Atlantis (54 page)

The old man—and our young friend, for all his emotional agitation, had the wit to notice this, took good care to prop up “Expectation” against the edge of their bed, before returning to the threshold to draw the curtains of their chamber—said to Nisos with an extremely humorous expression on his face: “For the sake of Aphrodite’s son, and by him I do
not
mean the good Aeneas—stay on guard here, my boy, and make sure that that terrible woman from Thebes doesn’t break in upon us! O yes! and don’t fail to remind me, before those Immortal Horses do carry them off, to see to it that that poor devil of an Enorches has a couple more blankets to keep him warm! He hurt both those creatures, you must remember, and flying horses, like ordinary horses, have long memories.”

It was at the upper portion of Pegasos’s wounded shoulder that the hypnotized stare of Nisos was fixed. With his own back to the mast Nisos had accepted for a moment the serious
responsibility
of two important ropes while Proros as the natural result
of the unusual amount of wine he had drunk went to the side of the vessel to relieve himself.

But after handing back the ropes Nisos still stared at the shoulder of the flying horse; for not only was he amazed to see that the outraged wing had grown fresh and strong but there was something else going on that astonished him even more. For while Nausikaa took her place in the centre of that god-like back, and while, behind her, the meticulous Herald discoursed earnestly and authoritatively to Okyrhöe, evidently explaining to her many matters of which she was completely ignorant with regard to the political situation among the Phaiakians to whose land she was now to be transported, to his bewilderment Nisos actually beheld, stretching out of the blankets with which the priest’s nakedness was covered, a bare arm with extended fingers clutching a piece of solidified ointment wherewith he was
furtively
rubbing and moistening the roots of the newly-grown feathers of that resuscitated wing.

“Is this insane fellow,” Nisos thought, “actually trying to wither up this new growth of feathers as he destroyed the original ones?”

But when, turning his gaze upon the Flying Horse’s god-like head, he caught the creature’s calm, alert, self-composed and liquid eye, he recognized the true state of the case; namely that the crazy priest was desperately trying to redeem the harm he had done by doctoring these miraculous feathers so as to make them resemble those of a supernatural albatross.

When once he was satisfied that the Priest was not playing any wicked game with Pegasos, Nisos gave himself up to the pure fascination of just watching the winged horse, as the creature patiently stood on that top deck of the “Teras”. His length was such that four of him would have reached from figure-head to stern and his width was such that four of him would have reached from the starboard rail to the larboard rail. The rippling flow of the muscles under his skin was apparent with every breath he drew; and as Nisos watched him with increasing wonder and told himself that there weren’t many boys in the world or men either
who would ever live to sec such a sight, the divine creature’s grace became yet more astounding as the animal twisted his neck round to see Zeuks lift, first Eione, whose thighs he clearly
enjoyed
caressing as he assisted her, and then Pontopereia whom he hoisted up bodily by her waist, and who, taking no more notice of him than if he’d been a Mill-wheel or a Wind-mill, fixed her beautiful and intellectual dark eyes upon Nisos and breathed the words, unmistakably audible, though wafted to him on the prematurely engendered twin-sigh of a final farewell: “You are my boy and I love you!”

Nisos was standing now so close to Odysseus that he could feel the quivering outer edge of the great wave of intense erotic vibration that was passing between the old king of Ithaca and the new Queen of Phaiakia.

That Odysseus’ emotion was unusually strong could be seen by the manner in which he squeezed the head of “Expectation” alias “Dokeesis”. Herakles himself could have hardly clasped his fingers round that wooden skull with a fiercer clutch. The consequence of this natural action while the lithe and limber, the glossy and sinewy, the delicate and perfectly equiposed body of the most athletic creature in the Cosmos rested on the deck of the “Teras”, was to produce such a vertiginous shock in the interior of the Heraklean Club that the Fly was forced like so many other great scientists to forget himself in his profession, and at once began interpreting, to the Moth and to all the world, in his high-pitched adverbial tongue, the information which the familiar voice of the Sixth Pillar in the old Corridor was
conveying
to the club.

“The son of the Midwife’s sister here, she who formerly served the famous ‘Nymph in Antro’ until she was made big with child by that King of the Latins who is building in Italy a New Troy upon Seven Hills, has been weaned from his mother’s breasts and can now be fed by hand. There have been rumours in the Palace that the marriage of the Maiden Leipephile to Agelaos the son of Krateros Naubolides will shortly take place. It is also reported that the other divine horse, the beautifully-maned one
who has so often accompanied Pegasos when not using his wings or crossing the sea, has on several occasions been heard
exchanging
human speech with the Herdsman Tis. This strange event which seems to be unquestionably true has had the effect of greatly increasing the already high esteem with which Herdsman Tis is regarded, not only by Krateros Naubolides and his son Agelaos, but also by Nosodea the mother of both Leipephile and Spartika the Priestess of Athene’s Temple.”

Here the Fly’s lively rendering of the conversation between the Sixth Pillar and the Club of Herakles was broken up by the Fly himself. As a scientific translator of the measured monotone in which the Sixth Pillar reported to the Heraklean Club the
elemental
gossip that reached it through earth and air and fire and water the Fly, for all his extravagant “adverbialism”, was intelligible and sensible.

It was, in the manner of most great scientists, only when he enlarged on his purely personal grievances that his emotions tended to erupt in spasms of disconcerting spleen. “The bitch! The bitch! the bitch! the bitch!” he now buzzed in our friend’s ears.

“Excuse me, O thou newly-proclaimed son of
abysmally-enduring
Odysseus, but I must incontinently go to emphatically warn that adulterously-and-slavishly-behaving whore that I’ve got my eye on her!”

It was indeed clear to Nisos that what the Fly feared was that Pegasos might suddenly spread his tremendous wings and create such a rush of wind that the Moth would be perforce carried off through the air to the land of Phaiakia and that he would never see her again. And as the pair of them, for like other fluttering priest-worshippers the Moth was susceptible to firm handling, returned to the weapon in the old hero’s grasp, it struck the boy’s mind as a topic upon which it was really incumbent upon him to ponder carefully in view of his future as prophet, namely as to what part the material size of a living Being ought to play in diminishing or increasing that Being’s moral responsibility. To put it plainly, should the conscience of an insect be as
tender and as quickly touched by remorse as the conscience of a whale?

A rasping stab in the vitals not so much of his conscience as of his intelligence hit him at that moment; and to the end of his days he always associated it with two things whose logical
connection
was merely that they belonged to the same animal. Something in the mast or the rigging interfered with the fall of the moonlight upon that glossy-dark supernatural form, whose fibres and muscles and tendons and curving sinews seemed to ripple in their relaxed quiescence not unlike the way the surface of the ocean itself was at that moment faintly stirring, but
whatever
it was that caused it, some kind of phantom-foam-drop appeared on the left front hoof of Pegasos gleaming with a light which seemed, in spite of it having descended from the full moon, to be an inner light, the light of a mind rather than of any external luminary.

And what became for Nisos a life-long memory, what became for him yet another symbol of that
spoudazo-terpsis,
“my whole will to enjoy what happens”, which was now his war-cry, was the strange fact that this inward gleam in the left front hoof of the flying horse corresponded with, and answered to, an inner light in the fathomless depth of the liquid eye which Pegasos turned upon his passengers as he twisted his flexible neck round to see whether everyone was comfortably and securely mounted.

But no metaphysical war-cries and no mystical symbols can keep certain painful and jarring jolts and jerks from destroying our peace; and the splinter that now pierced our young friend’s ideal chain of reasoning was a teasing and academic kind of question following closely on the childish one he had just asked himself about the conscience of a fly compared with that of a whale.

And the point was this. How far were the gods, by nature, by tradition, by custom, by international law, and finally by the necessity of the case, exempt from the moral law that all human beings of every tribe in the world feel an instinctive imperative, wherever it comes from, to obey?

When for instance Zeus swallowed the great prophetess Metis for fear of a fatal rival, was he breaking the moral law? The result, our teachers say, was the birth of Athene from his head. But does that redeem his murder of Metis? Athene was not Metis. To be the daughter of a mother born out of the head of the person who swallowed her does not make you your mother. It makes you a woman with every reason to avenge your mother on the person who swallowed her.

Themis the Goddess of Order may have been forced to yield to the embraces of Zeus, but it was she who named her daughter
Dike,
“Just Retribution” and all his thunderings and lightnings cannot save the All-Father from the penalty of his crimes.

“By Aidoneus, no! When the time comes for me to be a Prophet the great test of my truth and the truth of what I prophesy can be only one thing, whether I do or do not make it clear that not one of the gods—no! not even the Son of Kronos himself—can escape from the Law of Retribution. Shall I really be what I so long to be when I return from this voyage? O Atropos, thou great little goddess of Fate, give me——” His thoughts, and, we are compelled to add, his prayer to Destiny too, were broken off short by seeing Zeuks rush to the stern of the ship and disappear down the ladder. “He is after Arsinöe! He is after my girl!”

Every muscle in Nisos’ tall slender frame grew stiff and tense. “I forgot her! I forgot her! I forgot her! And he
had
forgotten her. Hypnotized by the fathomless moon-stone of that
unnatural
eye in the hoof of the Flying Horse, and quivering with excitement, as indeed was Pegasos himself, in anticipation of the spreading of those tremendous wings and of the immortal creature’s leap upwards into the air, Nisos had not only forgotten his deliberate association of his newly formulated life-logos,
spoudazo-terpsis,
with Arsinöe rather than with Eione or
Pontopereia
; but he had completely lost the image—though it now came back with a rush and filled his whole consciousness—of the Trojan maid herself.

“God! What a ‘kakos’, what a cad I am!” But it was no use
dancing a remorse dance, or calling upon Dionysos or Eros. What he had to do, if he had anything left in him but downcast
aidos
or pure “shame”, was to go after this incorrigible Zeuks and snatch Arsinöe away from him. But how could he, though he
was
the son of Odysseus and not of Krateros
Naubolides
, contend with the son of an immortal god, and that god none other than Arcadian Pan, whose passion for girls and obsession by girls amounted to an absolute mania?

“But you never know,” he told himself.

“For not only is ‘all fair in love and war’, but in all earthly struggles, whether between races, or persons, or things, it is Chance, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, who changes the wind, and gathers the rain, and loses or saves the day.

“What a curious nature mine is!” Nisos said to himself, instinctively making use of all the analytical intelligence he had, and he had a good deal more than most young men, to put an end to the smarting sting of self-reproach. “Here I am shivering with intense interest to see Pegasos mount up from the deck of the ‘Teras’ and yet I feel if I am to keep any self-respect at all I ought to invent some excuse, any confounded excuse, such as a desire to use a bucket down below, or to get a weapon from the pile of them in the big cabin, or to ask one of those Libyans to lend me his pocket-knife, and, muttering this same invented excuse, I ought to throw an easy self-contained glance at
Odysseus
, and slip off past Akron.

“By the Gods, this is what I will do!” For some reason he thought at this moment of his dead pet sea-hawk whom he would never behold again; and he also thought—it must have been the idea of his own death that brought such things into his mind—of the old dead Dryad about whom nobody any more seemed to give the least thought. Then he moved towards Akron. But what in heaven’s name was the man doing?

The captain of the “Teras” was indeed acting in a drastic manner. He was slowly and deliberately divesting himself of his clothes, and with the help of Proros and Pontos he was tying
round his waist a long rope. Nisos paused for a moment as the East Wind and the Moonlight isolated their intrepid skipper and held him in their crystal embrace, and then to the young man’s spell-bound gaze seemed to plunge with him into the water from a bow-sprit now as bare of ornament as the beard of Odysseus.

On their naked captain now boldly swimming, with the rope behind him passing, as he swam, through the hands of both Proros and Pontos, Nisos saw Odysseus fix a well-pleased and proudly satisfied look, a look that said: “Well done, faithful one!” But the old man was evidently so certain now of the result that he soon turned his gaze back to Pegasos, and to his silent dialogue with Nausikaa, who was now resting as securely on the divine horse’s back as she would soon be doing on her expectant throne in the land of her fathers. Nisos however kept his eyes steadily on that moon-lit swimmer, kept them there indeed till the “Teras”, quickly enough when the man had once climbed out of the water, was strongly and firmly moored to that human-shaped rock on the island of Wone, about fifteen yards inland, and about the same distance from those primeval Beings, who in their “Arima” of a forgotten Past could remember the days before Zeus and his thunderbolts, or the Titans and their mountains piled on mountains, had begun to disturb the world.

“I think, my Lord the King,” Nisos now began, edging himself forward between Pontos and Proros, “that I’ll just run down, if I may, and tell Zeuks that our ship is now safely moored.”