Atlantis (12 page)

He was not, however, so paralysed with terror that he couldn’t stagger to the trunk of the nearest spruce-fir; from which
vantage
-point, and clinging to this friendly tree with both his arms, he recovered a sufficient amount of “cleverness” to begin to take careful and detailed note of this whole amazing event. Amazing it certainly was: so much so that even the tree he was so
desperately
clutching, with some childish idea of taking refuge from the enemies of the gods with the daughters of the earth, displayed an unmistakable sign of being troubled in its quietude; for it exuded such a large drop of sticky tar that it tickled a nerve in the boy’s smooth cheek. But in spite of his trembling legs and the tickling in his cheek he didn’t fail to notice that the whole being of this pursuing Fury, whom he later discovered to be Allekto, “the never-ending”, was so lost, diffused, absorbed, mania-mazed and blood-crazed, in its mad punishment-lust that though at this moment she was flying, the wings she flew
with were feathered with the smoke of burning carrion, while from her mouth there issued, along with a stream of poisonous saliva, such a horrible alternation of bellowing and barking and such an appalling mixture of the stench of decomposition with the stench of excremental filth that the boy, though his stomach was empty, was unable to resist the motion of vomiting; and no! never for one moment did he fail to notice that
everything
about her had simply become one single rushing wind of all-devouring, all-consuming vengeance.

The creature whom Allekto was half-carrying through the air with her was also a female Being, and although it was not till later that Nisos learnt that she must have been Euryale or a daughter of “the wide sea”, and in fact that she was a progeny of the sea monster Keto himself, he already knew, from her tusks like those of a wild pig, and her claws of brass, and the serpents that were a living portion of her flesh and blood, and above all from that unspeakable and utterly indescribable look in her eyes that made it impossible for any other living child of the earth or of the heavens to face her glance without at least the risk of being frozen into stone with sheer terror, that she was one of the Gorgons, an immortal sister of the mortal Medusa.

While absorbed in his contemplation of these two monsters, who were now hovering round and round the Lykophos-Mound, Nisos had not yet noticed the most important person of all in this cosmic-comic burlesque show, namely the Being whom these two monsters were preparing to attack. She, he found out later, was none other than Atropos, the smallest, but at the same time the wisest and the oldest, of the three Fates, or the “Moirai”, those who can, when so they wish, decide the Destiny of every man and every woman born into the world.

Young Nisos Naubolides must have had something in him of the spirit of Odysseus, though, in place of being related to the king, his father Krateros and his brother Agelaos were the only living rivals of the old hero as claimants for the kingship. But the boy certainly displayed something beyond his boasted “cleverness” when, in order to find out what really was the
object of this mad attack by the Erinys and the Gorgon, he made a run to another small fir-tree-trunk and clung tightly to it.

Yes! There she was, Atropos herself, the unturning, unbending, unwavering, unrelenting, implacable Decider of mortal
destinies
! As Nisos saw her,
she
saw
him,
and for an incredible moment this “clever” boy who had just made up his mind to be the prophet to the strong, looked into the eyes of Fate, into the eyes of her who could decide the Destiny of any man and any woman born into this world. Yes, they looked each other full in the face.

Atropos was under a spruce-fir just as Nisos was; but she was seated beneath hers, while he was clinging to his. As he looked at her now Nisos realized that the flesh and blood of which she was made was neither the normal flesh and blood of mortals nor what he had always been taught to believe was the immortal flesh of the gods with its veins full of ichor, that divine liquid more like the sap of imperishable vegetation than the raw red stomach-turning juice that mortals call blood.

No, the boy realized as he gazed at her that the mystery of her being was far deeper than anything he had been taught to attribute to her or to her sisters. In fact the aura that hovered round her and the spirit that emanated from her were so
transporting
to him that the frightful noise kept up above his head by the barking and bellowing of the Fury and the still more
terrifying
sound, resembling a series of viscous and glutinous
thunder-claps
following one another like a procession of sea-blown bubbles and finally bursting as they broke into the air, made by the Gorgon, became no more than hens cackling in a yard.

Yes, the material out of which Atropos was made was clearly as different from the ichor-nourished substance of the Olympians as it was from the horn-like material of the bodies of the Erinys and Gorgon. Nor was it made of that vaporous stuff, only a little thicker than mist or spray such as composed those phantom-like forms who eternally harangued each other in Arima. No; the truth is that the longer Nisos Naubolides looked into the eyes
of Fate and the longer Fate looked into the eyes of Nisos
Naubolides
the more clearly did the latter realize that the
imperishable
frame of Atropos, this “one who could not be turned”, was made of a substance drawn from a level of existence outside both time and space, though cunningly adapted to play its part in each of them.

But the boy proved how “clever” he was by imbibing like an inexhaustible draught of timeless experience much more at that moment than the mere physical nature of the oldest of the Fates; for there came over him in a trance that was more than a trance the surprising knowledge—and this, though again and again he blundered hopelessly in trying to describe it in words, was really with him to the day of his death—that Atropos helps us in the creation of our individual fate by an infinitely long series of what some would call nothing but blind, stupid, dull, dreamy, moon-struck “brown studies”, many of which take place inside the walls of houses, and others when we are moving about on our ordinary errands outside.

In these interruptions of our ordinary consciousness we fall into a brainless, idea-less moment of dull abstraction in which we cease to think of anything in particular but just stare blindly and dully at some particular physical object, no matter what, that happens to be there at the moment. This object, in itself of no particular interest, and never selected for its real purpose is merely an object to stare at, lean upon, rest against and use as a trance-background, or brown-study foreground, or, if you like, like a shoal beneath a stranded consciousness, or a reef of brainless abstraction, wherein we simply escape for a moment from the trouble of being a conscious creature at all.

Nisos showed how born he was to be an interpreter if not a prophet by his complete acceptance—as from the trunk of
his
spruce-fir he faced the Mistress of Fate as she leaned against the trunk of
her
spruce-fir—of the revelation that our individual destiny is made up of an accumulation of brainless, uninspired,
brown-study
moments of abstraction wherein we cease to be organic living creatures and almost become inanimates, almost become
things of wood and stone and clay and dust and earth, almost become what we were before we were intelligent or instinctive creatures: almost—but not quite!

For, as our young friend looked Atropos in the face, there was permitted to him what is permitted to few among us mortals during our lifetime, namely the realization of what actually happens to us when we fall, as we all do, into these day-dreams. At that moment, as Nisos Naubolides now knew well, all over the surface of the earth there were living creatures, many of them men, women, and children, many of them horses, cattle, lions, wolves, foxes, wild asses and tame pigs, sheep and goats, rats and mice, who were standing or crouching, lying or sitting in one of these brooding trances when dazed and dreaming, we are asleep and yet not asleep.

For Nisos at this moment almost all the inhabitants of the earth, at least such as were not included in his school-
geography-books
, were “blameless Ethiopians”; and what he conjured up at that instant over the entire face of the earth’s surface were millions of men no different from those he knew so well, no
different
from the king and the king’s son, no different from his own father, Krateros Naubolides, or from the old man, Damnos Geraios, or from his own familiar bosom-crony, Tis, the herdsman from the other end of Ithaca, all of whom, as they went about their affairs, fell now and again into these day dreams of fate where, asleep and yet not asleep, they created without knowing it their future destiny.

And as he looked into the eyes of Atropos he seemed to become the blood-brother, the “Kasi”, or school-camerado, of all these day-dreamers, till their dream was his dream, and without any “pomposizing,” or processioning in the manner of Hermes, he became aware that with this whole great multitude, including not only his fellow-men but all creatures upon the earth, he was, without knowing it, living a double life, in fact two quite separate lives, one in this world and one in some other world.

“Why it’s just as if,” he said to himself, “I was in one of those dreams when I
know
I’m dreaming, and
could,
if I wanted
to, wake up, quite naturally, easily, and without any particular effort, rather than go on dreaming.”

He was beginning to feel almost reassured, when suddenly he received an extremely unpleasant and thoroughly disconcerting shock. He beheld those two hovering Horrors make a downward swoop towards the Spruce-Fir against which Atropos was leaning. It was a shock that gave him a very disagreeable
sensation
, a sensation as if his heart-beats, his pulses, his quick-drawn breaths had been pounded into one single blood-dripping welter, and that this welter of automatic physical functionings might at any moment absorb the attention of his whole conscious being.

“What on earth can be going on in her head,” he thought, “to give me such a feeling?” And then without warning, and still under the power of her eyes his entire mind became
concentrated
upon the old Odysseus. “I’m not going to endure,” he thought, “no! not one day longer, this wretched plot that father and Agelaos and the rest of them are working up against the old man. Arsinöe’s with them of course. That’s only natural since she’s a Trojan. But none of the rest of us are Trojans! What’s come into us, what’s come over us, that we’re so against the old man?”

The unpleasant sensation he had just been through of feeling as if the beating of his heart, the flicker of his eyelids, the throb of his pulses, the breath of his lungs, had got mixed together in one raw palpitating bubble of blood-streaked eruption, now began, as Nisos disentangled himself from this reeking
blood-sweating
mass, to take its due proportion in his mind as he connected it with the drowsy passivity of his body, and not only of
his
body, but of all the bodies of all the human and
sub-human
creatures as they pause in their work or in their play, in their hunting or in their fighting, to forget themselves in
day-dreams
and trances.

And it was then that Nisos realized that not only heroes and kings and prophets and soothsayers but all living things are subject to an unseen, unfelt, unrecognized fate, and that it is this fate
whose current flows, above or below, it matters not which, the heart-beats and pulse-beats of the lives of us all.

And the boy finally realized that there are points in our lives that we ourselves think of as turning points, but which, under the eyes of Atropos, the one with whom is no turning, are in reality only the fulfilment of our inherent destiny.

The boy had hardly reached this conclusion when the
threatened
attack began. The Erinys and the Gorgon descended with a sickening stench from their foul throats, with a horrible hissing from their bosom serpents, with an excremental vapour from their festering flesh and putrid scales, and with a screaming and a barking that silenced every bird and every wind.

It had nothing to do with the eyes of Atropos, for they had left him perforce—the instinctive impulse with which the boy now flung himself into the midst of that terrible struggle. The final issue may not have been in doubt; but Nisos was too young, and, just then too wild with desperate courage and too dazed by supernatural shocks to think of anything but his physical contact with that pair of Horrors and with their serpents and their stench and the sounds they made and with their appalling strength.

One comfort he had as he fought on, gasping and sweating, to free that oldest of all the beneficent powers in the world from those two demons, and that was nothing less than her own faint though very clear voice, encouraging him.

Another comfort he had was the uninterrupted humming of small insects round the Lykophos-Mound. These little creatures seemed quite oblivious of what was going on. Up and down across the surface of the rock they flew, dodging one another with quivering antennae and hovering wings; while first one, and then another, snatched a sip of Nectar from between petals of flowers so delicate that from their disturbed rims rose no sounds audible to human ears; though to lesser insects no doubt they sounded with the rain-drop clarity of tiny bells.

But what gave the boy a strength beyond his years was not only the fact that the oldest of all the goddesses was calling upon
him to aid her, but that, although her voice was as faint as the remote sound of the sea-wind in a sea-shell, it was a voice with the most far-reaching echo he had ever heard.

For the echo of the voice of Atropos was no ordinary echo. It was a special and peculiar one, and it responded to every syllable that the old creature uttered; for through the substances of all the material elements of which the Island of Ithaca was composed this small faint echo of the oldest of the Fates could pass. Through substances that seemed bent on resisting its passing this echo easily and naturally passed. The old Fate’s voice went forth first; and then the echo followed it like a faithful disciple doing the will of its master. Passing through everything that resisted them they went on; till they reached the yawning void where all echoes cease.