Atlantis (44 page)

The Fly did listen: and it heard the Pillar tell the club that Poseidon and Aidoneus had decided to break the covenant they once made with Zeus over Atlantis when they allowed him to drown it under the western ocean as a punishment for its refusal to believe he existed. They promised him they would let it stay drowned and that no man should ever cross the place of its drowning. This solemn covenant they have now decided to tear to shreds; and, if it comes to a fight, they say that Two are stronger than One.

“I am wondering,” murmured the Moth, “whether it isn’t my duty to leave you tonight and fly at my best speed to the
Priest of Eros, lest, my duty neglected, some world-disaster may overtake us.”

“If you feel like that, you’d better go to him,” hissed the Fly, in jealous rage. “And leave you alone in here?” “Where I am,” replied the Fly in his metaphysical pride, “there is always Eternity.”

The moth groaned. “I must, but O! it’s so hard, learn to love Eternity;” and she stroked with her left antenna one of the fly’s wings.

But the fly said to himself. “What shall I do if the King takes us down into Atlantis itself? There must be millions of dead flies down there.”

Meanwhile Nisos was walking round and round the great table thinking out very carefully just what he would say to Eione to persuade her to go with them. In his heart he was so
indescribably
relieved at the disappearance not only of his own relations, such as his brother and his brother’s betrothed,
together
with Pandea, his mother, and Nosodea, along with Spartika and the midwife, but of almost all the disputants and contenders of the general public of Ithaca, that he could only listen with amused and sympathetic satisfaction while the King explained to Zeuks that he had decided to put him into full, absolute, and complete charge of the Palace, the Temple, the chief Harbour, the lesser harbours, and all the caves, shrines, sanctuaries, and sacred places of the Island of Ithaca to guard, to hold and to sustain intact, until he, its only lawful sovereign and ruler, should return from his Voyage across the drowned Atlantis; “and take from you again the rights and privileges he now makes over to you and leaves unchallenged in your possession”.

At this point Odysseus laid his hand upon the strange object brought to him by Eione. “The Princess Nausikaa, here present,” he went on, “has consented to accept my company and that of my armour-bearer and Hetairos, Nisos
Naubolides
, together with my friend Okyrhöe the Theban and together with Pontopereia the daughter of Teiresias. At the moment I cannot tell you whether Eione, the sister of my Herdsman Tis,
will also come with us; but I have the Princess’s permission to invite her to do so, and my impression is she
will
do so. Just as I make thee, Zeuks, my vice-regent and sole representative among men, so, among women I leave my old Nurse Eurycleia in absolute and unchallenged control. I must add that there has just come into my possession the Helmet of Proteus, wearing which it will be possible for me to visit drowned Atlantis beneath the very waters that drowned her.”

It was then that Nausikaa rose to her feet and said: “What my Lord Odysseus has told you is the truth.”

“Well,” said Nisos to Akron, the Master of the ship “Teras”, “she’s got through
that
anyway!”

“O she’s a sly old bird, our good black ship, when matters get really serious,” replied Akron, “and there’s another thing about her which I wonder if you’ve noticed; I mean about her motion?”

“I
may
have noticed it and again I may not. Different eyes notice different things.”

“They sure do; and they are also blind to different things. I was blind myself just now when the Pillars of Herakles vanished over the Eastern Horizon.”

“Why, so they have! And I’d been watching so steadily to see them go! It’s no use. You’ll never make a sailor of me.”

“I used to say that very thing once myself! But it passes, Nisos, it passes!”

Nisos looked at him gravely. “I take it you don’t feel the slightest sensation of nervousness, or strangeness, not to speak of simple terror, when from this old black ship of yours you can see no sign or hint or trace of land? Don’t you feel
any
fear, master, when with nothing between you and this black abyss
but a few scrabbled bits of wood, if you don’t mind my saying so, and a few shaky planks blown by the wind and tossed on the wave, you give yourself up to whatever fate awaits you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t deny, my dear lad,” replied Akron, the ship’s master, “that sometimes, now and then,
I
have
that
feeling,
just as we all have when a spear or an arrow comes too close to our head! I get it, for instance, when I see the spouting of a whale, or catch sight of one of those great sharks, or one of those terrifying Hekatoncheiroi, such as Briareos must have looked when he smuggled down in the throne of the heavenly father and spread out on all sides his appalling suckers, each one of which would be capable of squeezing to death a man like you or me.

“But I really think I’ve got over those first sensations of what you might call pure elemental panic. I think I’ve come to be more or less reconciled to there being, as you say, Nisos, so much water under us and so much air above us! But such a lot of water and such an immensity of empty air does make a person feel small.”

“I don’t think,” Nisos went on in a meditative tone, “that its exactly the mass of water, or the infinity of air, that makes us feel small. I think it is the ceasing of accustomed labour and the idleness that leaves the mind free to follow its fancies.”

The ship’s master watched his young passenger with a shrewd eye as he talked in this way. He thought Nisos was trying to make him believe that he was analysing his feelings with the utmost calm, like an experienced traveller recording his reactions when the most dangerous and agitating moments of what he was going through had arrived and passed.

“The kid would like me to think,” he told himself, “that he accepts these monstrous enormities of air and water without one single natural shiver.”

Their ship was named the “Teras” or the “Prodigy” and its master with whom Nisos had already made friends was a man called Akron who came from Lilaia, a town in Phokis, and was of a reserved and reticent but of a decidedly philosophical turn of mind. Akron came, like Tis, of farming stock, and although
his father had kept an Inn in the main street of Lilaia, he had a great-uncle, of about the same age as old Moros, who continued running the family farm.

The second officer, whose name was Thon, had quite a different temperament from Akron and a very different bringing-up. He came of an old military family in Phrygia with a long and turbulent history. The “Teras” had two decks below the top one on which Nisos was standing as he talked with Akron. It was from the upper one of these that the four long oars projected that kept the “Teras” moving when the wind failed.

The mast was fixed in the keel of the vessel and reached up through both the two lower decks to where, on the top-deck, quite close to the spot on which our friend was now talking with Akron, the huge sail, made of the same sort of cloth that Odysseus had tried so desperately to obtain in Ithaca, was now carrying the “Teras” over the waves in a style that must have delighted every true sailor’s heart on board.

The way the vessel was behaving at this moment in a wind almost straight from the South-East, was certainly especially pleasing to the two men who just then were supervising the “protonoi” or “forestays”, the “kaloi” or “halliards”, and the “huperoi” or “braces”. These men were a pair of brothers, whose names, Pontos and Proros, were enough in themselves to suggest seafaring ability, but whose home-harbour, Skandeia in Kythera, was known over all Hellas to breed the best deck-hands in the world.

As he listened attentively and politely, though it must be confessed just a little cynically, to our friend Nisos’ rather prolonged but eloquent discourse on what particular feelings, whether enjoyable or the reverse, were aroused in him by air and water, Akron remained, according to the custom then prevalent in that best of all sea-going Hellenic circles, quietly, though not unsympathetically, detached from the chatter that was proceeding so happily between Pontos and Proros.

Both the brothers from Kythera were small in regard to their bodily form but they were smaller still in regard to the size of
their skulls. Indeed so diminutive were these Kytharean craniums that the most studious and experienced of phrenologists would have been puzzled to say where there was room for any sort of bump of worship or for any sort of bump of mathematics or for any sort of bump of metaphysics in these quaint little rondures that resembled a couple of oak-apples as they kept bobbing up and down, rallying each other and making sport of the entire universe.

The oarsmen in the second deck, above sea-level, were not at that moment using their long, thick, heavy oars, which were the largest oars to be seen at that epoch in any harbour in the world, but had pulled them out of the water and were holding them across their knees while they themselves leant back in their seats, talking, or throwing “astragaloi”, the special kind of dice that sailors preferred, or just settling themselves to sleep. There were four of these oarsmen, a couple for each side of the “Teras” as she breasted the waves, Klytos and Teknon on her starboard side, and Euros and Halios on her port side.

All these four men came from the immediate vicinity of the palace of Nausikaa’s parents and their families were personally well-known to her. It was down on the third deck that the passengers’ cabins were situated; and the present possessors of these cabins had to be selected without any exhausting
consideration
of personal feelings. One of them for instance was shared between Nausikaa and Okyrhöe; and another between
Pontopereia
and Eione; while a third was given up entirely to Odysseus.

The most striking thing about the “Teras” however was not the number of her decks nor the number of her cabins. It was her Figure-Head. If the beard of Odysseus, which already had played its part in one of the queerest palace-plots ever revealed by a chronicler, bore, as has already been noted, a strong resemblance to a ship’s bowsprit, the real bowsprit of the “Teras’, had no sooner entered the harbours of the world than it was recognized as the most striking of all figure-heads known to civilization. It represented a unique creature whose form and shape had been invented by the Ruler of Lost Atlantis who had
concluded the work by placing on the creature’s scaly neck his or her own head with all its striking features.

The name of this Ruler was unknown and the peculiarity of its unusual head was that it was hard to imagine it as the head of any mortal or immortal man, and still harder to accept it as the head of a god or head of the horribly scaly neck to which it was and is attached. This mysterious Being, whose extraordinary features were not those of a man or a god or a beast or a monster, was the author of a long poem about the beginning and the end of everything, a poem which still remains the greatest oracle of man’s destiny existing upon the earth.

The unfortunate thing about this tremendous hieroglyph is that by reason of the drowning of the continent that produced it, and by reason of its being chained with golden chains to the altar of the Hundred and Twenty-Five Gods of that sunken continent, only those who were permitted to read it before the waves covered the altar to which it was bound know anything of its secret; and among these only the Seven Wise Men of Italy have so much as begun to penetrate its contents; and these have only revealed the fact that it is landscape superimposed upon landscape rather than rhythm upon rhythm that is the method of its message.

Since, however, when any of these Seven Wise Men perish the remaining ones appoint successors there is still a hope that in spite of the punishment inflicted by Zeus, the wisdom of Atlantis-will never be entirely lost.

While Nisos was struggling to be as prophetic as he could in his talk to the Master of the “Teras”, Pontopereia, the daughter of a prophet, was doing the same sort of thing, only with more subtlety, in regard to Eione, as the two girls sipped the well-made red wine, mixed with plenty of pure spring-water, with which Nausikaa’s stores provided them, not to mention nibbling a few particularly well-spiced biscuits from Arabia, a taste for which the princess inherited from her mother.

“Oh don’t say
that,
darling Eione! I know so well the feeling you have that drives you to say it; but we women really must learn to slip under or slip over these crude urges of Nature that
lift us off our feet and force us to utter things like that! The great thing is, I know I’m right in
that
anyway, the great thing is always to have
two
lives going; one of them the life we share with our friends, and the other the life we enjoy with our own mind and with our own senses.

“To keep this secret second life going, even while we are living the other to the full, is the supreme trick of existence for girls such as you and I.”

Eione lifted up her shapely legs from the couch where hitherto the two girls had been lying face to face, each pair of bare feet resting motionless against the neck of the owner of the other pair. But the easy nonchalance of that chaste yet familiar position was completely broken up by this provocative movement on the part of Tis’s sister. Their position blotted out from the daughter of Teiresias all view of her companion’s face. All she could see of her now was a couple of white shins and the extremely intimate shadows and outlines between them.

“When you talk of the life we ‘share with our friends’,” enquired a girlish voice from behind these uplifted knees, “do you mean our lovers?”

“Certainly I do,” replied Pontopereia almost sharply, “if we have such idiots; but what was in my mind was nothing as sexual as that.”

“Would you advocate living this double life even after marriage?”

“Most certainly I would! Don’t you see, my sweet, it is only after the actual moment of union has been consummated by the loss of our virginity that men, and women, can make love, as people call it, on equal terms. But does the ecstasy of such embraces so absorb us both as to completely blot out and obliterate our separate identities? Don’t you suppose, my lovely one, that we still go on—I won’t say thinking thoughts that have have no connection with the passionate pleasure we’re enjoying, but thinking such a thought as—‘oh how utterly and entirely this heavenly, this divine sensation beats all other sensations I’ve ever known!’”

“But,” came the voice from behind the upraised legs, that is to say from behind the whole of Eione from the waist down, “but doesn’t what you’re now saying, my friend, reduce the passion of love to an extremity of purely selfish sensation?”

Pontopereia at this drew up her own legs with an abrupt jerk; but straightened her back as she did so, and leaned forward, sitting on her heels, and resting the palms of both her hands upon the uplifted knees of the girl before her.

“I confess, my dear,” she said, “that I’m talking of something of which I’ve had no experience. But surely if this ecstasy of love’s embrace, of which such a lot is made, is as transporting and enthralling as we’re always being told it is, neither of the parties concerned can possibly have the detachment of
consciousness
left inside them to say anything to themselves around or about or above or beneath the absolutely absorbing sensation they are caught up in and which is blinding them to all else?”

A sudden outburst of silvery laughter came from the girlish face upon which, with her hands on the young creature’s knees, Pontopereia now gazed with unpretended admiration.

“Aren’t you confusing,” were the words that issued from that radiant but extremely simple countenance, “what we feel when we’re imagining a love-ecstasy in some hot exciting trance of deliciousness when alone by ourselves with what we feel in our first real love-night?”

“You mean, Eione darling, that when we’re in the act of making love we think more of our lover and more of
his
feelings than of our own?”

“The gods forbid!” cried the excited girl. “Did I hear you utter the word ‘more’? Of course we think ‘more’ of his feelings for us than of ours for him! Isn’t it the delicious heat of his feelings for us that rouses ours and that alone has the power to arouse ours?” Pontopereia perceived that she had indeed entered a sphere of philosophic analysis where more intimate experience than had yet been hers was required if she were to see the thing in proper perspective.

So with a view to changing the subject she changed her physical position and sliding both her own feet to the floor she edged herself along the side of the bed, till bending down above her friend she was able to smooth the girl’s fair hair from her forehead.

“You haven’t half told me, you know, what happened after you rode off with Arcadian Pan and with Eurybia and Echidna. Where on earth did those two leave you? What happened to the horse with the flowing mane? Did Pan himself go down under the waves when you got to the place where the land of Atlantis had been drowned?”

Before beginning any answer to all this Eione thrust her friend’s hand away. “Don’t do that! It makes me nervous! It’s what Thrasonika our school-teacher used to do.”