Atlantis (7 page)

It was certainly a pitiful old face that looked out at him from that mouldering recess; but he had known it now for all the years since Penelope died; and though in its lines and wrinkles, and in its scooped out hollows where soft feminine flesh should be, and in its bony protuberances where beguiling girlish dimples should be, it was a ghastly enough mask of the ravaging power of time, it had the same strangely preoccupied look it always had.

It was a beautiful face—no! not “beautiful” exactly—say rather haunting with its own special kind of poignant wistfulness—and it wore a permanent expression that betrayed the Dryad’s incurable inability to lose herself in any love or worship or devotion or absorbing affection that implied the sacrifice of the smallest fraction of that larger half of her conscious life that was given up to her struggle to be a tender nurse, not only to all the wild vegetation within her reach, but to the innumerable
offscourings
of animal, vegetable and even mineral life about her, that seemed to her queer mind to be in need of a friend.

Arrived at the hollow oak the old king thrust the torch he carried into the ground, where its quiet flame, now that the gust of wind had subsided, burned as steadily as a large candle. “There’s so much, Odysseus, to tell you‚” the Dryad began, “that I don’t know where to start. Kleta-Charis, my
name-mother
, has been here: that’s the chief thing I wanted to tell you. She was resting for the night in that cave of yours belonging to the Naiads where Athene helped you to hide your treasure when you returned to slay the suitors.”

“And where, now, old lady,” the king interrupted. “I am building my ship for my last voyage! But what did
Kleta-Charis
say? Don’t ’ee be afraid to tell me, old friend. I know of myself from what I’ve been feeling all night that there’s
something
new and strange on the wind; though whether from East or West the storm is coming, and whether Zeus or Poseidon is behind it I’ve not yet learnt.

“What I cannot understand is why my friend Athene hasn’t come to tell me what has been happening tonight. In all my life until now she has always come to me at a great crisis. Is it so serious, do you suppose, Kleta-Dryad, that she has been
summoned
by the gods of Olympos to a grand council? Or has she gone to the East, whither the great gods were always accustomed to go at this time of year, to receive worship and reward
worshippers
among the blameless Ethiopians?”

“Sit down on this, my child,” and the lady of the oak leaned forward from her hiding-place and using both of her long emaciated arms spread out on the dark mosses and small ferns between them the skin of a recently dead wolf.

“Kleta-Charis,” murmured the old Dryad in a low hoarse voice, and it was clear to her hearer that she spoke with an effort and with a grim determination to let him hear the worst at once, “Kleta-Charis told me that the great gods were at this hour in such extreme danger themselves that they had no time to think of the fate of their votaries and champions. She said that the whole of Tartaros has broken loose, and that in their first attempt to resist this upheaval, Zeus and Poseidon, blind with anger,
raised up such a world-swallowing sea-wave that it swallowed the whole continent of Atlantis; and that the cities of Atlantis with all their populations had now sunk into Hades, where, if Aidoneus reigns still—but does he, Odysseus, does he reign in Hades still?—he ought to be marshalling them in their due order and bringing their leaders and chieftains, and especially those among them who were unjust and cruel, before the
judgment-seats
of Rhadamanthus and Minos.”

The old Dryad, having poured out all this in one breath save for a gasp at the word “Atlantis” and another at the word “Aidoneus”, sank down on her knees in the inside of the hollow tree-trunk and rested her chin and her hands against the rough, powdery, thousand-year-old jaggedness of disintegration which for nearly a century had constituted the window-sill of the slowly dying oak which was in a sense her house, and in a sense herself.

She breathed heavily, but freely enough now, as she watched the effect of her words upon the massive, upturned, almost bald head beneath her, as he squatted cross-legged upon the
wolf-skin
, while his torch from its muddy socket in the wet moss threw a wavering beam of light upon his outstretched
bowsprit-beard
which at noon-day was like the solid silver of a graven image in a temple.

But the most silvery beard in that darkness, in spite of the crescent-moon and the stars and the torch, would have been reduced to a colour-levelling monotone by the encompassing gloom. He remained silent for a long moment. Then he said slowly: “My friend Athene is bound to appear soon. She will touch me with her immortal hand. She will counsel me with her divine wisdom.”

After hearing this the dweller in the dying oak fell silent in her turn while far-away they both could catch the voice of some fortunate sea-bird that after losing itself inland fell to uttering repeated cries of relief when it caught once more the sound of waves breaking on the rocks.

“Athene will probably appear to me,” began Odysseus again, “in the form of a young fisherman or goatherd when I go
tomorrow
,
today I mean, to the cave of the Naiads where I’m building my ship. It was clever of me—eh, Kleta, old friend?—to go to a place like that which all the island regards as so sacred to the sea-powers that they daren’t approach it? My difficulty, as I knew from the start, when I began working on the keel and the body of my ship, will be to collect enough
sail-cloth
to make a big enough main-sail.

“You, of course, old friend, always busy as you are with tending your wild garden, have no idea of the things we men have to consider, especially in matters of war and of ships. I’ve made up my mind to hoist sail again before I die. I’m not going to rot here alive till I’m eaten by worms. You tell me Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus have between them drowned the whole of Atlantis.
That
doesn’t look to me as if the power of the gods were declining!

“Zeus, the Father of Athene, has often been influenced by her far-sighted wisdom; and when she visits me she will tell me how to propitiate the Father of men and gods. Even if Atlantis
is
at the bottom of the ocean, why should I be worried? Answer me
that
, name-child of the loveliest of the Graces! Couldn’t I steer my ship, when once I’ve got her mainsail, over the graves of a hundred Atlantises?

“I tell you’ old friend, I can’t see what there is in this news to make me miserable. I just can’t see! I feel at this moment as if I——”

But he suddenly stopped; confounded by what he saw in the old face staring at him out of that hollow tree.

“What’s the matter, Kleta-Dryad, old friend? For the sake of all the Olympians tell your child what’s the matter?”

The Dryad uttered a choking sound in her throat that was like the sob of a sea-wave caught and imprisoned behind cruel rocks when it longs to leap and curve and curl and toss and crest and fume and foam and race over the ocean’s surface. Then she said, speaking in a queer voice that seemed to come from the middle of her old bent spine and to force itself between her ribs and her withered breasts: “I can’t hide it from you, my child;
I can’t hide it from you! But what Kleta-Charis really came to tell me was that Keto herself, the most terrible of all sea-monsters, has been seen in your cave!

“Oh child of my soul think of it! Yes, Keto herself, sister of that awful Eurybia who along with Echidna haunts Arima over there, where only those of us who have lost their wits ever go; yes! Keto the sea-monster who plays the beast with old man Phorkys of all the old gods of the sea has been seen in your cave; and since she has been there not a Naiad dares to go near it; and Kleta-Charis told me that nothing would ever induce her or any of her sisters to visit the place again! O my child, my child! It’s terrible to think of! What it will really be is a second Arima.

“Yes, Odysseus, a second ‘Arima’ whose threshold none of us will dare to cross. What are you doing? Where are you going, Odysseus? You’re not forgetting there are two hours still before Dawn, are you? Where are you going, Odysseus? You frighten me when you pull your blanket round you like that!”

Her voice rose to a hoarse shriek. “Stop, Odysseus! Stop! I tell you there are two hours more of night before the dawn comes. You can’t go
now
,
my child! You can’t go like that!”

The only reply he made to her frantic appeal, as he rose to his feet and wrapped his blanket more tightly round him, was to turn his face towards the East and stand absolutely still with his mouth open, his nostrils wide and quivering, and his breath drawn deeply inwards in long spasms of excited suction.

But when the troubled old creature went so far in her agitation as to clamber grotesquely if not indecently out of the hollow oak and seize him by the wrist, he did speak, and when he spoke he did so with a natural and easy calm entirely free from all intensity of locked-in emotion.

“I am only going to my room,” he said, “to get some sleep, and I’ve not the least intention of going anywhere, Kleta, old friend, till I have had a good meal. Athene will no doubt either send me a message or come herself. I only hope she won’t send Telemachos. Why is it, Kleta dear, that I find it so hard to
feel at ease with Telemachos since his mother died? He’s become so rigid and austere and pontifical; more of a priest than a son. The great goddess herself is free enough and natural enough with me. I can even fool her a bit now and again and make sport of the way she has treated me and challenge her to treat my son in the same way.

“And all this without her getting angry with me or my getting angry with her. Though she’s an immortal Olympian, and I am very much of a too-human mortal man, the goddess and I understand each other perfectly. Nothing anyone said to make trouble between us about her telling Telemachos things she doesn’t tell me would make me angry with her. She’s the goddess who all my life has helped me; and I am the one from among the rulers of men she has chosen to aid and defend—and that’s all there is between us.

“This business of priesthood and worship, and sanctity and calling upon the dead, and swallowing the smoke from mystic tripods, and eating the flesh of dead or of living gods, and drinking their blood, and bringing the dead to life by boiling their bones in magic cauldrons is something beyond me altogether and alien to me, and I cannot understand what has come over Telemachos since his mother died. He’s become so silent and secretive and so wrapt up in all this priestly ritual, that I can’t get a word out of him. He says he has no wish to be king of Ithaca and lord of the islands when I’m dead!

“Sometimes I think it’s all due to this curst Priest of Orpheus. But that is hard to believe; for Telemachos from his infancy has seen the Maenads and Bacchantes of Dionysos without wanting to join them! He has seen the Mysteries of Demeter and
Persephone
without wanting to follow them into the Kingdom of Aidoneus. I tell you, Kleta, all the priests and prophets of the gods that I’ve known, and I’ve known many, are such as teach us rulers how to overcome our enemies and how to break down the gates of their cities and take their women captive.

“No, I can’t understand it, Kleta old friend. Do you remember how the other day you asked me why I didn’t go to the Agora
over there and make a public oration calling upon the people to collect all the sail-cloth they could get hold of and bring it to me? There are thousands and thousands of pieces of it woven into the huts and hovels of slaves in our city and hanging idly in the chambers of our merchants, when they ought to be filled with all the winds of heaven and carrying good well-benched ships over all the waves of the ocean.”

He picked up his torch and looked about him. The torch had begun to burn badly and its smoke had an unnatural smell because of the moisture rising from the wet ground into which it had been thrust; but as he brandished it in the air to quicken its flame this badly-smelling cloud of smoke drifted away towards the Temple of Athene.

The old king followed its departure with his eyes while his head remained turned to the West. Slowly that small cloud of evil-smelling vapour floated away over the Temple towards the Agora. With his imagination conjuring up his speech to the assembled people of Ithaca he followed that small cloud to the low walls of their compact little city and to the amphitheatre outside those walls, with its stone seats and wide stone platform, where the citizens of the whole island, if once gathered together in a popular “ekklesia”, could be conveniently harangued.

Then turning once more to the troubled old Dryad who had taken to heart so bitterly this invasion of the Naiads’ cave by the monster-wife of the oldest of the “Old Men of the Sea” he saw that she was weeping silently with her forehead pressed against her knuckles and her hands clinging tightly to that uneven edge of rottenness, so frayed and so fragile and so soft and crumbling that it looked as if it had ceased to be a substance and had become a momentarily objectified taste or smell, such as, together with the aged transparency sobbing in its midst, might vanish like a ghost at cock-crow.

As the king turned his back upon her and moved off towards the stair-way to his chamber he had the feeling that the bowed old creature were nibbling her own flesh as if it were a bread of phantom-sorrow made of the crumbling wood of an ancestral oak.

Back in his room, however, Odysseus behaved exactly as he had declared to his old friend he would behave. He loosened his belt, wrapt his blanket more evenly round him, and lay down on his bed, shutting his eyes so as to replace any sort of steady staring into darkness by an absolute blindness to the whole phenomena of the visible world.

Thus he remained, and no one but himself could possibly have told whether he were awake or asleep, till dawn was more than well advanced. In fact the sun was high above the horizon, and all the paths and vineyards and gardens and woods and desert-places were illuminated by full daylight when he rose from his bed and shouted for his ancient nurse.