Atlantis (3 page)

And where this impulsive flutterer made her mistake was in speaking so carelessly about Ash-Trees and Pine-Trees that the natural implication was left upon the atmosphere that the only difference between them was that one was the haunt of Nymphs and the other of Lions.

But the savage beast with whose brains the Club of Herakles had sprinkled the pine-needles of the Nemean Wood had never made a more violent sign of fury than the heavy thud with which the Club struck the paving stones of that palace-porch or the harsh groan with which it bade the terrified little flutterer “get back to your Priest of Blasphemy and your Father of Lies!”

Out into the dawn flew in deadly silence Pyraust, the brown moth, while Myos, the black house-fly, spread his gauzy wings and with the tense buzzing sound that always, for all its low pitch, suggested the impetus of a classic messenger, flew in
pursuit
of her to the Temple of Athene.

It was at this moment that the cow-herd Tis stretched himself with a comfortable groan and rising to his feet lifted up first his bare right leg and then his bare left leg, supporting them against the base of the third pillar, while he fumbled for his sandals. He had been sleeping in his single garment, his
shirt-tunic
or “chiton”, and he now surveyed his companion, the boy Nisos, who, asleep in a similar garment, though fashioned a little differently as befitted not only his fewer years but his nobler birth, had been so suddenly submerged in sleep that though the cords that bound his sandals to his ankles had been loosened and now trailed over the flag-stones, the sandals
themselves
remained on his feet.

Tis regarded the sleeping boy with friendly amusement for a moment. Then he shook him gently by the shoulder. “
That
girl
will be down here in a moment,” he said. “In fact I keep thinking I hear her step. Of course neither she nor Leipephile would worry about me if I were like you a son of Naubolos who claims to have more right to be King of Ithaca than Odysseus himself.

“But if I were your elder brother or your uncle that girl Arsinöe would still throw her witch-look on me just the same as she does on you. She hates us all, and not altogether without—God! master Silly-Boy! wake up for Hermes’ sake! Tie your
sandal-strings
tight!” As he spoke the Cow-herd disentangled the boy’s sandal from the cords of the mattress on which the lad had been sleeping and helped him to get his foot into it.

“Has Babba been making a noise?” enquired Nisos somewhat irritably. “The old lady ought to be ashamed of herself,” he went on, “if she has been raising hell again just because her damned udders are too full. Didn’t I hold on to my bladder when it was nigh to bursting yesterday when mother sent me to the Temple to see Stratonika and I had to wait till her morning chant was finished and she’d put off her garlands and black ribbons in the porch?

“How ridiculously different from one another women are, Tis! Who would ever have imagined that Stratonika was Leipephile’s
Sister? It seems just simply crazy to me whenever I think about it. I can’t help rather liking Leipephile myself. It’s the way she smiles at you when you tease her; as much as to say: “of course, kid, I know perfectly well you’re much cleverer than I am; and I’m a bit of an idiot; and I know that the great House of Naubolides is much grander than we Pheresides can ever claim to be; but yet,” so her looks seems to say, “you and I, Nisos Naubolides, are born to understand each other. That’s what the gods have willed that you and I should understand each other!”

The boy was now engaged in smoothing down his blue-black hair with a small ivory comb which he drew from an interior pocket of his “chiton” and the odd fancy crossed the patient mind of Tis that his own left eye upon which Nisos seemed to have concentrated his gaze had suddenly become a mirror, but a mirror that didn’t interfere with his keeping both his own eyes firmly fixed on the boy’s face. “It’ll be your brother Agelaos she’ll soon have to understand, if what Eurycleia told me the other day is true,” muttered Tis carelessly.

“O I know all
that
,”
cried Nisos; “and Agelaos is as simple as Leipephile! It’s Mummy and me who are the clever ones. You should hear us confabulating in the kitchen when she’s stewing pears and how I say something about Leipephile and she says something about Agelaos and how we both laugh. Dad has no more idea than Agelaos how mother and me talk about them and what we say and how we laugh; but naturally”—here the boy gave the cow-herd a very searching and very quick look—“naturally it’s different between
us,
Tis. You’re the oldest friend I’ve got; and I’ll never have another like you. However! We are what we are, Tis, old partner—you the perfect cow-herd and me Eurycleia’s clever little House-help—and if dreams mean anything some very queer happenings are on the wind. Do you know what I was dreaming when you woke me up? No, no! I’ll tell you later! There’s Babba making that noise again! Don’t let’s wait here, Tis. I’ll come out with you. I’ve got to see mother anyway before I help Leipephile with the old
man’s breakfast. So I’ll come down the road with you to the Milking-Shed and then I’ll go on to Aulion. I’d better run in at Druinos as I pass its gate. My mother and Leipephile’s mother tell each other everything! Dad and my brother can’t
understand
how everything they say to each other is known all over the island.

“But what can you expect from two elderly well-to-do mothers with trained servants and children as grown-up as Stratonika and Leipephile on the one hand and my brother Angelaos on the other, and with nothing to do but comment on what other people are doing and saying?

“I call it perfectly natural and right. Why shouldn’t our mothers have their little pleasures when they are too old to make love? I don’t like these Temple-chanters who blame Nosodea and my mother for exchanging tales about their husbands and children. I know well how stupid Dad and Agelaos are; and we all know what a funny old customer Damnos Pheresides is! who in the name of Aidoneus can say what goes on in that queer-shaped head?

“If I were Leipephile’s mother I should certainly want to talk to
somebody
about my husband.” The shrill boyish voice of Nisos Naubolides drifted away between the olive-trees till it was lost among the slaves’ graves. Very soon both that youthful voice and the cow-herd’s hoarse responses to it were lost in Babba’s call to be milked.

Even the Sixth Pillar, whose unusual consciousness had been at once fortified and dulled by its bewildered ponderings upon those two deeply-engraved letters, that “U” and that “H”, which had in the early times appeared on its base, could no longer hear a sound.

Little big-eyed Myos the house-fly, was gone; indeed he was at this moment waylaying in the porch of Athene’s Temple in defiance of the Priest of Orpheus his pathetically frail
acquaintance
Pyraust, the brown moth. Thus the most intelligent
consciousness
left just then in the Porch of the Palace—for the five younger Pillars were even more lacking in response to anything
outside their own substance than their venerable comrade the Sixth Pillar who at least had kept up an interest in the letters “U” and “H” for a few thousand years—was the half-burnt pine-wood Club of Herakles, whose heavy head and almost feminine bosom as they rested between those fragments of quartz while the movements of the man and boy were still causing vibrations through the substance of the flagstone, lost no
opportunity
of swaying consequentially, and pontifically, first to one side and then to the other of their narrow enclosure.

It was indeed with almost a sacerdotal alternation between east and west or left and right, and with a quaint blend of judicial finality and suspended fatalism, that the Club of Herakles acted the part of Guardian of the Gate that early Spring morning.

Thus it was with a shrewdly expectant acceptance of the worst rather than a mischievous enjoyment of what was happening at the moment that the Club listened to a light step descending the unseen stairs to the door behind the throne and watched the stealthy opening of this same door and the emergence
therefrom
of a plaintively wistful middle-aged woman who looked as if she would have more willingly reconciled herself to
welcoming
the last dawn that would ever reach this earth than the particular one which was now removing the kindly veil of
darkness
from the repetitive horror of life.

The Pillars in the corridor were by no means evenly placed. They were indeed so divergently and so erratically arranged that they resembled the sort of massive supports that might have been found in the crypt of some sea-king’s palace beneath the floor of the ocean, the building of which had been disturbed by the movement of sea-monsters.

The expression in the woman’s face as she made her way from the inner door to the entrance was only too familiar to all the dwellers in that house. It was indeed the expression of such an enduring quarrel with existence that there was not one among them who would not—whatever words he or she might utter with their lips—breathe a sigh of gratitude to the gods on her behalf if they heard of her death. “The poor thing has gone
whither she longed to go!” would have been the instinctive feeling of them all.

As the woman now threaded her way to the entrance she glanced apprehensively at every pillar she encountered; and in the case of the second one and the fourth one she slipped
cautiously
round them, as if to make sure that nobody was watching her. She wore the sort of robe or “peplos” that by means of the way a certain fold was draped over the curve of one of her breasts left room for a secret pocket at that particular place where a pair of scissors, or a knife, or a dagger, could be quite comfortably and easily concealed.

What this forlorn creature carried hidden in the fold of her foreign-looking garment on this eventful morning was as a matter of fact known to none, not even to the Club of Herakles. It was a carefully sharpened carving-tool of the sort used by
wood-carvers
. But what increased the self-conscious caution of this secretive woman’s movements was the awkward bundle she carried in her bare arms wrapped in a linen cloth.

Whatever this object may have been it agitated the forest nerves of the once root-inspired club; for the club was naturally, since its flesh was made of wood, hostile to every metallic object and it recognized at once that whatever the girl was carrying it was something made of bronze. Bronze or not bronze the woman kept pressing it tightly to the pit of her stomach, while every now and then she gave a sharp jerk with her bare shoulder when that carving-tool in the fold of her robe scraped against her soft skin through its covering.

Safely past the great club, whose judicial watchfulness changed to angry perturbation as it felt her passing, Arsinöe, the Trojan, whose father was Hector, and her mother a sister of that Dolon who had been slaughtered so unmercifully by Diomed so that his weapons and all he wore might be offered up by Odysseus as a pious offering to Athene, found herself among the graves of the slaves and among the olive-trees that bordered on the graves.

Safely past both graves and olives, and clearly keeping a definite purpose in her tense brain the Trojan captive directed
her steps to an uncultivated tract of wild country, about a mile square, which was avoided by all the people of Ithaca.

This particular expanse of ground was unploughed and unsown; nor was it planted with fruit-bearing trees or with
nut-bearing
trees or with any grain or any flowers. A few very ancient oaks and ash-trees and poplars had grown there for ages and there were several reedy swamps where the mud had a brackish smell though the sea was more than a mile away and where there were strangely-stalked mosses that looked as if they had grown there along with antediluvian marsh-lichens which had been the food of creatures so monstrous that the mind shrinks from picturing them.

At any rate the natives of Ithaca had for unchronicled
generations
avoided this particular square mile. It had come to be known as Rima or Arima, though these musical syllables had no known connection with the mysterious tribe of a
similar-sounding
name to which reference is made in certain ancient poems; and it was avoided for a very definite and particular reason. It had, as a matter of fact, become the “Temenos”, or consecrated shrine, of two fearful Beings who must have been worshipped as Deities in Ithaca long before the Golden Age of Kronos, and long before any dweller in the island had so much as heard of Zeus and his thunderbolts.

Not only was this weird expanse of haunted ground the “Temenos” or dedicated shrine of these two strange Beings, but it was the immemorial stage of an unending argument between them, a sort of phantom-ritual, not between two worshippers but between two objects of worship. They were both female Deities and what must have been in pre-historic days their
unqualified
hideousness had been blurred and clouded, and, if such a word can be used, be-ghosted, by the passing of time, as the most horribly shaped rocks can be overgrown by congenial funguses.

One was Eurybia, whose name means “far-flung force”; and the other was Echidna whose name simply means “the Serpent”. Eurybia was the grandmother of Hecate; while Echidna was the
mother of the Chimera and of the Hydra and of Cerberus, and also of the Lion of Nemea, not so very long since destroyed in its savage old age by the introspective Club of Herakles, whose
repose
between his two quartz pillows had been disturbed only an hour ago by this tragic captive concerned with nothing but her carving-tool and the mysterious bronze object wrapped so
carefully
in its linen cloth.

The shrine of the Grandmother of Hecate was on the lower level of this mile of unfertile land. Indeed it overlooked the most frightening portion of the haunted swamp where any imaginative intruder might well fancy that he caught shadows and reflections in the black water and among the swaying reeds of hovering ghosts that had drifted down the ages from an epoch in which mortal men by day as well as by night had to struggle with creatures whose limbs were not only deathly cold but had a saurian effluvium from centuries of reptilian life in salt-marshes, where terraqueous abortions of both sexes embraced and
devoured
one another. The shrine of the Mother of the Chimera was in a different position, although there was only a quarter of a mile between them.