Atlantis (28 page)

This particular “Depas” was an enormous one. It had a flat stand at its base and a circular handle on each side of its circumference and it was made of solid gold. It was in fact made of gold so heavy, so massive, and so purged of every kind of alloy, that as Zenios caressed it it gave him the feeling that it was
something
so totally different from all other things in the world and so absolutely divided from all other things in the world that when he gave himself up wholly and entirely to the pure
sensation
of this feel of it, he himself became isolated from everything else on earth. The handling of real gold, massive gold, pure gold, solid gold, had become the one positive lust, the one supreme indulgence, the one ecstatic cult, the one ultimate paradise of Zenios’ existence; and when he did so, as he was doing now, he grew so identified with the precious thing he held, that with no effort other than passive surrender to bliss he became what, save for a few blameless Ethiopeans both in the extreme East and in the extreme West, a man seldom becomes, namely a motionless orb of convulsed sunlight, or even starlight,
for whom the mere alternation of inbreathing and outbreathing is not only a sufficient satisfaction for one life, but a sufficient satisfaction to justify an infinite series of lives.

But meanwhile, very cautiously, and inch by inch, Nisos was descending the stairs towards this absorbed gold-worshipper. Now the approach of the aboriginal wild creatures in the forests of the earth towards one another has been from the beginning the cause of innumerable invisible vibrations across various expanses of earth and air and such primeval vibrations, whether of attraction or repulsion, or of pure warning, have never
completely
vanished from the human scene all the way down the ages.

It must have been some such vibration, and of pure warning too, that caused young Nisos, before he had reached the fourth step in his stealthy descent towards that chink of light between door and door-post, to change his mind completely, and, avoiding with exquisite care the least shiver of disturbing sound, to ascend those steps twice as quickly as he had descended them, and, once clear of that quarter of the restored ruins of Ornax, to set off as fast as possible to find Odysseus.

Even Zeuks would not have been able to interpret for the benefit of any other person seated on that broad back all the thoughts of Pegasos as the two of them waited patiently for their start from Ornax on their homeward journey. The whole thing is conjectural of course, but it does seem unlikely that an
immortal
creature however wounded could feel quite as agitated‚ as did Okyrhöe for example, when she discovered that she was really going to perch herself on the still bleeding back of a
one-winged
unflying flier, “with this low peasant”, as she told herself “who out of vulgar blasphemy calls himself Zeuks’’, in front of her, “and this silly old King-Hero who won’t be able to see more of me than my back”, behind her.

The whole thing was a surprise and a shock to this beautiful designer of elaborate schemes; for the last thing she expected was to have to make her plunge into the innermost circle of
Odysseus
’ life without the least preparation, indeed with what might
almost be called a “hippodromic” leap. However! If she had to do it she had to do it, and with a courage and recklessness that would have drawn from her cautious slow-moving husband a very straight look, she rushed to one of the innermost chests in the furthest corner of her Mirror-Room and dragged forth from it a garment that Zenios had never known she had bought, for she had managed the transaction in secret with a Phoenician Merchant during a mighty purchase of golden cups.

No sooner now had she dragged out this garment and wrapped her lovely body in it than in a flash all her annoyance
disappeared
! It was exactly suited to the occasion. Nothing on earth could have answered this unexpected situation better. Even though the immortal creature she rode on was wet with ichor and blood, and even though “with this on” the old hero could not even see how shapely her back was, the effect of her face looking forth from that feathery cloud of heavenly whiteness was beyond what even she herself had ever dreamed of!

She walked up and down in front of Kadmos’ Mirror-Shield. She arranged herself, with this wonderful thing about her, first on a couch, then on a chair, then on the couch again, and once more on a chair. Okyrhöe had never in her whole life felt so inspired by her own beauty. And the remarkable thing about it was that her head, her critical, fastidious, detached, acquisitive, unscrupulous head, remained absolutely clear and cold.

Dramatizing herself and gesturing and posing in front of that shield of Kadmos there was absolutely nothing in the
consciousness
of Okyrhöe that had the faintest resemblance to the
self-adoration
, the self-intoxication, the self-worship of the
unfortunate
Narcissus. Okyrhöe’s mind was as cold and hard and ruthless as one of those short sharp Latin swords that the Nymph Egeria in her Italian cave would know more about than any Achaean woman.

Okyrhöe used her beauty purely, solely, and simply as a weapon. She fought with her beauty as if it were a sword. She sacked cities with her beauty. She dried up deep seas with her beauty. She blighted harvests, she devastated vineyards, she
up-rooted 
forests with it. She was prepared to blacken shining stars and to put out burning suns with her beauty. Beauty for her was something wherewith to carve out empires or to drown continents.

The cloak she had extracted from the Phoenician’s most sacred and secret caravan was made of the white skin of a huge
pre-historic
animal called a Podandrikon whose peculiarity was that round its waist it had shining scales and round its neck it had thick white feathers. Wrapped in the Podandrikon’s skin the completely reassured Okyrhöe told herself with one last glance at the Shield of Kadmos that if this fond and foolish old king thought he would ever sail from Ithaca again he was mad.

With the face the gods had given her and in the cloak she had discovered for herself she would rule all Argos and all Boeotia and all Hellas from this old fool’s rock-cave island palace! Thus thought Okyrhöe.

But the oldest of the Fates, as it used to be said at any special pinch concerning the goddess Athene, who now was so wrought up—and who can blame her—by the blind folly of her own people in the face of all this cosmic confusion that she had taken refuge with the blameless Ethiopians, “took other counsel”. Yes, Atropos, the weakest, the oldest, but the wisest of the Moirai, or Fates, came, invisibly rushing, as she always did, to the
crisis-spot
and prompted Odysseus to make one of his own decisions independently of everyone. And such a decision he made; and it was so wholly material and practical, and so absolutely free from any general theory about the matter at issue, from any logical sequence of reasoning about the problem at stake, from any principle of action, from any “mystique” of action, from any philosophic metaphysic of action, that it could hardly be described as a decision at all.

Of course in his past there had been occasions, there
had
to be occasions, when he was forced to act according to some practical plan of action, when in fact to act at all implied a plan of action;  but this was different, and the truth was that Odysseus behaved now like a skilful carpenter who has already taken the measure of the adjustments, of the shaping, the trimming, the nailing, the
thickening, the thinning, the rounding off, the hammering, the polishing, which in this particular case he would be forced to employ.

Those who knew him intimately however—and of these there were perhaps now living only two persons, namely his nurse Eurycleia, whose extreme old age interfered with the expression of what she knew, and the goddess Athene, who had her own ethnological undertakings independent of any individual man or woman—would have been in a position to explain to us that there had been in this extraordinary man’s life certain far-off but quite definite, concrete and material projects to the realization of which the whole complicated organism of his formidable identity was basically aimed.

Of these vast projects, like huge islands on immeasurable horizons, Eurycleia would probably have pointed to the taking of Troy, while Pallas Athene might conceivably have named the immense but misty and cloudy notion, like an old and battered world-sailor’s fantasy, that at present loomed in the
darkly-brooding
background of his consciousness, the notion of sailing Westward, far past the Pillars of Herakles and the place where Atlas holds up the Sky, past even the shores of Ultima Thule where exiled Kronos awaits the day of his awakening, the notion in fact of steering his ship over the very waves of the very sea under which lie the drowned towers and temples and domes and palaces and streets of the sunken continent of Atlantis.

But what Odysseus decided upon now as his most prudent line of action was to accept Okyrhöe’s astonishing offer to share with Zeuks and himself the wounded back of Pegasos on
condition
that her tender maternal arms should firmly encircle the awkwardly-moulded form of the prophetic orphan Pontopereia.

He was in fact wily enough to decide then and there to use to the limit the obviously possessive power of this beautiful woman so as to make sure that no sudden, wild, girlish impulse such as might very well spring up in a daughter of Teiresias should deprive him of her as an aid to the baffling of his enemies and the furtherance of his sailing.

“Oh, I’m so glad‚” cried this same eager girlish prophet, when she found Zeuks alone with Pegasos waiting for Okyrhöe and the old king, “to have a chance to ask you what you really meant by your terrifying story of those horrible pirates putting ropes round us all and deliberately chopping us to death one by one. I couldn’t bear to see it done to anybody, however much I hated them; and it’s certain I couldn’t bear it myself. I should just go shrieking-mad, and struggle wildly and bang about till I was killed or killed somebody else!”

The girl’s directness and simplicity had its effect. The
expression
upon the face of Zeuks would have suggested to anyone who had the particular kind of penetration that the great Theban prophet seems to have been not quite able to pass on to his progeny, that within the bloated mask of humorous relish for every conceivable aspect of human existence and of animal sensation that was Zeuks’ nature there had been suddenly roused from sleep a small active insect-like second nature that was a drastically honest commentator upon all the man’s impressions and was a pitiless exposure of all his own self-deceptions and all his own exaggerations and all his own boastings.

“I’ll tell you the whole thing, my dear Pontopereia,” Zeuks blurted out hurriedly. “I was glorying, you see, in my own mind over this idea of mine which I call Prokleesis or ‘defiance’. I’m proud of this idea, which has become very important to me and which is something I’m constantly trying to practise. But I’m a terrible one for seeing everything as comic and I suddenly saw my own life-method, my own life-philosophy, my own private and special defiance of life as a comic thing; and I thought: ‘How can I show up this prokleesis of mine as I love to show up all those other philosophic cure-alls that aim at dispending with Themis, treating old Auntie Atropos as a doting hag, discounting Necessity, and putting Chance to shame as a negligible wanton?’

“And I decided that the only way I could do this was by imagining a situation in which only a very few heroic human souls, and they probably already half-crazy, could possibly
practise my philosophy of ‘prokleesis’, or defiance of the whole of existence, and so I conjured up the picture of those murderous pirates on the brink of chopping us all to death one after another, as much as to say: ‘Well! If you can defy life while watching your best friends chopped to bits and waiting your own turn, you have to be something more than a clowning antic like me, whose head’s been turned by a good idea!’”

The kidnapper of Pegasos with his hand on that Gorgonian Wonder’s solitary wing must have drained at that second the ambrosial dregs of true philosophic glory, for the awkward figure of the daughter of Teiresias hunched itself into a shapeless heap of girlish admiration before the knees that had bent so faithfully all those years serving the aged Nymph deserted by Pan.

When Okyrhöe in the Podandrikon’s incomparable skin, and with her bold hand on Odysseus’ shoulder, finally appeared, it was evident that neither her own loveliness nor the unique wonder wrapped round her had made the old hero forget his Heraklean club.

“We shall be off in a moment, pretty creature,” murmured the fly to the moth from the deep life-crack in that self-conscious weapon, “and then we’ll soon find out how far the great god Pan has been able to go with young Eione.”

“It’s all very well for you to say that,” replied the moth, “but I wish you hadn’t gone to sleep while the Sixth Pillar was talking to the club just now; for the Pillar had heard about our
midwife’s
sister having quarrelled with her Egeria, and being now with old Moros, at the home of Tis and Eione, and being on the point of having a child.”

“How you beautiful girls,” jeered the teasing fly, “do adore thinking of the results of love-making! What interests
me
is whether the great god Pan will be able to go to the limit with young Eione.”

The moth stared vaguely out of the belly of the club into the surrounding darkness. “Yes, I wonder,” she pondered, “whether Eione
is
old enough to have a child.”

It was a riderless Arion who met the four of them, that is to say the two women, Okyrhöe and Pontopereia, mounted between the two men, Zeuks and Odysseus, when they arrived at the
palace-porch
and dismounted from the wounded back of Pegasos at the entrance to the Corridor of the Pillars. There was still a little more of that weird before-dawn light called Lykophos to be got through ere the sun rose, for neither Pegasos’ wounded shoulder nor his heavily-trailing solitary wing had interfered with the speed of his stride; and the darkness had only just broken when they got home.

The faithful Tis, however, was awaiting them, though since he had fastened Arion by a rope long enough to permit the animal to graze on the weeds in the Slaves’ Burial-ground it was clear he was ready to wait patiently for some time. But it was from Arion’s obvious restlessness and excited expectancy, to be seen in every turn of his finely-moulded head and every arching of his proud though mutilated neck, that Tis, who knew the instincts of animals as well as Odysseus knew the instincts of men, had guessed that some mysterious vibration existing between these two semi-godlike creatures had already begun to inform Arion of the near arrival of Pegasos.

When they actually did meet, their re-encounter would have delighted Nisos, and he would have observed with relief that each of them had now ceased to leave on the ground any trail of
blood-stained
ichor. The immediate witnesses of the scene however were too taken up with their own affairs to notice the condition of the pair of animals who were led off by Tis. He led them quite quietly and naturally to a shed adjoining the one devoted to Babba.

Babba herself, whose private affairs were less absorbing than those of any of the persons dismounting from the back of Pegasos, instantaneously thrust her horns through the wooden partition
separating the two horses from herself, and then, hurriedly withdrawing these finely curved objects from the neat apertures they had made, proceeded to arrange her beautifully flapping ears so as to catch every faintest overtone and undertone of the thoughts and feelings that these unusual visitors exchanged between themselves.

But satisfactory as it was to an amiable and easy-going cow like Babba to have the distraction, though she could only understand half of what she heard, of listening to something that did at least make her forget the passing discomfort of waiting with full udders the time of her milking, it was a mild satisfaction compared with the pleasure Okyrhöe derived from talking to Arsinöe. The woman listened to every word Arsinöe uttered, to every sigh Arsinöe sighed. Nor was there any shade of seduction, whether frightening or reassuring, whether cajoling or propitiating, that she did not practise on her sister-handmaid from Priam’s court.

She had Arsinöe just now entirely to herself, for Odysseus had gone off with Zeuks to present that unusual cattle-dealer, as a queer specimen of an island farmer, to their old family-nurse, Eurycleia. Time and place and circumstance therefore all played into Okyrhöe’s hands and she threw such a thrilling intensity into what she was doing that she would have taken Arsinöe completely by storm if the latter had not possessed her own secret loyalties: but even these were troubled and shaken; for the girl accepted without question—being all the while herself the hero’s child—the grotesque lie that Okyrhöe was a daughter of Hector. “You have the very look of his eyes!” Arsinöe cried. As a matter of fact even while she was uttering this ridiculous cry, and very largely because of the honest vehemence with which she uttered it, this impassioned carver of the features she had idealized from childhood, in complete ignorance of her blood-relationship to their possessor, not only revealed their outlines in her own face but imagined she found them where in reality there wasn’t a trace of them.

To meet a sister-member of that girlish band of devoted
hero-worshippers
from Ilium was in itself an event that brought with
it almost unbearable emotion, but to meet a woman who called Hector father loosened, as we say, Arsinöe’s knees and melted her reserved heart. It was therefore in the sobs of her compatriot upon her beautiful bosom, a bosom no longer entirely concealed under the skin of the Podandrikon, a creature whose name, owing to its association with some mysterious oriental court-fashion, must always, so its wearer had explained to Zeuks as on their ride the night-wind whistled through it, be pronounced with the stress on the syllable “dand”, that Okyrhöe won her first victory in the palace of the king of Ithaca.

It must, however, be allowed that in the bold invader’s second encounter with the defenders of this pillared rock-cave the victory was on the other side. The old Eurycleia, who had looked after the wounds, and recognized the scars, and protected the
eccentricities
, and cured the manias, of three generations, saw through the mask worn so becomingly by this beautiful adventuress at the first glance.

To every point Okyrhöe brought forward the old lady opposed a plain blunt doubt of its essential veracity.

“My rule has always been,” she declared at one point, “to obtain the word of a prophet or a teacher known through the whole of Hellas for proof of a family’s claim to be connected with this or that hero of the days of our grandparents; and I have never myself accepted the word of a ghost. Odysseus undoubtedly does believe that he met the ghost of Teiresias beyond the brink of Okeanos and made the ghost drink of the blood of the animal he was sacrificing. Moreover I know that Odysseus feels sure that he himself and none other went down into the Underworld ruled over by Aidoneus the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Indeed everyone who lives near our dear Odysseus has heard him tell stories about the ghosts of the famous heroes and heroines that he encountered in that Kingdom of the Dead.

“But I have seen so much of life in my time, young lady, and if you’ll let me cry, ‘Go away!’ or ‘erre! erre!’ to the bad omen, so much of death too, that when I hear people tell me that they are connected with the family of Peleus or Theseus or
Kadmos or Priam my feeling is simply this: if you have this noble blood in your veins your friends may be the better for it and your enemies the worse for it, but for you yourself life will be the same to you as it is to the rest of us, and death will be no longer in coming, nor kinder in the way in which it comes, than it is to the rest of us; for as my grandmother used to say, and she goes back further than your precious Kadmos, ‘the nearer to the First Man the stronger the hand; the nearer to the Last Man the shrewder the head!’

“Thus although it was with her sweetest and most cajoling smile that Okyrhöe bowed herself out of the presence of the king’s nurse, her thoughts, as she got the Trojan captive to introduce her to Leipephile, the betrothed of Nisos’ brother, and then persuaded that same Arsinöe to take her to a well-cushioned chamber in a low-roofed passage behind the royal throne in the dining-hall, where Pontopereia was talking eagerly to young Eione, were nothing less than murderous.

“O you wait, you wait, you wait, you wait! you croaking and creaking corpse! It won’t be you who’ll choose the death you’ll die. It’ll be your meek and obedient Okyrhöe; and it won’t be the prettiest death in the world either; I can tell you that.”

Meanwhile, hidden away in that chamber at the end of that low-roofed passage between the great dining-hall and the
subterranean
kitchens and sculleries, where the meals were prepared and washed up and where the floral wreaths and the symbols and all the ritualistic paraphernalia for festival days were kept, Tis’s little sister Eione was recounting to Pontopereia her escape from the amorous attentions of the god Pan.

“But didn’t you feel,” Pontopereia had just dared to suggest, “so spell-bound under his touch that you longed to yield to him?”

The two young girls were sitting cross-legged on opposite piles of Cyprian cushions. Eione was seated on cushions whose
prevailing
colour was pale green, and Pontopereia on cushions whose prevailing colour was purple. Eione looked gravely and intently into her friend’s eyes.

“No, my dear,” she replied, “you’ll probably laugh at me as absurdly ignorant, but to tell you the honest truth——”

“You mean you’ve never really been made love to?”

Eione neither reddened nor stammered. She just frowned and rubbed the sole of one of her sandals with two of her knuckles as if the unravelling of this difficult question required her whole mental concentration.

“I’m not sure whether I have or not,” she said simply. “A boy who lives near us pressed me once very tight against him, when neither of us had much on, and I felt something—the thing they all have, I suppose, that makes them men—pounding and throbbing and beating against me like a stick with the pulse of a heart. But it didn’t make me want him to do anything; and it didn’t frighten me or disturb me. I just noticed it; that’s all, and wondered what I’d feel if he did anything else, and whether I ought to help him to do anything else. And then somebody came—and that was all.”

Pontopereia gave the purple cushion beneath her a mighty tug with both her hands so that it rose up like a wave between her thighs. “No,” she said. “I can’t call that quite enough; and to tell you the truth, my sweet one, I’ve never myself got as far as that—I mean in real life, if you understand. What I’ve always done, since I was O! so little, is to tell myself stories of
love-making
when I’m alone in bed. Sometimes I wake up in the night—you know?—feeling very amorous and then I tell myself, O such weird and funny stories—not very nice stories always, I’m afraid! It depends on what I’m feeling that particular night. But do tell me, my Sweet, what you did when Arcadian Pan laid hands on you. And first, do tell me this. Did his thin hairy legs and goat’s feet give you the shivers?”

At this point, to Pontopereia’s complete astonishment, Eione burst out laughing. “Shivers?” she cried. “I should say not! I like goats very much. Goats are my favourite beasts, just as Crows are my favourite birds, and blue dragon-flies my favourite insects and eels my favourite fish! I begged Arcadian Pan to let me stroke his thin hairy legs and it wasn’t he who made me sit
on his queer knees, it was I myself who made him take me on them. And I kept making him lift up his goat-feet so that I could see them quite close and touch them, like I like touching the feet of real goats! Then I made him let me clean his goat’s horns for him and polish them till they were lovely and smooth. Then I got him to teach me to make some real proper sounds with his pipe—yes! I played some real notes on Arcadian Pan’s own flute!

“Yes, as I’m telling you, Ponty darling, everything between us was just as I liked it to be, in fact as I made it be. The truth is I never knew that great gods—for he
is
a great god, isn’t he, Arcadian Pan?—ever let a person treat them, well! certainly not an ordinary farm-girl like me treat them, as he let me treat him!”

Pontopereia pulled out the uppermost one of her purple cushions from between her legs, and spreading it on her knees thumped it with her fists into smoothness.

“But what happened then, my dear? You aren’t suggesting, are you, that having made friends with this astonishing Being in such a simple way you were separated from him by a mistake?”

Eione looked at her with a vague careless, idle, good-natured, but entirely childish and innocent look.

“I wish indeed, Ponty dear,” she said, slowly, “that you could explain to me what happened for it’s all so totally beyond my comprehension that I’ve been living in a sort of trance of
confusion
ever since. It’s only your coming that’s brought me back into my own real self again. Yes, on my soul! I’ve never had such queer feelings. It’s just as if I’d been turned into somebody else; and somebody whose whole life goes by, without any move of her own, just as if she were a figure in another person’s dream! I know it sounds all vague and sleepy and funny; but I swear to you, Ponty darling, it’s true. Do you think I’ve fallen in love with Arcadian Pan? Ordinary girls like me
can
fall in love with an immortal god can’t they? There’s nothing impossible about it is there?

“Anyway, Ponty darling, I don’t quite know what has happened
to me and that’s what’s made me decide that, come what may, I
must
stick close to Arcadian Pan for a few more spring days and see what comes of it! One important thing has already come of it and that is our curiously complete agreement over this great cosmic Revolution. Mind you, some of us Island people still talk of the ‘Minoan’ or ‘Cretan’ revolution and others still talk of the ‘Argive’ revolution; but the only revolution that Arcadian Pan and I talk of is what we have come to call the ‘Cosmic’ Revolution, by which we mean a rustic pastoral revolution against a cruel, despotic, wicked, undemocratic, hieratic, privileged tyrannical Order of the Citizens of great Cities, which we—rustic shepherds and shepherdesses from the country—have joined together to break up forever!”

“But what will you put in its place?” enquired Pontopereia, giving her purple cushion a final caress with both her hands; hands which it must be confessed were not, like those of Eione, the hands of a born dancer.

“Anarchy! Anarchy! Anarchy!” cried the younger girl. “Don’t you see, Ponty darling, this revolution of ours, which is really a revolution of the older gods against the newer gods, of the great old giant-gods, animal-gods, dragon-gods,
serpent-gods
, and, above all,
women-
gods, for the older times were
matri
archal
times
, and women,
not
men, however heroic such men might be, ruled Heaven and Earth, since at the Beginning of things it was Gaia, our real old mother the earth, who gave birth to Ouranos, this holy heaven of hermeneutical humbug, that priests make so much of, and not the other way round! Isn’t that a spry word, ‘hermeneutical’? He taught me that!

“Yes! the thing that has thrown Arcadian Pan and me together has nothing really to do with his ‘taking me’, as he tells me they call it in the Arcadian sheep-folds, or his treating me as wives are treated, and it has nothing to do with my feelings, one way or the other.