Atlantis (51 page)

As to the Moth herself, she had no sooner returned to her friend in their familiar refuge than she was compelled to listen to one of those cosmic conversations between the Sixth Pillar and the Club of Herakles which the Fly’s scientific mind always found so fascinating and illuminating.

“You must have noticed already, my dear old friend,” the Sixth Pillar was saying, “how strongly and emphatically the four elements are joining in this multiversial revolt against the authority of the Olympians? Of course there are voices abroad and I can hear them in this corridor who declare that what is now going on is a world-wide revolt of women against men rather than of men against gods or of Titans against Olympians; but with my own personal nearness to the Four Supreme Elements I cannot share these eccentric opinions.

“To me it is clear that what is happening in the multiverse at the present moment is a revolt against Zeus the Son of Kronos by every other power in the wide world! The best proof of this is the definite news that Hera and Athene who have always worked hand in hand are now encouraging Poseidon and
Aidoneus
to join with Zeus in some final desperate act of authority and retribution.

“What I am most conscious of now,” went on the Sixth Pillar, “is the mental awareness of what is going on by each of the Four Elements. Take the earth, to begin with, my good friend.
I assure you I cannot imagine anything clearer or more definite than the vibration of sympathy with the rebels in this cosmogonic revolt which I feel—yes! at this very second as I talk to you I feel it—emanating from the earth! The vibrations I feel, you must understand, my friend, are not spoken words. They are more like the deep, dim rumblings of an earthquake! They are thick and dense and dark, and convey to me something of what animals must feel when they fall and strike their foreheads upon the ground. On the contrary the vibrations I get out of the air are like a mighty rushing wind which seems in the fanning and flapping of its vast feathers to have completely surrounded me and to be carrying me into a boundless void.

“And then what I get out of the heart of the hot black fire of the darkened sun as he travels beneath the earth, and what I get out of the heart of the cold white fire of the ghostly moon as she rides through the clouds, are two infinite throbbings that are like thunder in my own heart!

“And strangest of all is the vibration that emanates from the massed volume of all the waters of the ocean, a vibration that is in many ways more important for us in this corridor of the
rock-palace
of the Island of Ithaca than all the other three; for it is a vibration from an element that resembles air made palpable, air thickened out into a tidal momentum encircling the earth, grey, fathomless, immeasurable, salt with all the tears ever shed, cold and ultimate as a universal grave.”

The monotone of the Sixth Pillar’s discourse as he thus informed his friend the Club of Herakles, to whom Atropos had given the name of “Expectation” and who had always had the name of “Dokeesis” or “Seeming”, how the Four sublime elements of earth, air, fire and water responded to this
world-wide
revolt against the gods had scarcely died down, before there came, reverberating up from the depths of the “Teras”, the second call for supper.

It was the custom on board this particular ship for the white crew and their black helpers to enjoy their evening meal in a haphazard manner, casually, and irregularly, and in no
particular 
order, slipping down by twos and threes to the kitchen in the hold when opportunity offered, and lingering with a friend over a flask of wine down there when the wind was in their sail and the ship was moving quietly.

At the moment therefore when the second call for the supper went forth on this particular evening our young friend Nisos, who was to have a berth that night with the master of the ship so as to give the only remaining one-man cabin to Zeuks, was already wondering whether to obey the call alone or to beg Zeuks and Arsinöe, the latter looking half-asleep as she reposed partly on the knees of the son of Pan and partly against the base of the ship’s figure-head, to accompany him.

If Arsinöe was half-asleep, Zeuks, as far as Nisos could tell, was entirely so, for his eyes were tightly closed and his face had the expression, already familiar to Nisos, that it always assumed when the man was asleep, an expression as if he were some whimsical creator of the world who had dozed off in the act of trying to suppress his amusement at his creation.

Pontos and Proros were playing some private game of their own at the foot of the mast, a game that was clearly one rather of skill than of chance; for they threw no dice, and seemed to be moving little bits of wood from one position to another across some geometrical figure scrawled on the deck.

Nisos had the boldness at this moment, so quietly and silently was the “Teras” being rowed along that rocky coast of the Island of Wone in that unearthly moonlight, to sink down himself upon the old king’s seat of coiled ropes, as he watched in a sort of trance across the slowly changing rocky edges of Wone those two weird figures from Arima, whose unearthly and unending disputation with each other the wind must now be carrying back towards those old Eastern lands they were so steadily leaving as they sailed through the moonlight towards the unknown West.

It was a moment in his life, so our friend told himself, as he tried to arrange his limbs on his pile of ropes as
comfortably
as the king always did, that until his death he would remember.

“I don’t believe I will go down to dinner at all tonight,” he thought, answering, as he fancied, some call out of the moonlight that was more imperative for him than even the second call to the most important meal of the day, and in a flash of interior penetration he recognized that he still couldn’t decide whether it was Pontopereia or Eione he would like best to have for his wife.

“I don’t even know to which of them I am the more attracted! In fact, as I watch Arsinöe now, who is ever so much older than they are, I really think I would feel more at ease and more content if it were she rather than either of those young girls who was to be my mate. And she’s not only older; she’s a Trojan too! Of course I’d be thrilled to make love to either of those girls and overjoyed to sleep with either of them; but I’d be scared of being fixed up for good with that stupid little face of Eione’s or with that heavy little body of Pontopereia’s. I simply can’t understand it! But there it is: it’s the truth. What I feel now is that something—someone—a Presence of some kind—is calling to me out of this moonlight and out of this night-wind and out of these waves, though I’m damned if I know what kind of a Presence it is!

“Come! Tell me, you Unknown! Are you a living girl, you Mystery of the Night? Or are you a boy like me, alone and puzzled and not quite knowing what you want, but not wanting to go back to your mother, and hating your father and brother and your brother’s girl? Are you a boy like me, you Mystery of the Night, serving one of the greatest heroes the world has ever seen and a hero who has seen more of the world than any other human being who has ever been born? Are you a lonely girl who-want me for your mate? Or are you a lonely boy who want me for your ‘Hetairos’ or friend? Speak you Mystery of the Night! Speak and tell me which of the two you are!”

But there was no answer and the Moon grew steadily larger and larger and larger. And as Nisos settled himself deeper and deeper in the centre of that pile of ropes he began to feel as if it were the Moon herself, Selene the Moon-Goddess, who had
selected him, as according to the rumours he was always hearing she had long ago selected Arcadian Pan and as she had lately selected, so the angelic scandal-mongers swore, the Carian shepherd Endymion of Mount Latmos.

He allowed himself to dally with this idea of having really attracted the attention of the Moon-Goddess on this night of all nights when her circle of white magic was full to the brim, until the inhuman murmur from Eurybia and Echidna, neither of whom seemed even remotely affected by their voyage through the air from Arima to Wone, reached such a point in their choreographic accompaniment to his fancy, as if—pair of ancestral Titanesses as they were!—they were about to vary the monotony of their immemorial argument by hopping up and down in the fury of their repartees!

It was at this point that Nisos fancying he saw Arsinöe, still in the arms of the now soundly sleeping Zeuks, throw him an understanding if not a companionable smile, replied to her by kissing his hand.

“I can’t help liking this Trojan girl,” he said to himself; and then, as his gaze returned to Eurybia and Echidna, and from them wandered back to the coast of Wone, and from thence to the moonlight on the ocean, there rushed through his mind like jaggedly forked lightning a startling philosophical speculation.

“Does everything come round in circles and repeat itself? Was there, when people first invented boats and ships, some boy like me ten thousand years ago who lay on a ship’s deck, such as ships were in those days, with only one deck, and only a couple of oarsmen, and a sail made of the skins of seals and wild goats, and said to himself, just as I am saying now: ‘I don’t want to go back to mother and father. I want to serve my King. I want to make love to that girl I saw on that wharf where we moored yesterday!’

“And will there be a boy like me ten thousand years hence who will lie on a much grander deck than this and say to himself: ‘I don’t want to go back to my mother and father! I want to sail round all the known West to the Isles of the Blest!’ That boy
who
was
like me; and this boy who
will
be
like me, shall we three meet in the kingdom of Aidoneus?”

Nisos had only just begun to turn his mind away from thinking about boys like himself ten thousand years before and ten thousand years after, when he saw Arsinöe open her beautiful eyes very wide indeed and give a start that would have waked from sleep anyone in the world save the son of Arcadian Pan who was holding her on his knee.

At the same time Nisos felt himself touched on the shoulder. He twisted his head round, and there before him in the
moonlight
stood the figure of Odysseus!

“Hush!” whispered the old hero while his bowsprit beard tickled Nisos’ chin: “get up as quietly as you can, my boy, and take a step with me!”

It was a comfort to Nisos to notice when he was on his feet that his friend Arsinöe had been shrewd enough to shut her eyes and pretend to surrender herself to what certainly looked like a sleep as deep as Zeuks’ own.

“I won’t take you with me just now further than the ladder, my boy,” said Odysseus still speaking very quietly. “I came to fetch ‘Expectation’, my most valued weapon, with which, as you know, Herakles killed the Nemean lion. But I also came to tell you what my intention is. I have already told Akron, who is at this moment informing the oarsmen what I have in mind, and I have already told Eumolpos the helmsman. My intention is this. My son Telemachos received, when he visited the yellow-haired Menelaos, as a guest-gift from Helen herself, a little phial of Nepenthe which was given to her by the King of Egypt.

“When even a few drops of this divine Nepenthe, the enemy of all suffering, are dropped into wine, the wine into which the Nepenthe has been poured, takes away all thoughts that bring anxiety or pain or fear or doubt or suspicion or grief or envy or hatred or terror; and in place of these a beatific happiness fills our souls to the brim.

“A little of this precious Nepenthe goes a very long way; and I have brought some of it with me to this ship. Now what I
propose to do is to put a few drops of this divine drug into the wine which our four Ladies, together with Nausikaa’s official Herald, will presently be drinking in my cabin. You and I, however—and for heaven’s sake, child, don’t you go and get caught by the fragrance of the wine or lured into letting the least drop of it touch your tongue!—as soon as we see that the four ladies and Nausikaa’s Herald have fallen asleep and are deep sunk in this blessed Elysium of happy visions, having taken good care—and don’t you forget that part of it, my son!—to eat enough to last us, if need be, for a whole night and day, we, I say, will leave that lower deck and come up here, to be ready for, well, for whatever fate may bring!”

They had by this time reached the ladder which descended to the deck of the rowers, and it was not until Odysseus was half-way down that the necessity of asking him a most drastic and necessary question forced Nisos to make the old man turn round and lift up his head towards him. Never did the lad, through all the rest of his mortal days, forget the impression he received at that second as the unearthly luminosity of that night’s omniscient moonlight poured down upon that old upturned face with that crazy “Helmet of Proteus” twisted about it, whereof the absurdly trailing “thusanoi”, or “tassels” looked in that silvery gleaming as if they were the “tassels” of Athene’s “aegis” transformed into long, slenderly-coiling, silvery worms.

“Do you wish me, my king,” Nisos enquired, getting the words out with a gasping rush of breath, “to inform Zeuks of your intention? Is
he
to share your Nepenthe with the Herald and the four ladies? Or shall I tell him of your intention and recommend him to bring down the Trojan maid Arsinöe to wait on the four ladies and to share their supper and the sleep-giving wine?”

“You have done well in thinking as you have,” answered the voice of the king from the white face above that moonlit beard. “Bring them both down to my cabin. We’ll let them both sleep the sleep of Nepenthe. After all it was the gift of Helen.”

A couple of minutes later, Nisos was standing close to what clearly had become an extremely agitating game of
contending figurines above whose “Pessoi”, or “inanimate
men-at-arms
”, Pontos and Proros were now bending in intense concentration.

But Nisos was too occupied just then in obeying Odysseus to feel the faintest desire to “pessenize”. “Arsinöe!” he called out in a clear though not a loud voice. The girl heard him at once. “What’s the matter?” she asked, disengaging herself from the knees of the son of Pan and rising to her feet.