Atlantis (62 page)

Nisos was tempted to cry out for Arsinöe. “It’s funny,” he thought, “that all death calls for women; and yet all life depends on women!”

“Is the Pillar saying anything to the Club about our landing?” he asked the dying Fly, feeling instinctively that it would like to die talking.

But the Moth being dead and its own end near the Fly was disinclined to report on the world-events. “I have been
thinking
,” he whispered, “about our burial; and it is of this I wish to speak.”

“I take it,” said Nisos, “you mean yours and the Moth’s?”

“I do,” whispered the Fly.

“Have you decided upon the exact spot?”

“I have.”

“Do I know it?”

“You do.”

“You don’t mean the Sea?”

“No! No! No! No!”

“Where do you mean?”

“Put your ear close.”

Nisos obeyed, though it meant his pressing rather awkwardly against the motionless Zeuks. “You don’t mean you want me to finish you off first?”

“Of course,” groaned the Fly. “Don’t you understand that I’m done for and want to—to—be in one blob
with
her
?”

“Blot did you say?”

“Call it what you like. I
said
blob.”

“Where is it you want me to bury you both?”

“I want to be swallowed. I want to go into a god’s stomach.”

At this point Zeuks lifted his head with a chuckle. “I am no god of flies,” he said, “but I can follow this little beggar’s buzzing. Squeeze the two of them into a pellet and I’ll swallow it right now!”

Nisos gravely and reverently obeyed. With his finger and
thumb he killed the Fly; and then of its body and of the body and the surviving wing of the Moth he made one blot or blob and held it towards Zeuks.

“Kiss it!” murmured the great-grandson of ever-youthful Maia.

Nisos kissed it and placed it between the lips of Zeuks who swallowed it with a pleased smile.

“Kiss
me
!”

Nisos again obeyed and kissed the grandson of Hermes with so much feeling that a tear fell on a cheek that looked as if it might at any moment be split from one side to the other by a burst of profane amusement. When this world-deep bubble of
irrepressible
jocularity had subsided, Zeuks, who was far too weak to do anything but just murmur the words, told Nisos that it was curious to think that at this moment all over the world there were entities dying in their loneliness, who were without a friend to help them and who had moreover an awareness of their loneliness that was so definite and clear that it was painful to think about it. “When you consider‚” Zeuks murmured, but Nisos could see, below the tragic pity of his words, a bubble of such defiant, mischievous merriment bursting through the whole body of the man that it seemed to arise out of the heart of life itself, “when you consider all the men and women and all the beasts, fishes, birds, reptiles and insects, isn’t it awful to think of creatures dying in the panic terror of loneliness? Did you know, my friend”—Zeuks’ speech by this time was so low that Nisos had to bend down to catch it—“that there are vibrations from one organism to another throughout the entire universe? Well! There are!
And do you know what I’m going to do now? And please don’t disturb me in it! I give you my word I’ll die the moment I’ve done it. I’m going to tell every dying one in this whole crazy and confounded world that they’ve got me, Zeuks, the son of
Pan,
that is to say of the rebel who is everywhere,
on
their
side
against
Z
eus
‚
and that the best way of fooling him and the whole lot of them is to die laughing, yes! laughing at this big, bloody, beggarly joke of a world! Stand back now, my dear!”

Nisos simply and silently obeyed the fellow; but the burst of stored-up ribaldry with which Zeuks died was so explosive that there was no corpse left to bury or burn. Out of world-dust he’d come, and into world-dust he dissolved, and the tiny blob of insect lovers he’d swallowed, melted with him into thin air.

Long afterwards Nisos and Arsinöe would spend hours asking each other about their memory of that landing. “What exactly did you feel,” that luckiest of middle-aged Prophets would cry, “when Odysseus stopped us from lifting a finger against the Red-Skins crowding round us? Do you remember how he looked when he came back to us, after talking with them in some words they understood that he’d picked up, Heaven knows where, to tell us that we’d landed on a place called Manhattan, whose Ruler was a very very old Queen called Nokomis, whose only child had already sailed away to a Kingdom they called Ponemah, which was the land of the Wind they called Keewaydin? And, O my Love, my Life,
you
know as
I
know what we both felt when he cried aloud to us all, he, Odysseus, the son of Laertes, among all those Red-Skins: ‘Now that our wind from the East has dropped at last, and the only wind that we feel is the North West wind Keewaydin, shall we hoist our sail again? Never, never, never, never! Come my friends, all of you, white, black, yellow, and red, let us pour out all our wine upon her and then burn her! Yes, let us burn our ship!’”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset–Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. In addition to his
Autobiography
his masterpieces are considered to be
Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands
and
Porius
. But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn’t be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.