disregarded the shaky rostrum.

On this particular occasion it was before the handsome Father of our friend Nisos had reached the middle of his blunt and rude speech that the bulk of those who were listening to him became aware of the presence of the Priest of the Orphic Mysteries among the elders who stood at the foot of that dilapidated
old-fashioned
wooden erection on the summit of the speaking-rock.

The moment he was caught sight of, especially by the women, who were freely sprinkled among the men throughout the whole assembly, it was clear to the shrewd weather-eye of the watchful Odysseus that there was a palpable quickening of pulses. These manifestations of feeling in crowds are very queer phenomena. But of course this man possessed psychic powers of an unusually rare kind and he was insatiable in his quest for human converts of every age up and down the island; and, while a bogey-man to some, he was a redeeming angel to others.

Thus there now appeared over that whole assembly of men and women something resembling a many-coloured wind-blown ripple moving rapidly over a wide expanse of water, a ripple that was grey when it reached our horizon but had been a deep blue-green when it left the shore.

Had Nisos Naubolides arrived at the “agora” just then, he would have plunged at once into a veritable vortex of
bewildering
psychic problems, the chief of which would have been the extremely complicated question as to just what constituted an important enough crisis in the general stream of events, whether a waterfall, a cataract, a tributary, a marsh, a lake, or a “delta” of several river-estuaries, to justify an interference in the situation by the little old lady he had known as Atropos, and by what subtle understandings of the forces of earth and air and water and fire messages were duly despatched to the said little old lady, so that she could draw certain hints indicating in detail the issues involved and not failing to make clear at what exact point, if care was not
taken, the wanton Goddess of pure Chance, whose name is Tyche, might snatch the occasion out of wiser hands.

But queerly enough it was neither blind Chance nor the oldest of the Fates who was now the disturber of the normal stream of natural events—this stream that flowed and eddied and circled and delayed and hastened across that old “agora”. It was none other than the young girl, Pontopereia.

It was some while before Enorches fully realized that his most formidable opponent at this crucial pause in events was the awkward and ungainly damsel who was now shuffling so
absent-mindedly
up and down between Odysseus, who was leaning on his club, and Okyrhöe, who had accompanied them to this
confused
scene for some mysterious purpose of her own. As she shuffled back and forth in this odd manner Pontopereia couldn’t help noticing a great many things that she had no wish to notice.

This business of “noticing” was the very last thing she wanted to be engaged in at that particular juncture. Her entire purpose as she shuffled to and fro was indeed the extreme opposite of noticing anything. What she desired just then was to make her mind as near a blank as she possibly could so as to offer it as a pure, clean, unfurnished sanctuary, of which, free from every distraction, encumbrance, or rival, her father’s prophetic spirit might take complete possession.

But so astonishing were the forms and colours forced upon her senses by the spectacle before her that she struggled in vain to defend her attention from them. The sun just then was in
mid-sky
and was blazing down with such tremendous noon-day glare upon land and sea that it was difficult for her not to feel that she must yield up her whole being to the dazzling white opacity of Athene’s Temple on the one hand, and to the dazzling blue opacity of the gleaming salt water on the other.

She had never seen bluer salt water in all her life. It seemed at one moment to lift her up to a yet bluer sky-zenith in the air above, and at another moment, just as if it were some vast, hard, smooth, magnetic precious stone, to draw her down to a petrifying
abyss of demonic blueness in some enchanting but dangerous dimension of existence below Tartaros itself.

It was indeed, though nobody but herself knew it, a real crisis in the life of the daughter of Teiresias, this appearance of hers before the Ithacan assembly of which Odysseus made so much. Her real antagonist in the whole thing was not the father of her new friend Nisos but the Priest of the Mysteries who was even now preparing to take a terrific advantage of the old King’s calm and unruffled assurance.

“How absolutely alone,” she said to herself, “we all are! That old hero with his projecting chin and his sharp beard sticking out from it like the horn of a fabulous beast, what is he thinking and feeling now? I shall never know. Nobody will ever know. And that red and green gnat over there, sunning itself on that half-budded greenish-yellow willow-leaf, I would bet anything it is now, at this very moment of time, wondering whether its fate is destined to come by the violence of another insect not much bigger than itself, or by the sudden downfall of a rotten branch dislodged by a gust of wind, or by being snapped up between the upper half and the lower half of the beak of a bird.

“And has it perhaps just decided,” the girl thought, “that it would be pleasanter to be trampled out of existence while it was asleep under a leaf than to perish in the disgustingly foul air of the crop of a feathery glutton? It’s gone anyway; and wherever it’s gone it’s just as absolutely alone, in a multitudinous world without end in any direction, as I am, or as this old king is, or as Mummy Okyrhöe is, or any one of these men waving their spears and whispering to their wives and to the wives of their friends! Alone, alone, alone!

“And the same applies,” thought Pontopereia, “to whatever grub that little hole contains!” And she struck with the side of her sandal a decaying fragment of tree-root that was half-covered by dark-green moss but had blotches of grey lichen on it here and there, and it was between two of these grey patches that the daughter of Teiresias detected a small orifice that was obviously the entrance to the dwelling of some grub-like creature.

“Are you at home, master?” she muttered; and then, digging her heel into the rubble beside that piece of decayed wood, she swung her whole body round, smiling to herself with a muttered exclamation. “Why,” she told herself, “I am doing just what I said a minute ago I mustn’t do! I’m noticing things! Only these things aren’t exactly what I meant. I meant marble roofs and dazzling waves! But I must, I
must
get into the right mood for father’s spirit!”

She straightened herself, clasped her hands behind her, stared at her sandals, and tried to imagine she was walking upon empty air. “If I can’t make my mind a blank,” she said to herself, “I must anyway get myself into the mood of being angry with this confounded Krateros who wants to make a fool of the old king by not letting him sail. I know exactly what the old man feels. He doesn’t want to slide into an ordinary, conventional, tiresome, commonplace old age. I can follow
that
like a map!

“Heaven and earth! If
I
had a chance to sail in a ship over the drowned cities of Atlantis, wouldn’t I snatch at it!”

She shuffled on, after that, with her head bent, repeating the word “Atlantis” over and over again. What she obscurely felt in her deepest consciousness was that, since this word contained the concentrated desire of the old hero who had appealed to her for aid at this crisis of his life, the best way of emptying her mind so as to make it a medium for the spirit of the dead prophet was to dissolve this actual word into a sacred mist, or even, and her eyes grew larger when she thought of this, into a sort of nectar such as would help to banish every emotion from her mind save the will to prophesy.