Atlantis (26 page)

By this time Zeuks had reached the climax of his singular outburst. He was still on his feet; but he was standing in a manner in which we can be absolutely certain no Grecian orator had ever stood before while addressing a crowd. One foot was on his chair and the other on the floor.

This sounds harmless and conventional enough; but it only does so because we have not yet realized that owing to Zeuks’
lack of height and his chair’s antique height, his upraised knee was on a level with his chin. Nor was this all; for Zeuks’ incurable indifference to the decencies of human dignity combined with his flagrant and absolutely unashamed fondness for his own physical person from head to foot, resulted in a very quaint issue: for seeing his knee so extremely near his mouth, much nearer than human knees generally are to human lips he clutched it with his two hands and digging his chin into it and pressing his clenched teeth against it he began muttering and murmuring
through
his teeth, for his teeth being tightly clenched he wasn’t biting his knee, a strange rhapsody of self-enjoyment.

To all but one of the company then present this curious chant of ecstatic self-possession was inarticulate; but to the club of Herakles it was not only wholly audible but wholly intelligible.

“At last,” said the Club to himself, “I hear the language uttered, which, if I were the ruler of the world, I would cause to be the language of the world!”

What the club heard as articulate speech could not be set down in the syllables of any tongue that was spoken then on the surface of the earth or has been spoken since; but it consisted of a groaningly murmured, thickly muttered, grindingly hoarse, creakingly wooden, scrapingly rocky, clangingly metallic, and also, naturally enough considering that our friend was
rhapsodizing
into the hardness of his own knee, a satisfyingly
onomatopaeic
paean.

The drift of what Zeuks was chanting had undoubtedly to do with that same “prokleesis” whose secret he had tried to
interpret
; only this was an attempt to turn his own body into a drum or trumpet or clarionet, or whatever it might be, that like some vocal sea-shell or land-shell transformed the heavy material sounds of rock against rock, root against root, earth-mass against earth-mass, sea-sand against sea-sand, through which the sixth Pillar from its fixed abode in that old corridor at home was able to communicate with the club of Herakles.

“Enorches”—Zeuks chanted at last, in a deep, rich, resonant voice, lifting his head from his knee and clasping that symbol of
eternal supplication with the fingers of both his hands—“Enorches is the unhappiest man on earth! Anyone who
understood
to the full the real nature of the unhappiness of Enorches would die of pity. But this much, my friends, it is permitted to me to tell you; and tell it you I must since the knowledge of it is of the very essence of the supreme ‘prokleesis’ you are making with me, or if you prefer, I am making with you, here tonight.

“Enorches is deliberately lying when he says that Eros and Dionysos together redeem the world. He implies that they do this, one or the other of them, or both together, as the salvation of mankind, by means of mystical love or mystical intoxication. He implies they do it so utterly and completely that ordinary self-control, ordinary kindness, ordinary decency, ordinary honesty, ordinary courtesy, ordinary generosity, are rendered totally and wholly unimportant when these two mystical ecstasies are at work; and that it is in fact as an alternative to the good, the true, and the beautiful, that these celestial manias and heavenly drugs fill the entire stage and obsess the whole nature of man’s consciousness.

“Now the diabolical lie beneath all this is the implicit
assumption
that we love to the point of ecstasy and drink to the point of ecstasy in order that life shall go on in the universe indefinitely and without end. Now the real secret purpose and the real secret motive actuating Enorches is the extreme opposite of this.

“What he really hates with a hatred that is co-existent with his uttermost being and with the uttermost being of what he hates is nothing less than
Life
itself.
His praise of Eros and Dionysos, that is to say his glorification of Love and Intoxication as
Substitutes
for all other forms of Worship, is really a grand and supreme indulgence in deliberate lying. The one secret aim and the one final intention of this crafty Priest of Orpheus is to destroy all Life utterly and forever!

“In the depths of his own being he is so scooped-out by despair, so bled white by abysmal unhappiness that he has only one desire left, the desire that Life once and for all and in every place
under the sun and moon, and upon and within and below the earth, should be destroyed and brought to an end forever!

“Yes, what this Priest of the Mysteries aims at is that there shall no longer be any Mystery—in other words that there should no longer be any
life.
What he recognizes as the uttermost reality of his own destructive and negative nature is a fathomless, yawning void, an open mouth, a gulf, an abysmal hole; and this in-sucking shaft leads not to any kind of Being, but to that nameless opposite of all existence that can only be called
Not-Being
.

“Here, therefore, down in the depths of this priest’s nature, is something much deeper and much nearer an absolute than Death; for Death, after all, implies that something has lived or it could not have died; but in this man’s nature, when we go down to the very depths of it, we find
that
which can in reality have no ‘nature’ of any sort at all, for it is Nothingness Itself.

“Yes! What this self-styled Priest of Orpheus really feels, in his absolute and abysmal despair, is that it would have been infinitely better if there had never been any Life at all. But since life
has
appeared, what this Priest of the Mysteries would wish to see happen would be for the whole miserable mass of it to plunge headlong down and vanish in the Nothingness out of which it ought never to have emerged!”

While Zeuks let himself go in this sweeping diatribe they all watched him carefully in their different ways—Odysseus watched him as a steersman in dubious weather watches a distant horizon. Nisos watched him as an amorist might watch the eyes of one girl through the transparent body of another. The pregnant woman watched him as if he were a cock crowing on a
dung-heap
. Old Moros watched him as if he were a dog going too close to a trap that ought long ago to have been sprung. Zenios watched him as if he were an itinerant musician, spoiling an opportunity for a good stroke of business.

Okyrhöe watched him, thinking: “I must make them stay and I must give
him
something to lie on in the Mirror-Room.” Pontoporeia watched him, thinking: “Yes, I agree with this
absurd ‘prokleesis’ up to a point; but he doesn’t make it
personal
enough, for it ought to be some way, some mood, some turn of the mind, some twist of the reason, that would help you when you wanted to make friends with a person.”

And finally, while the club of Herakles, still leaning against the elbow of that narrow seat cut out of the pre-historic wall, watched him, thinking: “how annoying if he starts a vibration that brings me crashing down!” Zeuks felt as if an irresistible unseen power compelled him to fling back his head and to gaze out into the darkness through a half-open door; and though the lights about him made the darkness outside absolute, the same power that compelled him to lift his head forced him to treat that darkness as if it were the whole vast immeasurable bulk of the massed material of the thick-ribbed earth, ridge upon ridge, hill upon hill, mountain upon mountain, towering up in its enormity to a toppling height, high above the encircling ocean that encompasses all, forced him to treat it as if it were this, and at the same time forced him to plunge into it and with his soul gathered together to break through it, to cleave it, to wrench his way through it, until he reached a certain particular spot on the earth’s surface.

What particular spot? Ah! That’s the point! “That’s what has been”—and it was Zeuks himself who flung this
jaggedly-splintered
shaft of rending interjection into the thick bulk of that darkness—“What has been led up to in all this”—for the spot he was being forced to visit was nothing less than a stone shed near-by with a massively-closed iron-barred door in which Pegasos had been imprisoned ever since Odysseus released him.

In this shed, tied by the neck, Pegasos was at that moment groaning piteously and twisting his head from side to side; for the rope that tied him crossed and re-crossed and chafed
abominably
that raw part of his shoulder from which the wing had been torn and from which even yet dark drops of blood, mingled with ichor, were trickling down.

Slowly therefore now, in spite of all the eyes that were upon him, Zeuks rose, and deliberately crossing the hall to the open
door through which that unknown force had just drawn his soul into the palpable darkness, he resolutely, but still slowly and very quietly, left the company and went out. Once outside and alone in the air it was not nearly so dark, and it didn’t take him long to discover the stone shed where in the haste of their arrival Pegasos had been tied up. It was still necessary, however, to get some kind of torch or lantern; and with this in view he made his way, led by the smell of the fragrant smoke to where Nemertes was already drying, after having cleaned and washed with the exquisite care and nicety exacted by Zenios of all who touched his possessions, the vast array of plates and dishes used at
tonight’s
supper.

She certainly was a shrewd and intelligent woman, this mother of Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos; and now when Zeuks entered her domain to get a light so as to deal with Pegasos, and found her directing her three sons in the complicated task of piling up and putting away all this precious crockery, he was conscious of being delivered, merely by drawing her attention to his situation, from a whole load of tiresome responsibility.

She told him at once to fetch Pegasos out of that cold and dark shed and to bring him into the kitchen; and when he obeyed her and they had tied this mutilated and one-winged creature, who had once flown above the turrets of Arabia and the domes of China and the pyramids of Egypt and had
distended
its quivering nostrils in its flight to catch the enchanted odours that are wafted down on certain human midnights from the ghostly valleys of the moon, to one of the shadowy
meat-hooks
that broke the flickering fire-lit surface of those friendly walls, it was easy to see from the immortal animal’s grateful eyes as they were turned first to one and then to another till they finally rested on the woman herself, that the prospect of a night behind the cyclopean pre-historic walls of Ornax after his windy lodging on the outskirts of Cuckoo-Hill was now wholly congenial to him.

Nemertes hesitated not to take entire possession of Zeuks at once and to tell him exactly what he had better do if he wished his one night in Ornax to be really a pleasant one.

“You will have to sleep in the porch of the Chamber of the Mirror so as to be a guard for the sleep of the Mistress. This will be the sleeping arrangement with which nothing must interfere; but if you, my Lord Zeuks, and you, my Lord Pegasos, agree to accept this arrangement, it is in my power to give
you
”—and she turned to Zeuks—“and
you
”—and she stroked the great free beautiful useless unhurt wing of her animal-visitor which now trailed across a third of the floor, “the peacefullest sleep you’ve ever had in your lives.”

“Give us this?” enquired Zeuks in his most cheerful and humorous intonation.

“How will you give us this?” asked Pegasos with his appealing eyes.

And the woman answered by immediate action. She went to a great brazen receptacle in a corner of the kitchen and scooped up two handfuls of oats which she forthwith presented to the winged horse, who reverently swallowed them. Then she lifted the lid of a substantial chest made of sycamore wood from the main-land and brought out a small loaf. This she deliberately broke into four pieces, one big piece and three small pieces; and handing one of the small pieces to each of her sons who straightway began munching and masticating it with intense satisfaction, she gave the large piece to Zeuks who promptly kissed it and crammed it into his mouth, but allowed half of it to remain in one cheek, and half of it in the other, un-chewed and un-swallowed.

It was at this point that Zeuks noticed a hurried whispered conversation going on between Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos; and before he had made up his mind whether to ignore what he perceived or to boldly ask them what was the matter, Omphos, the eldest of the three, crossed the kitchen with obvious
nervousness
, while Pegasos, answering this respectful courtesy with equal consideration, did his best to move his unhurt wing out of the young man’s way.

When Omphos reached Zeuks he stood in front of him like an earnest-minded school-boy summoned for an oral examination;
and Nemertes couldn’t help noting how quaint it was to see the two cheeks of this examiner of young men bulging so auspiciously for his own future enjoyment but rendering him practically inarticulate before an academic questioner.

But the question asked by Omphos was a simple one. “Could you tell us, my Lord Zeuks, exactly what you thought of when you say we must still practise ‘prokleesis’ though we were soon going to be cut to pieces by those pirates?”

What Zeuks desired to do at this point was first to use his tongue to push both halves of that delicious little loaf into one bulging cheek, and then with that same tongue to discourse so eloquently on the practice of “prokleesis” when you were
watching
people tortured or when you were being tortured yourself, that not only Omphos but his sympathetic brothers and possibly even their wise mother would decide to try how it worked in the ordinary vexations of every day.

But all he could blurt out at the moment was: “Of course nobody can bear more than a certain amount of pain; and if you’re watching its infliction on others there comes a point when you break out or go raving mad; but nothing helps anyone to endure what
can
be endured more than forcing yourself to feel in the way ‘prokleesis’ makes you feel: for when you feel like this it isn’t the cruel enemy or executioner or torturer or murderer you are defying; it is Life itself!