Atlantis (6 page)

Four times during that disturbed February night, while the atmosphere in the palace-corridor grew tenser and tenser, and the Herculean club between its quartz-props grew more and more surly, and the fly Myos and the moth Pyraust were working themselves up to a fever of agitation, did the lonely old monarch rise from his bed and look out of his two windows. One of these faced due West, that is to say towards the opposite quarter of the
sky from the one upon which the corridor of the six pillars opened. The other window of the king’s bedroom faced due North.

It was the middle of night when he got out of bed for the fourth time; and this time he heard a certain thin, frail, feminine voice uttering a quavering, rasping, high-pitched appeal from the ancient oak opposite his window. This was a hollow oak-tree not only familiar to his own boyhood, but equally familiar to the boyhood of Laertes his father; and it was the abode or what almost might be called the second self of a Dryad.

His encounters with this ancient Oak-Sister had been rarer since his marriage. They had been interrupted of course by the Trojan war and his capture by Circe and Calypso, and had been only intermittently resumed since his wife had followed his parents into the shades and his son Telemachos had turned into a reserved, self-centred, philosophy-absorbed priest, serving Athene indeed, but serving her in a very different manner from the way he served her himself.

The voice he heard now as he leaned out of the window which looked due North was consequently not only a little querulous but a little injured. He was wearing his usual night-blanket or “claina” which save on the hottest nights he kept buckled round him by his broad body-belt or “zosteer”; so it wasn’t from chilliness that the Dryad’s voice struck him as having in its tone something so disturbing that it went beyond querulousness or hurt feelings. Laertes, his father, who had often talked to her out of this same window, used to call her by her name; a name she had received from a patroness of hers, one of the less
well-known
Graces, a Spartan Grace named Kleta, or “the one called for in time of need”.

The Dryad Kleta was indeed a touchy, highly-strung,
super-sensitive
Nymph, whose chief pleasure was in what she persisted in calling her “garden”: and if you wanted to bring down her anger upon you you had only to meddle with this obsession of hers. Kleta’s garden in reality was simply and solely a wild strip of uncultivated woodland, not as rocky or swampy as the haunted “Arima”, but, like it, belonging to no individual owner, and
extending as far as the crest of an up-land ridge from which the wooded peak of the mountain known as Neriton was visible as well as the high rock above that Naiad’s cave where on his return to slay the suitors Odysseus had been helped by Athene herself to hide his Phaiakian treasure.

The oak-tree from which this disturbing appeal reached him through the thick darkness was not only large enough and hollow enough to hide three or four old Dryads as emaciated as Kleta; but it was disfigured and deformed under its lowest branch, as well as above its largest branch, by two deeply-cut indentations, now almost filled up with mosses and small ferns, one of which, the lower one, having been made by the childish axe of Laertes and the other upper one by a similar childish tool wielded by himself.

As he leaned now out of that wooden aperture and murmured his response to that quavering voice he couldn’t help thinking of the days when his mother had stopped him from interfering with Kleta’s so-called “garden”. What the old Nymph liked to do was to arrange every tree, every shrub, every flower, every clump of grass, every dead or living root, every wild fern, every spray of ivy, so as to make exquisite patterns and delicate
arrangements
, and even to design suggestions of god-like terraces, and the mystic purlieus or enchanted courts and secret vistas leading into divine sanctuaries where the smallest insects and the weakest worms could be safe at last from all those abominable injustices and cruel outrages, and all those stupid brutalities and careless mutilations that lack even the excuse of lust.

But it was not only of things like these that the aged Dryad Kleta constructed what she called her garden. What she really set herself to be was a protector and fulfiller of the intentions of her universal mother Gaia, the Earth. Kleta was in fact a sort of voluntary gardener of wild nature, planting and re-planting and trimming and cutting and watering and grafting and
designing
, as if she were a spirit-like impersonation of all the various maturing elements and an embodied shield-bearer against all the destructive ones.

Not an inch of Kleta’s garden in the slow long passing of the years was neglected. That spartan grace who visiting Ithaca once every five-hundred years had noticed this young oak-tree with its entwining “hetaira”, or devoted “companion”, and had given the Dryad her own name, was well-satisfied with her protégée. If that portion of the island called Arima was dedicated to mystery and prophecy, the portion of it tended by Kleta was
dedicated
to the unruffled preservation of what is usually obliterated.

Kleta would arrange with absorbed contemplation and deeply pondered purpose all those little separate twigs and straws and tiny pieces of wood and fungus and fir-cone that lend themselves to some subtle extension of the power of Themis even over such chaotic realms of pure chance as are offered by the man-trodden and creature-trodden trails and tracks and paths in a wild island like Ithaca.

Anyone, whether human or more than human, who turns nature into a garden is liable to find an unbelievable number of very small things that have once been parts of other things but are now
entities
on
their
own
such as bits of wood, bits of stalk, bits of fungus, bits of small snail-shells, bits of empty birds’ eggs, bits of animals’ hair, bits of birds’ feathers, bits of broken sheaths of long-perished buds and shattered insect-shards, strewn remnants of withered lichen-clusters, and scattered fragments of acorns and berries and oak-apples that have survived in these lonely trails and tracks to be scurf upon the skin of one world and the
chaos-stuff
for the creation of another world.

It was especially the curious hieroglyphs and mysterious patterns which are the written messages from all the unnoticed things that die to make the dust out of which other things are born that fascinated the aged Dryad as she moved day by day about her wild garden.

It was because of her sensitiveness and touchiness with regard to her interpretations of Nature’s intentions, and the odd uses to which Nature’s smallest leavings and litterings can be put, that Kleta had often burst into fits of furious anger with the childish heroes of three generations of the Lords of Ithaca.

The first time he left his bed that February night he
completely
soothed the old Dryad. But by the fourth time he leaned on that great plank rather like a ship’s rail, that crossed the opening into his bedroom at the top of a short ladder of thick pine-wood boards, he felt as if it were he himself, quite as much as the Dryad, who needed soothing.

This time he held a torch in his hand and had sandals on his feet, while Kleta, who was watching that illuminated window with trembling limbs and a troubled mouth could only stare in amazement at the figure that confronted her across that black gulf. Odysseus was anything but uncomely, anything but
deformed
or badly built, but it must be confessed that in the flickering blaze of his torch he presented a somewhat eccentric appearance at that moment.

He was not a tall man; and this fact which the famous Helen hadn’t failed to notice made the massive breadth of his shoulders and the enormous span of his chest something that bordered on the fantastic and grotesque. Nobody’s vision of him, arrested at first by these peculiarities, would be able all the same to dwell on them for long.

The startling proportions and unique grandeur of his head would inevitably dominate any enduring impression. He was very nearly totally bald; so there were no attractive curls to distract an onlooker’s or even an interlocutor’s attention from the peculiar majesty of his skull and of the way his eyes were set in it. His forehead itself was neither particularly high nor
particularly
low. Its breadth was its chief characteristic and next to its breadth the unusual distance between his eye-sockets.

This distance made it impossible for him to stare at any person with that kind of concentrated intensity which suggested that the object of the gaze had the power of giving him something that it was essential he should have, or of taking something from him that it was essential he should not lose.

In fact this breadth between his eye-sockets produced an effect that was at once sub-human and super-human. It gave him that look which certain large animals have of being completely
oblivious to everything save their own immediate purpose. But it also gave him the look of a Titan or a Giant or even of a God from whom other mortals, whether male or female, had no claim for more individual notice or respect than swarms of gnats or midges.

His nose was neither curved like an eagle’s beak nor
protuberant
as a boar’s snout. It carried forward the straight line of his forehead and its character lay in its massive and bony breadth; for its nostrils were not especially wide nor did they twitch or contract and open with the abnormal sensitivity of horses or deer. Curiously enough it was not his majestic skull nor this weird breadth between his eyes that gave to the
countenance
of Odysseus its most familiar attribute.

Every person, whether male or female, in any group of people who encounter one another day by day, possesses some particular physical characteristic more realistically charged with that person’s predominant effect upon others than any other attribute. In the case of the aged Odysseus this was his beard. If the wily old warrior had any special personal vanity or anything about his appearance upon which he himself especially concentrated it was his beard.

To get the effect that pleased him over this beard of his it had become necessary for him not only to trim it with the utmost care but to shave off or cut away all the hair on the portions of his face other than those that served him as a stage for this dramatic emphasis upon his beard.

As he now leaned out into that hollow sap-scented darkness holding his blazing torch, his beard was emphasized precisely in the way that satisfied this one queer streak of personal vanity in him. It was no wonder then that the old Dryad’s appeal to him to come down those wooden steps, for they were much more than a ladder, and listen closely to what she wanted him to hear became an appeal that he felt to be irresistible, for in certain deep and narrow mole-runs in their nature the personal vanity of
god-like
men surpasses by a hundred-fold the natural vanity of women. But there was more in this than that. There was a queer psychic
obsession in it; for once when, in middle manhood, and under the influence of this rather eccentric vanity of his, and of the method he had deliberately adopted for trimming it, his beard showed signs of taking the shape he desired for it, his mother Antikleia cried out to him when she caught sight of him emerging clean and fresh from a bath: “By the gods, boy, your beard is as pointed as the prow of a ship!” and, as it chanced, in flinging out this casual remark she proved she had read, as mothers sometimes, though not often, can read, what had hardly been known to himself, the hidden urge behind what he was doing to his face.

“O why is it,” he groaned to himself, this wily old sacker of cities, and enslaver of their defenders’ wives, “that we mortals have the power of re-creating our actual appearance with which we confront the sun and the moon? Animals and birds can’t do it though they can rejoice in the change or lament over the change when it’s done for them!”

If it had been some special competition of opposite odours during that February night, as they hovered round his home, some of them unspeakably exquisite, some of them revoltingly excremental, a few actually sepulchral, that swept his memory back at that moment to his mother’s words about the way he trimmed his beard, he was still descending that wooden flight of stairs, when a gust of wind from the sea whirled away from above both himself and Kleta’s oak a thick veil of mist, leaving in sight not only several zodiacal constellations, but among them, and yet not among them, such a shy, timid, lonely, brittle, shell-like crescent, that the idea of the Moon as she was before Artemis meddled with her, or Apollo meddled with the sun, whirled into his heavy skull.

This same gust of wind, not satisfied with making him aware that his disturbed sleep was connected with the fact that they were now in “noumenia” or the beginning of the month, brought from far-away, across rocks and deserts and forests and seas, in fact from the entrance to Hades itself a vision so strange that he paused in his descent, and holding his torch at arm’s length, so
that its flame shouldn’t touch the protruding point of this same bowsprit-beard, shut both his deep-socketed, widely-separated eyes, and drew in his breath in such a gasping sigh that it was as if he were swallowing his own soul.

What that wind brought to him, as it revealed under those far-off stars that tiny crescent was nothing less than the glimpse he had in Hades of the ghost of Herakles himself, glaring round him like black night with his fingers on the string of his bow, while round about him whirled flocks upon flocks upon flocks of birds in feathered panic, their beaks and wings and claws
indistinguishable
as they circled.

But his vision of the former owner of the great club that
nowadays
was always so patiently waiting in the porch till its hour came round again, was gone with the gust that brought it. The old man leapt to the earth from the final rung of that wooden flight of steps and tightening his belt about his middle and holding his torch so that neither its flame nor its smoke should impede his movements he hurried across the uneven ground to the hollow oak.