Atlantis (18 page)

It was indeed of dust that the two insects were arguing in their accustomed hiding-place within that warm perambulating retreat. Dust played as large a part in their life as wind and rain played in the life of the king of Ithaca; and so, while Enorches was striving to cast whatever devilish spell he fancied would be most effective against the creations of the blood of Medusa and the horse-play of Poseidon, the fly Myos was explaining to the moth Pyraust that every grain of dust was an actual world and that it was foolish to philosophize about the universe until you stopped talking about Etna being flung upon Typhon and talked about Arsinöe disturbing worlds with her duster.

Meanwhile Nisos also, like his newly-made student-pal or Kasi-kid, was philosophizing after his fashion. What struck him, as this dancing Zeuks led his magnetized captives towards them,
was the smooth-sliding manner in which each separate event or incident or occurrence, whether it was of cosmogonic
importance
, or was of the faintest and most attenuated significance, a mere ripple, you might say, crossing the surface of the oceanic time-mirror of life, was accepted by Odysseus with the same unalterable equanimity.

Here was the winged horse Pegasos, born of the blood of the Gorgon, and here was the black-maned Arion, born of Demeter herself when she took the form of a mare to escape Poseidon; and dancing round these Divine Abortions was the queer
individual
who had the power of hypnotizing any equivocal creation who crossed his path and yet was no Bellerephon or Perseus or cast at all in the heroic mould; and here, beside them, surveying these lusty apparitions with the eye of an executioner was the Priest of the immemorial Mysteries who looked as if there were nothing in sight he would not gladly offer up to his chthonian divinities.

And yet what was this amazing old king pointing out to him now—to him whom he had recently been considering as his successor in the kingship over the heads of a father and elder brother—but some casually noted aesthetic point about the contrasting beauty of a certain massive tower of greyish-yellow stone, to the North-East of where they stood and rising from a corner of the city wall, and a glittering roof of white marble to their North-West belonging to the Temple of Athene, pictorial elements that justified still further, the old man explained, the idea of this particular spot as a new assembly place.

“Don’t let me ever forget,” the boy prayed in his heart, though to no particular deity, “the calm he shows at a moment like this!” And it really was, this time, without any thought of it being “clever” of him to notice such things that Nisos followed up his secret prayer by telling himself that though those weirdly startling wings rising from the shoulders of that submissive great horse, and that black mane sweeping the ground belonging to the other animal, were striking phenomena of creative nature’s power, it was really a more striking thing that a king who lived
alone in his palace with his old nurse and a couple of maids should be so completely equal to occasions like this.

Was it, Nisos asked himself, that that great massive skull possessed an imperviousness to shocks denied to other human craniums? Well, anyway that bowsprit-like and carefully trimmed beard accentuated the quality of the man’s
self-possession
. And Nisos decided that when once
his
beard began to grow he would treat it with exquisite care. “A prophet,” he told, himself, “can clearly hide a great many natural feelings behind a well-managed beard, and if he can hide them, cannot he rule them, cannot he force them to obey him, as this horse with wings and this other with a trailing black mane have been forced to obey this madman Zeuks?”

It was with the utmost interest that Nisos watched Zeuks and tried his best to weigh him up and get to the bottom of him. The impression he first got of this eccentric farm-labourer was that he was of middle height, of middle age, and of middle social estimation. He noted how essentially Achaean he was in every detail, in dress, in manner and in general appearance; not Pelasgian, or Dorian, or Ionian but an evenly balanced
middle-of
-the-road Achaean, moderate in all the imponderables, in tribal habits as well as personal reactions, and conveying, wherever he went, beneath the whole paraphernalia of his comic humours an impression of dispassionate calm; a calm that was not merely temperamental, like the coolness of Odysseus, but was the deliberately arrived-at attitude of a definite
metaphysical
philosophy.

Watching Zeuks carefully Nisos decided that it was this unobtrusive mediocrity that enhanced to such a startling degree
the peculiar features of his countenance, features for which it would be difficult to find a more accurate epithet than bulbous. Bulbous they were, and bulbous they remained, under all the contortions and distortions of his remarkable physiognomy.

Every single one of the man’s features was so to say swollen by the inordinate pressure within it of the particular purpose for which the creativeness of nature had designed it. The forehead of Zeuks seemed bursting with its overpowering plethora of thought. His nose seemed bursting with its abounding zest for smelling. His mouth with its full lips, its strong white teeth, its grandly sensuous curves, seemed to have been created by the insatiable palate and indefatigable tongue within it, a couple that were united in conjugal understanding, the palate as the female to the tongue as the male, for the tasting and enjoying of almost everything that could possibly, conceivably,
indeterminably
be tasted and enjoyed.

But his eyes,—“What is it in this man’s eyes,” thought Nisos, “that makes me feel so nice and warm?”—his eyes were surrounded by a thousand wrinkles and creases and rufflings of the ruddy skin round them, creases that seemed so infinitely tickled by what you had just said, or were just going to say, or simply by the way you were the self that
could
say such things, that merely to watch their response to you and your remarks gave you a delicious sense of having found your place in the world, a place which, the more you said, or the more entirely you put yourself behind what you said, would grow hourly, daily, monthly, yearly more agreeable to yourself, if not to all concerned!

But it was the eyes themselves, apart from those friendly and rampageously benevolent wrinkles, that were made to encourage everybody they approached to enjoy the world and to enjoy being the person who was thus enjoying it.

Zeuks’ eyes were in fact so deeply set in his bulbous head that Nisos got the feeling that they receded into a mass of substance which they themselves, in their immense zest for life, were everlastingly creating afresh behind that mediocre skull with its pair of eternally recessive holes.

Nisos couldn’t then—he put it down at first to the glare of the noonday sun, but he changed his mind later on—catch the exact colour of Zeuks’ eyes; but for that very reason he decided they were probably hazel. It was indeed, all considered, an extremely complicated moment in our clever young friend’s life. He might be seventeen and he might be the one destined by fate to become the prophet to the strong rather than to the weak, but it began to invade his mind, as he stood there, leaning on his heavy sack, which in its turn rested on a lichen-covered rock, that because a hero had won in his time almost miraculous victories and had used incredible physical strength and still more incredible mental cunning to win the victories, it did not mean that to the end of his days such an one would inevitably be the centre of every dramatic human situation that could possibly arise.

It was exactly noon on this desirable level expanse, with the homestead of Zeuks overlooking it to the East, and that high corner of the City-Wall and that gleam of the Temple’s marble roof out-topping it to the West, exactly noon on the very spot selected by the old king as the perfect site for an assembly of the people that would be swayed by his eloquence.

Well! here was Zeuks, coming dancing out of his ramshackle shed and leading, yes, actually leading, the immortal creatures they had come to buy!

The well-dressed crowd of prosperous farmer-families seemed puzzled as to where to turn to get some hint of the manner in which they ought to receive the thousand-years wonder of this smuggling into their home of these Divine Beasts. Were they to get it from Zeuks or from their king?

Alas! from neither! The Personage who was destined to direct their feelings was none other than Enorches, the Priest of Orpheus! Yes, to the absolute amazement of the
seventeen-year
-old “prophet to the strong”, there was not a family there, not a man or a woman there, not even a child, who did not excitedly turn to greet Enorches.

It is true there was one little toddler of about two-and-a-half who stretched out a plump arm towards the Club of Herakles,
no doubt being attracted by the roundly twisted curves of that formidable bosom, in the cracked interior of which Myos the Fly was still expounding to Pyraust the Moth the metaphysical philosophy of dust and how every grain of it was a world.

But apart from the child who admired the Club and the two insects who were inside the Club, the whole of that excited assembly of well-to-do farmers with their wives and children instinctively divided itself into two parties, the largest of which gathered closely round Enorches and displayed evident hostility to Zeuks, while the other advanced with irresistible curiosity towards Zeuks and his Divine Beasts, constantly looking back, however, as they did so, the women glancing apprehensively over their shoulders, and the children alternately stumbling as they turned to stare at Enorches, or clinging to their mothers’ belts and pressing their faces against their garments.

Not a soul among that whole company made any move towards or away from their old king, though Nisos did notice two of the men whispering together with furtive glances at
himself
and his great sack.

“They’re saying to each other,” he thought with a faint shiver; “We’ll take
that
off him before they get away from here!”

Meanwhile Odysseus, having gravely turned his pointed beard to the North, the West, the South and the East, and having instructed Nisos to remain close to his side—“No! no! my boy, much nearer than that! In fact you’d better put a finger into my belt, if you can balance that thing on your shoulder with one hand”—advanced slowly straight towards the swaying and dancing Zeuks.

Neither the word “swaying” nor the word “dancing” accurately describes the sinuous movements with which this queer creature hypnotized those two animals. As in every other aspect of this singular person’s character, if you had never seen him before it was necessary for the understanding of his peculiar nature to catch not only the general expression of his face but at least a few of its special expressions; and among these it was especially important to note what his expression was when he
experienced an access of respect and reverence for anyone or anything he suddenly encountered.

Nisos had the wit to realize quickly enough, when Odysseus had greeted Zeuks and was conversing with him, that what those little, searching, deep-set eyes, peering out from the receding depths of what seemed an eternally replenished background, expressed just then was a mixture of deeply affectionate respect and humorous amusement.

And it was further evident to Nisos that this singular person’s profound respect for the king was increased, not diminished, by the fact that he found the old hero so infinitely entertaining. It was also evident that Odysseus felt absolutely at ease with Zeuks and entirely natural in dealing with him. Indeed he continued to be so direct, so objective, so practical in his handling of him that it was difficult for Nisos to see what there was about such shrewd and downright and matter-of-fact business relations that could excite not only ribald laughter but hugely humorous enjoyment.

But it was quite evident to Nisos that either the old king enjoyed being laughed at, or, and this is what seemed to the boy the more probable, that he had been so toughened by all his experiences of the ways of the world, that his self-created thick skin and his long-practised straight-to-the-point opportunism had made him as impervious to humour as he was impervious to love!

Nisos inserted a second finger into the king’s belt, the longest finger he had. In some queer fashion the old man’s
imperviousness
to everything but the one single desire to sail away, to sail over the sunken towers of Atlantis into the Unknown West, touched the boy to the heart. It was a purpose he could understand. It had something about it that resembled his own fixed intention to become, when once he had grown a pointed beard, a Prophet to the Strong.

Let the rollicking humour of Zeuks bubble and bubble from what springs it would! Let it burble up against the old hero’s face pebbles as hard as balls of brimstone! There’d be one friend
for the old adventurer who’d be as tough and impervious as himself! Yes, imperviousness was what the future “prophet to the strong” felt he must struggle to win.

But fate had other moves to make; and there were several farmers there who, although with homesteads on the same ridge as farm-labourer Zeuks, and although they had come out to see the farm up there at high noon, were in part self-pitying puppets moved by fingers other than their own, and yet were in part also living creators of the future of Ithaca.

Enorches had already begun to scream angrily at Zeuks before Nisos, with his right hand supporting the treasure-sack balanced to a nicety at the back of his head and with two fingers thrust deep into the belt of Odysseus, had even realized that he himself, and the deserted old king, and the winged Horse, and the
black-maned
Horse, and Zeuks and the Priest of Orpheus were in a random knot together, with the flabbergasted but still fascinated crowd hemming them in on all sides and surging round them,

“It’s no good your grinning and chuckling at me, thief, robber, pirate, serf!” cried Enorches. “It’s no good your fancying that a wretch like you, the lowest of the low, the basest of the base, born to be the slave of those who rightly and properly by the laws of Themis and Zeus and Eros and Dionysos and the Inspired Singer Orpheus rule the entire world, can make a covenant with a king to put in his keeping this mad Spawn of the Gorgon and this By-Blow of Poseidon and Demeter!

“Did you think, Dung of the Earth, did you suppose, Turd of the World, that the Stars in their Courses would fight for a blob, a shred, a foul pellet, a filthy crumb, a drop of cuckoo-spit, a clipping of toe-nail, like you? There are many who rule us. There are many who strive to rule us. There are many who once ruled us. Erebos and Tartaros are full of such as once lorded it over us! And where are they now?

“Don’t you understand sod of sods, don’t you comprehend, dreg of dregs, that what you’ve been given hands and feet for by the beautiful ones, the creative ones, the powerful ones, the one’s eternally to be worshipped, is the privilege, dung of dungs, blob
of blobs, squit of squit, curd of curd, scurf of scurf, flake of flake, chip of chips, drop of drop, sweat of sweat, the privilege to serve your betters, and yet here you are actually daring to decamp with demigods!

“Yes! to steal, to kidnap, to imprison in your wretched pigsty these two sacred creatures, the feathers of whose wings and the hairs of whose manes you are unworthy to kiss! Release them, I command you! Hand them over to me, the god-appointed guardian of the holiest of holy mysteries!

Though Athene may have fled to her shrine among the Ethiopians, I have not fled; and where I am there will always be a sanctuary for any offspring of the ever-living gods, however far blasphemy and sacrilege and atheism may spread their savagery! Give up these holy creatures I say! Yield them over to me now and I will see that you escape the punishment you deserve! But refuse and it will fall upon you! Harken unto me all ye that are here, devoted worshippers of the most high Gods! Have you not heard—has it not been revealed to you——”

It was at this point that Enorches, whose very name had been given him at his birth because of the enormity of his testicles, and who had been called ere now by fellow-priests “the well-hung brother” proved his manhood by leaping forward with a spring and scrambling up upon one of the rocks with which Odysseus’s
newfound
“agora” was sprinkled and by bursting into a ringing oration.

“Our whole Hellenic way of life,” he cried, “is in danger my friends, and we’re not alive enough to what’s going on to do anything to save it! We haven’t even cleared our minds of all the childish poetry our mothers and nurses put into our heads to stop us piddling on the floor, or upsetting the pot on the fire, or cutting off the tail of the dog, or giving the hen’s best chicks to the cat! We have been too shallow and stupid, my friends, in our whole attitude to religion!

“We have accepted like babies all our mothers told us about the Twelve Olympians, about Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollon, Artemis, Hermes, Aphrodite, Hephaistos, Ares, Themis, and our own Athene.

“But, my friends, all this is sheer childishness, and what it leads to is exactly what has happened in the case of this worthless pirate, this low-born thief, this dung-heap rapscallion, this
offscouring
of the city’s brothels who calls himself Zeuks so that he may blaspheme the more, so that he may make a mock at our Father in Heaven, and, worse still, put to scorn our Father’s Sister and Mate, the great Queen of Heaven, Hera herself!

“What none of you are grown up enough to understand, though I’ve been explaining this very thing for the last ten years, is that by certain new, certain occult, certain mystical, certain
sanctified
, certain divinely inspired revelations, drawn at length and explained at last from the most sacred and precious oracle that we of pure Hellenic birth can boast, an oracle do I say? an inheritance, a birth-right, a talisman, an enchantment, a divine and celestial Word, by means of which our enemies are inevitably defeated and our intentions are inevitably fulfilled, we know that we’ve arrived at a point in our development where Eros and Dionysos appear in their true light. Does anyone here on this fair platform, looking down on the rich harbour of our
island-home
, realize the full significance, the concerted value, the abysmally-charged import of the birthright of which I speak?