Atlantis (24 page)

What added an unexpected and quite special interest to this improvised banquet was the fact that, along with old Moros, Zenios had brought back to Ornax none other than Petraia’s sister who after a distressing scene with the Latin Nymph Egeria had embarked frantically for home; and by the aid of a real and not pretended black sail had been brought to this very coast.

To the complete surprise of their hostess the heart and soul of the whole dinner was Zeuks. Nor was it only Okyrhöe who was astonished at the way this plain rustic Achaean dominated the situation and entertained them all. Nisos was amazed at what he saw and heard. Zenios though he condescended to chuckle now and again, was obviously more interested in a flask of a special kind of wine that Moros had brought for him than in anything else; but the fact that the first Master that Ornax had had for a thousand years, had had indeed since men and Titans were almost indistinguishable in their hostility to the gods, was so abnormally thick-skinned, so self-centred, so toweringly
conventional
, did undoubtedly contribute to the banquet’s success.

Zenios was indeed so magnificently stupid as to take it for granted that his being of the same blood as the famous Kadmos and possessing that potentate’s Shield, Drinking-Horn, and Sceptre in the shape of a Thyrsus, were circumstances that did
so much honour to any guest that chance might send him that no more was required.

And no more
was
required. Zenios’ guests were the luckiest of guests. They were left to entertain themselves. Nor was the fact of Zenios being such an obsessed collector of objects made of gold detrimental to what might be called the pleasant
negativeness
of his hospitality. His visitors obscurely thought of
themselves
—so completely did the mania of the born collector dominate the atmosphere of his table—as if they too were rare and precious and had been brought there for that reason.

Nor was this feeling contradicted by the nature of the locality. Ornax was literally a House of Ruins; but it was not itself a ruin. It had come to be created out of a physical acme of desperate isolation in combination with a psychic acme of impervious conceit. But it had been created by a woman; and thus the newly arisen House of Ornax had advantages, qualities,
amenities
and conveniences, beyond most of the Kings’ Houses in Hellas.

In the first place it was divided into five essential structures; the Mirror Room, where hung the Shield of Kadmos; the sleeping Chambers with little stone-passages and wooden doors connecting them; the Dining-Hall, prepared for the reception of about twenty guests with no less than three “guest-thrones”, as well as the permanent host-throne, ensconced in which the greatest of Collectors enjoyed his meat, his wine, and an
experimental
variety of baked bread and sweet-meat condiments on every night of the year; the underground treasure-chamber, entered by descending quite a long flight of stone steps, at the bottom of which was a low-arched chamber entirely surrounded by extensive shelves scooped out of solid rock and crowded with all manner of ancient vessels and platters and bowls and goblets, things that were by no means all Theban, far less all connected with Kadmos, but things that had been got together by Xenios himself, in his double role as an acquisitive collector and an implacable miser.

And finally there was the kitchen. This was so large, so
ancient, so monumental, that a visitor’s first thought would be that only a goddess could possibly preside over such a place.

Quite apart from her creation of this ideal abode for herself and Zenios, Okyrhöe had made sure that outside the great Kitchen there was a House of Shelter for Nemertes and her sons. And it was within the entrance to this annexe that a little private chamber had been constructed for Pontopereia and for her alone.

Okyrhöe had wisely decided, when the three of them first took possession of this long-deserted House by the Sea, that the best part for herself to play was the double one of Zenios’ wife and the bastard daughter of Hector; for this was a role that left her entirely independent and free at any moment to leave both Zenios and Pontopereia for any other human “stepping-stone to higher things” that Fate or Chance might provide. Absolute freedom for herself had been the guiding principle of all her actions since she first heard of Ornax. She had heard of the place from a Tyrian pirate.

And she had scarcely heard of it before she persuaded Zenios to secure the services not only of the man and his ship but of the man’s sister Nemertes, the murder of whose builder-husband she contrived on their way, for it can be imagined how soon she made the ship’s master her accomplice; and indeed the man was well advised by his sister to weigh anchor and clear off while the going was good.

Old Moros had never seen in all his days on earth anything so memorable as what he saw at this banquet. He was a
kind-hearted
man, however. Kind-heartedness had indeed been his chief handicap in life. He always found it difficult not to identify his feelings with the feelings of every person, man, woman or child, whom he came across. Each personality old Moros
encountered
impinged upon the personality of old Moros more than in her ordinary, rough-and-ready rules for human existence Nature had altogether allowed for. Thus while he watched the famous King Odysseus with awe and reverence, and stole as many infatuated glances as he dared at their enthralling hostess, he couldn’t help again and again and again, casting a sympathetic,
protective, and even paternal look at the newly-landed sister of Petraia, who sat by his side, while their far-sighted hostess was thinking, “I must keep those two together till Moros gets so concerned about her that he fetches a cart to carry her home.” For the obvious truth was that Petraia’s sister was pregnant.

How far gone was her pregnancy old Moros was not
experienced
enough in the child-bearing of ladies to have the least idea; but he saw enough for his habitual sympathy to beset him. Most tenderly he warded off the excess of wine offered the woman by the tallest of the three sons of Nemertes. All the three were attired in some exquisitely-washed white stuff that somehow gave old Moros the feeling that he was surrounded by male Sirens in the depths of the sea, who were always wanting to refill both his own and his neighbour’s wine-cup, the neighbour for whose sake, so as to keep her repeated refusals from being observed, for luckily the wine did not incommode his own stomach, he succeeded in keeping their two glasses on his side of her plate.

“For the third time!” cried Zeuks, rising to his feet and striking the black bull’s horn, rimmed with massive silver, from which he was drinking, against the golden goblet that had been so carefully chosen by Okyrhöe for Odysseus, “I call upon you all to join with me in defeating the ultimate design of this Monster, Enorches, who has dared to wrench half the life from these two celestial Horses!

“What is it I heard you say in your heart just now, great king, that you want us all to do? I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you now, and I’ll tell you once and for all!

“Yes, yes! You can look at me with that everlasting look of yours, which says to the entire universe ‘Stop this business of acceptance as if there were no such thing as choice. Come! come! Do something about it!’ That’s what your pointed beard, sticking out like the sword of a sword-fish is forever saying: ‘For the sake of all the gods in the sky do something about it!’

“But when we ordinary people want ‘to do something about it, we simply don’t know what to try to do!’ Listen, therefore,
O great king, to the word of one of the humblest of your subjects, and stick your beard into me when I go wrong in what I say!

“What we all want in our hearts, men and women alike, is a peaceful and at the same time an active life. There are too many prophets and oracles too, who always tell us to crown some king, to obey some law, to follow some hero, to embrace some system, to accept some philosophy, to invade some country, to sack some city!

“Well then, O great King, well then, dear Lords and Ladies, what happens? We burn that city, we over-run that country, we change our name, our language, our manners, our dress, our habits. But what is the result? Are we any happier? Not a bit of it! Are we any richer? Not by a farthing! Are we any wiser? Ask our wives and children! Are we honester, nobler, braver, kinder, tenderer, more sympathetic, more long-suffering, more enduring, more unconquerable, more impregnable?
We
are
not
!

“And yet we have invaded Persia, sacked Ecbatana, gutted Syracuse, burnt Troy! And yet we have accepted the philosophy of Parmenides. We have offered sacrifice to the God of Israel. We have bowed our heads in the Temple of Baal. We have given our maidens to Pan and our boys to Moloch. And are we the happier for it? Are we the wiser for it?

“Not a jot! Our eyes still weep salt tears! Our slaves still sweat blood! Our women still bear abortions! Our grapes are still sour! Our hives still lack honey! Our figs still lack sweetness! Our fountains are still slow to run, and our streams still sink in the same sand and dry in the same desert!

“What therefore is the word for the unenlightened and the sign for the uninspired? What is the clue for the lost in the
wilderness
; and the secret of recovery for the heavy of heart? Is it what Enorches calls the Mystery of Love that will save us? Is it the holy ecstasy of Dionysos that will set us straight in the path of happiness?

“Never on your life, great King! Never on your lives, my lovely companions! The only thing that can set us on the path of happiness is to create carvers of joy in our own secret selves and moulders of delight in our own hidden souls. And we must do it
by the countering and confounding of the most extreme
contradictions
.

“We can’t do it, I tell you, by trying to mingle these opposites in confused conglomeration! No! we must keep our lives in natural advances and retreats, in ebb and flow, in up and down, in pull devil and pull tailor, till the end of the only round we know in this crazy planetary game! Shall I tell you O great King, shall I tell you most sweet and beautiful ladies, what, in spite of this Priest of Orpheus with his Eros and his Dionysus, is the real secret of the whole of life, of the whole of experience, of the whole of existence, of the whole of everything?

“I mean of course the secret of it for each and every one of us? I mean the ultimate word that eventually, when we have all been dead for a hundred-thousand years, will still describe the idea, the feeling, the emotion for every single consciousness possessed of what we call life? I have decided to announce to you tonight a word of my own which at least expresses one aspect of the complicated meaning that some magic word must eventually possess, when in a hundred-thousand years it is invented. My poor word is a common and an extremely simple word. It is—do not smile, most grave King!

“Yes! I will boldly utter it!—It is the word ‘Prokleesis’. And now I must struggle to make clear some of the beautiful, terrible, stirring, satisfying, comforting, restoring, consoling, redeeming, creating meanings that I have put into this natural and simple word,
Prokleesis
!
For I do here and now, O great King! I do here and now, most lovely ladies! I do here and now, Moros my old friend, Nisos my young friend, and you three, heroic sons of the lady Nemertes, who is the friend of all of us, as indeed this banquet, which is the grandest banquet I have ever enjoyed, proves up to the hilt, I do here and now proclaim, to all living creatures in all the innumerable worlds, that for each and every one of us, whether human, super-human, or sub-human, whether male or female, whether old or young, that the word
Prokleesis
whose simplest meaning is a ‘defiance’ or ‘challenge’ is the best clue to life we can have!

“Yes,
Prokleesis
is
the word. We must ‘challenge’ life from our childhood to our old age! We must ‘defy’ life to quench our spirit and to beat us down! We must ‘challenge’ it, whatever it may be, to a fight to the finish! Don’t you see, O great King, don’t you see, my sweet friends, how the crafty and wicked Enorches is really advocating an escape into death in place of a battle with life? His Eros and his Dionysos are both different names for the same plunge into the same Nothingness.

“One is a plunge into it by way of love, and the other by way of drink. Whatever else to be alive upon earth, or above earth, or under earth, may mean to those who are landed in it or sunk in it or confronted by it, it is clear that it means a challenge to a battle! O my friends, my friends, we have not got the secret of life, I mean the secret of our
experience
of
life
for
ourselves
,
till we’ve defied it to make us cry, ‘Hold! Enough!’ This challenge, this ‘Prokleesis,’ is
the
secret
of
life
for
us.

“As to what the secret of life is
for
life
itself
,
who can answer such a question? We can only answer for ourselves. The animals and birds and fishes can only answer
for
themselves.
Whatever it is that calls itself the cause of life, or imagines itself to be the cause of life, or is supposed to be the cause of life by the tribal tradition of this race or that race, or by the geographical tradition of Northern or Southern life, or of Eastern or Western life, or Middle-Eastern life, or of life at the bottom of the ocean, or of life among the Gods in the sky, or of life among the Titans in Tartaros, or of life among the ghosts of Hades—if Ghosts
have
any life and if there are any ghosts left there now; for the story runs that they have all escaped, even as this wise lady here has come back to her own from the Latin cavern of the Nymph Egeria!

“No, we have not the faintest idea as to how this world of colour and form, and of solid and watery and airy and fiery substance ever appeared before us or ever inspired its favourite champions with the overpowering suggestion that we ourselves are nothing but transitory and dreamlike portions of its evanescent mirage!