Atlantis (36 page)

“And very likely by doing that very thing Poseidon ruined his own abominable and murderous intention. The great
wave
,
or the great
mountain
,
whichever it was may have had the opposite effect to what was intended. It may have enshrouded Ajax in forests and ferns and mosses and vast leafy chasms and yawning flowery abysses and huge cracks and crevices in the green thick rondure of the earth.

“Well, well, well! So we’ve got Ajax on our hands again! What twists and turns of fate!—‘Turns’ do I say? What enormous, sweeping, astral curves this destiny of ours indulges in!
Ajax
!
Well, well! We must all be as gentle and hospitable to him as we can—eh, ladies, my dears?—eh, Nisos, my lad? And to this purpose”—and at this point the old King swung directly round upon Euanthos, who had risen to his feet and with his hands clasped behind him and his shoulders squared was staring at some particular oblong of nothingness beyond which his
preposterous
politeness had erected its own private horizon—“to this purpose we are indeed—don’t you think so, Ladies?—incredibly lucky to have a real live Herald from the land of the
Phaiakians actually here with us in our midst! He will explain to us, primitive islanders and settlers and farmers and fishermen as we are here in Ithaca, to what a stately tradition on the
main-land
of Hellas our ancestors look back.

“Yes, he will soon find, O my most gallant Hetairoi, that our old Achaian and Danaan ritual of life is as poetical as any he can discover in the most courtly cities of the orient. The first lesson he is destined to receive as to our power to show ourselves worthy of his respect will be the hospitality we shall now show to this noble princess, of whose coming he is the herald, and also the manner in which we shall entertain my ancient friend and once beloved rival, Ajax the son of Telamon!”

Odysseus leant forward as he spoke and as he did so he clasped with both hands the head of his club, pressing it against the pit of his stomach. It may be well believed how, as he did this, out of what the club itself always referred to as its “life-crack” and which was a slit in its gullet reaching as far down as its lungs and containing, as all its friends well knew, a sort of nomadic camp for two adventurous insect-friends of quite different species, there now issued a fine controversy.

Yes, out of the “life-crack” of the club there emerged and dissolved like recurrent waves of smoke into the hot afternoon air quite a bitter dialogue. It is curious how the voices of any living things as they strike air, or earth, or water, or fire, go through a change in their nature the perceiving of which,
especially
when such sounds happen to be solitary sounds, is a
remarkable
experience for the human person who perceives it.

Yes, it is when other sounds are absent and when the earth feels as if it were surrounded by an aura possessed of a singularly penetrating fragrance like nothing else in the world, that this change occurs. The sound may have been a cry of wild delight. It may have been a shriek of anger, it may have been a wail of sorrow, it may have been a whistle, a call, an appeal. It matters not what the sound was or what it conveyed. The sound has been changed.

And this change has come about by the thing having drawn
out of the element into which it rose or fell, and into which it dispersed itself, something akin to its own nature and yet
something
that no creature alive could apprehend through its sense of hearing. Into what has it been changed? Into a presence. Yes, there is no doubt or question about that. It has become a presence. What the listener is aware of now is the inexplicable and unaccountable effect upon him of a presence; not a human presence nor a godlike presence nor a titanic presence, and totally different from any conceivable animal presence.

But the point is that the effect of this presence is the
etherealizing
in some mysterious way of the material element, whatever it may have been, into which the sound has plunged. If into the flames of a bonfire, those flames become the purged and dancing spirits of all the leaves they are devouring! If into the air above the peaks of a mountain, that air becomes a particular region of pure space made of a more rarefied substance than the ordinary air which surrounds the earth.

If into water, that water becomes a pool of such perfect
translucence
that a consecration of all the places on earth where water springs up seems indicated by its mere existence on this planet.

And finally if into earth, every grain of sand, or atom of rock or speck of mud, or dab of clay, or chip of quartz, or crumb of dung, or grit of granite, or mite of mould, which that sound reaches becomes suddenly possessed by something akin to the mystery of consciousness, though it is not the consciousness of a man or a beast or even of a vegetable.

It was when the voice of Odysseus died away with the sound of the name of the father of Ajax that the moth enquired of the fly: “Why does the King go on so long about Ajax? Isn’t the important person who has arrived not this half-drowned
half-witted
doting old hero from the Siege of Troy, but this great living Princess Nausikaa from the land of the Phaiakians?”

The philosophical contempt in the voice of the fly cannot be expressed in rational words. “Have you no idea, you funny little perfection of a darling, silly, little girl, as to the way we men take
these things? Don’t you see that he’s making all this fuss about Ajax simply to cover up his feelings about Nausikaa? Have you forgotten, little stupid, all we were taught at school about men hiding up their strongest feelings, and about there having been a passionate romance between our King and some great Phaiakian princess? Why, you little ignorant silly, it’s one of the great
love-stories
of the entire world! Of course he has to make a lot of fuss about this old crazy Ajax! Why, you lovely, delicious, heavenly, little idiot, what on earth are you thinking about? Ajax defying the lightning is a simple proposition.

“
There
is Ajax.
There
is the lightning! There is an Ajax in every single living creature on earth and when that creature is in the mood of defying the Great Gods, it may be on behalf of the Little Gods, or it may be in anger on its own account. I tell you, you little silky-soft priest-worshipper, there isn’t a fisherman in all the coasts of Ithaca who hasn’t heard about Ajax and the Lightning. The toughest, roughest, homeliest, rudest fisherman you could find in this whole island has heard of Ajax defying the Lightning.

“I tell you, child, I know what I’m talking about. Being as fond of rotten fish as anybody in the world, I used to go out with certain special boats, whose owners used to start earlier in the morning than the others and weren’t as fussy as the others about cleaning out the bottom of their skiffs. Yes! I swear to you, you
unscientific
, irrational, unphilosophical, little lovely, I heard the most savage and most primitive of these sailors, yes! the very rudest of them, cry out to some companion: ‘Why, you’re as upset by a storm as Ajax defying the Lightning!’

“But when it comes to our king’s meetings with Princess
Nausikaa
of that land, it’s a very different story! Of course he keeps the essence of it to himself. Look at him now! He’s as ready to fall into a fit of reverie and fantasia as any youth in his beatified adolescence!”

The words of the wise fly had much truth in them just then; but the whole scene up there, from the place where Odysseus held his Heraklian weapon to the place where excitedly
whispering
groups were gathered on the furthest outskirts of that
island-agora
, was so confused and chaotic that it had become difficult to concentrate on any particular member of the heterogeneous crowd that was surging about in agitated waves of bewildered excitement.

As for the priest Enorches, he had become so invisible that he might have sunk into the earth after his tremendous oration.

“And now,” cried Odysseus, raising his voice above its accustomed pitch, “the thing for us to do is to go and greet this heroic rival of mine out of my ancient past, thus risen like a ghost to keep my pride in its proper place but also to make it clear to my enemies that it is essential that the people of Ithaca should provide their king with sail-cloth!”

While his words died away in that incredible sunshine he instinctively began leading them down the slope at the foot of which lay his rock-hewn palace.

But Nisos had a further announcement to make. “It was while we were leading Ajax as carefully as we could towards the palace that we met Zeuks, O King, and it was to tell you how Zeuks had taken it on himself to be the guide and interpreter to my Lord Ajax that I ran to meet you. My friend Euanthos here objected very strongly to my leaving our Lord Ajax under the care of Zeuks. It seemed to him that Zeuks was not well-dressed enough, well-mannered enough, distinguished enough, or nearly aristocratic enough, to be able to explain our life in Ithaca to a hero of the ancient tradition and one who possesses the lofty habits of the past and those godlike ways of living and thinking that are now lost to the world.”

Odysseus had inadvertently taken Pontopereia by the arm as he began to descend the hill, and this protective gesture of his had naturally brought Okyrhöe to his other side, that is to his right, where he prodded the ground with his club of Herakles. It was therefore, across the club’s self-styled “life-crack” that the craftiest woman in Hellas murmured her seductive words to the craftiest man in Hellas, and what she said was as nectar to the moth and as gall to the fly.

“All the Achaian world will be waiting with eagerness, my Lord King,” she murmured, “to hear the result of this encounter between you and the Lady Nausikaa. We forget sometimes how quickly news travels in these modern days. It’s the quality of the sails the ships carry, I expect: O, and of course it’s also because there are so many more merchant-sailors nowadays! Merchants are the great news-carriers and scandal-bearers. No doubt they always
have
been. But we mustn’t forget all these modern improvements in the masts and sails and benches and keels of ships, and even in the sleeping-places below the benches.

“It is wonderful to think of all the improvements we have lived to see of which our fathers never dreamed! Yes, I have followed pretty closely the history of Phaiakia from merchant-sailors’ narratives of what has been going on there, for in the history of any country what you pick up from travelling merchants is always nearer the truth than the speeches of official rulers and their ambassadors.”

“It was at this point that the fly became convinced that if Okyrhöe went on for one single sentence more in this manner Odysseus would revolt against her influence. But the clever woman now made it manifest that she could practise a quite different strategy, and as soon as she began in this clear, definite, and concrete manner, to aim at convincing him, she had the king at her mercy.

“What I have been leading up to,” she now remarked in a most emphatic manner, “is this. I have been, as I tell you, O King, following rather carefully the events in Phaiakia; and I have noticed that when Alkinoos died his throne was occupied first by one, and then by another, of the favourite sons of the widowed queen. But both these sons died before their mother—at least that is what my merchant-sailors have told me; though I fully admit they may have had, in each case, their own peculiar business-reasons for lying—and so when finally the mother herself died the only surviving child of Alkinoos was Nausikaa.

“She married twice and both her husbands died childless, a situation that set going various shameful rumours among the
people, rumours that Nausikaa poisoned them both with the hope of sailing for Ithaca when they were dead and being wedded to thyself! Of course you will know, O great King, much better than a mere stranger and traveller like myself, how to treat such ignoble tales: but you must at least remember in excuse for such tales that you have, as few heroes ever have, become a legend during your life-time, and since many of us in our youth have read—and have written too, I’ll be bound!—passionate love-lyrics about you and this daughter of Alkinoos, it is inevitable that when we hear of you two meeting again all manner of
disturbingly
romantic thoughts rush into our human-too-human heads!

“From a perfectly practical and sensible point of view the coming to Ithaca of this experienced and beautiful woman was indeed most cleverly planned. She too without any doubt has been collecting news from merchant-ships about Ithaca, just as I have about Phaiakia; and having found out that Penelope has been long dead and that you have never taken a second wife she naturally thinks of marrying you and of having those children by you which she clearly could not have by any other husband. It is a tragic and a touching hope; but I can imagine it proving a good deal of a nuisance and embarrassment to you.”

Neither the fly nor the moth as they listened to these words could see the effect upon the king of this treacherous warning, though they couldn’t help noticing how the beard of Odysseus kept giving curious little forward jerks. But then the king’s beard had for some time clearly been trying to isolate itself from the rest of his appearance. Apparently its desire was to become a sort of advanced Body-guard, which, if it were not propitiated, or, as the school-boy mates of Nisos would say, “sucked up to”, its owner would have to treat as an independent personality, or simply to cut it off.

As a matter of fact the old man’s imperviousness at this moment had no connection with these ambitions of his beard. It was in accord with his whole character that, while he accepted every material detail of what Okyrhöe suggested, he disregarded, or
postponed for later consideration, the lady’s psychic interpretation of the same.

What did cross his mind at that moment was a definite regret that owing to his penuriousness, or to his poverty, or to a mixture of them both, he had for years contented himself with getting on without any more effective cook in his excavated cave of a kitchen than the family’s ancient Nurse Eurycleia, who though she knew well enough what to prepare for his own meals, and even better how to restrict the appetites of Arsinöe and Leipephile, would lack both the physical strength and the culinary experience to cook for a visitor like the Princess Nausikaa.