Atlantis (29 page)

“What Arcadian Pan feels drawn to do, as far as his treatment of a plain ignorant girl like me is concerned, is to keep his hands off me and the thing that male creatures carry about with them
out of me, until what you might call ‘the ice’ is broken between us; but, to break this ‘ice’—which is of course my shyness and nervousness and pride and independence, and also, you needn’t smile, my dear! my ignorance—the great thing is for Arcadian Pan and me, and don’t ’ee ever think, Ponty my precious, that I don’t know what an honour it is for a stupid little kid like me to go about with a great immortal god, especially one with the beautifully-thin hairy legs and the firmly-planted goat-feet of my favourite of all animals!—the great thing, I say, is for Arcadian Pan and me to have the same idea of a proper ‘Cosmic
Revolution
’ and the same idea of the kind of Anarchy we must set up in place of this confounded hieratic ‘order’.

“What the old Dryad advised—and she told us that though her name ‘Kleta’ was given her by one of the Graces she was not displeased to bear a name that resembled Keto, the fair-cheeked sea-monster who became the wife of Phorkys, one of those honest ‘old Men of the Sea’ who
cannot
—and isn’t
that
a significant thing in itself?—tell a lie about anything.

“That’s what I said this morning to Arcadian Pan, and O! it pleased him so: and though he swore he couldn’t be as honest as all that, being a shepherd busy with ewes and nanny-goats and rams, and as a player on the flute for country-girls to follow and as the cause of those sudden, nameless, deep, strange, inexplicable, mysterious, obsessing, panic-terrors which take possession of mortal men and make them scurry and scamper away like rats out of a barn, he liked honesty, he said. And so I told him that the ‘old men of the sea,’ that is to say the old gods of the sea, were the only ‘honest’ gods in the world because they lived in water, and water I told him is the one element in the world that
cannot,
in its inherent nature, play dramatic tricks upon us.” “What about ships at sea?” thought Pontopereia; but she held her peace; and Eione went on. “Well! we shall want all the help we can get from the outspoken honesty of water if we are to make headway against Zeus, Poseidon, and Aidoneus, each of the three of them a superb master of lies! Yes, what Arcadian Pan and I feel is that these three Sons of Kronos are now trying
to combine together, since one is the Ruler of the Sky, one of the Sea, and the other of whatever dark and dreadful world it
is that lies beneath the Earth; and that what we revolutionists and rebels have to do is enlist against Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus all the subnormal and abnormal and supernormal creatures we can collect together!

“These three most powerful rulers among the Olympians have joined together to suppress with violence and magical force every rebel that is opposed to them and opposed to all the great
Olympians
who support them!

“Do you realize, Ponty dear, that fresh news has just reached this appalling priest Enorches from his fellow-priests of the Mysteries at Eleusis, informing him that Herakles, who has been guarding Mount Etna to keep that fire-breathing monster Typhon from breaking out, has been persuaded by Dionysos to yield himself up to an orgy of drink; and that while this has been going on, Eros, who had been chained with golden chains by Hephaistos or by some ‘Son of Hephaistos’, like the one who carved the letters ‘U. H.’ on the base of the pillar here, yes! chained to the arm of Aphrodite’s throne in Cyprus, has broken his bonds and joined Dionysos, and together they have succeeded in throwing Herakles into what amounts to a mad trance of ecstasy, in which condition he has become so completely
irresponsible
that the monster Typhon has got entirely loose, has left Italy and Sicily altogether, and has gone, fire-breathing,
ravaging
, rampaging, to where, above the Garden of Hesperides, the Titan Atlas, whose punishment from the Olympians it has been to hold up the sky, is threatening to leave his job? What do you think of all this, Ponty dear? Arcadian Pan and I think that his departure will neither mean the end of the sky nor the end of the earth, but the end of the superiority of the sky over the earth.

“You see, Ponty dear, the garden of the Hesperides lies at the western verge of the entire world where the divine streams of Okeanos encircle the earth, and where once used to be—
malediction
on those who submerged it! is what Arcadian Pan and I say now—the beautiful sheep-grazed meadows of Lost Atlantis.
I took Arcadian Pan to the oak-tree of the King’s old Dryad who was such a friend of Laertes in
his
time, and the Dryad revealed to him certain secrets of the Future of which he, although an immortal, had heard nothing; ‘I am about to die’, the Dryad said to us, ‘or I shouldn’t know these things myself.’ And it was after our talk with the Dryad that
we
decided
to
intercept
Typhon
.”

Pontopereia’s blank amazement at these astonishing words made her whirl the purple cushion in the air before sitting down on it with a thud.

“You—and Arcadian Pan,” she gasped, “intercepting that fire-breathing monster!” As she stared dumbfounded at her young friend, she became aware that the childish innocence in Eione’s expression had suddenly changed to something else; and at this point she realized that between herself and this new Eione there was a blank space she couldn’t bridge. “How weird,” she said to herself, “are the ways by which two minds touch each other and dodge each other!”

And indeed it struck Pontopereia now as if they were the gestures of a complete stranger, when Eione suddenly stood up, opened her mouth as if to speak, but, in place of speaking, yawned, put the back of her left hand with careless indifference against her mouth, and, when her yawn was finished, with a half-smile, as if just waking from a pleasant dream in which she and Arcadian Pan might have been riding Typhon like an obedient horse, stretched both her shapely arms with clenched fists high above her straw-coloured head.

“You see, Ponty dear,” she said emphatically as she let her arms fall to her sides. “Not only has this Echidna of Arima borne children to Typhon but the dragon, Ladon, who guards the apples of the Hesperides, is her brother; and there is a good chance that when Poseidon and Aidoneus come on the scene we shall have got Prometheus himself to stand up to them.”

Pontopereia looked past her friend into far-receding space. She suddenly felt sad and lonely. Had this rash young girl,
without
in the least comprehending what was happening to her, fallen in love with Arcadian Pan? Was all that rather hurried and very
startling and yet not completely satisfactory account of these great cosmic events
an outward and visible sign of a much more personal feeling? Was it actually possible that a simple country girl like this should be subject to vibrations of emotion belonging to a superhuman conflict between Gods and Titans?

Pontopereia experienced just then a very perceptible sense of humiliation. When she had hastened their departure from Ornax she had felt without doubt the spirit of her father descend upon her and the inspiration of her father possess her soul, and she had exulted so much in this and felt so proud of it that it had seemed to her, as she bowed down in intellectual response before the gnomic humility of Zeuks, that her place in the struggle of life was with the great seers and the illumined soothsayers and not with ordinary women and girls.

But in this rough, earthy, primitive, uncomfortable rock-palace of the royal house of Ithaca she felt reduced in stature and importance. Her prophetic power seemed to have deserted her. While she had been listening to what Eione had told her of this news from the priests of Eleusis about the monster Typhon escaping from under Aetna and thundering over sea and land, till he reached the Garden of the Hesperides and the place where Atlas holds up the sky as his punishment, she felt as if without a definite inspiration from her father she had no place in these events and no power of her own to obtain such a place.

She even began to feel a doubt in her mind whether the
beautiful
and formidable Okyrhöe herself would be able to deal with this rock-hewn palace to which she had insisted on being brought.

With an intellectual candour that went further than the emotional simplicity of her friend she decided that the prophetic power within her must depend on the special atmosphere of particular places. “I don’t believe,” she told herself, “it will sweep me away at all here. Well, if I’m not destined, after all, to be a prophetess,
I
’
m
not,
and that’s all there is to be said!
But
I
wish
Nisos
was
here
.”

This frank admission, so nakedly expressed, was a great relief to her; she felt as if in the midst of putting on the ritualistic
robes for the worship of one of the greater Olympians she had suddenly snatched the things off and thrown them on the floor and rushing out into the open air danced on the grass the first dancing-steps she had learnt as a child.

Meanwhile since Nisos’ brother had carried away the other virginal attendant it was natural that the two woman who had known Ilium and the Court of King Priam should drift off together. As may be imagined with one like Okyrhöe to deal with, it did not take Arsinöe very long to discover that this lovely creature who put on the skin of the fabulous “Podandrikon” to accompany her to the haunted area of Arima and who seemed to find that to talk about the importance of accentuating the syllable “dand” in this harsh word was the best way of keeping their Trojan emotion in its place, had the same will as herself to thwart, frustrate and bring to a disastrous and contemptible end, the one single aim of the old age of Odysseus, his desire to sail across the sunken towers of Atlantis into the Unknown West.

Over their bowed feminine heads as they moved through Arima, defying the dark influences of that sinister region, there moaned and wailed, just as over the drowned temples of Atlantis Odysseus might have heard his ship’s rigging respond to the wind, the eternally monotonous dialogue between Echidna the mother of the Hound of Hell, and Eurybia the grandmother of Hekate.

But when, in the golden afternoon light, Okyrhöe was led by her new ally into the very presence of what looked like the absolute reality of the fully-armed Hector himself, her nerves did for an instant, for all their superhuman control, break into a choking gasp. For not only were Hector’s lineaments represented in exact correspondence to the living truth but there was
something
about the curves of his broad low forehead that exactly resembled the shape of Arsinöe’s head. She recovered quickly however; and they were returning in a deliberately loitering fashion; for Arsinöe had begun to explain to the visitor that Odysseus grew irritable if he had to speak to guests or even to catch sight of guests while dinner was preparing though she
admitted that the old hero had come by this time to look upon his unaristocratic companion, Zeuks, as an intimate; but the two women’s leisureliness at this moment received a shock that was as disturbing as it was startling.

By a grotesque piece of ill-luck they encountered the old Dryad Kleta; an encounter which brought them both down with a disagreeable jolt to the very things in Odysseus’ life that they would have preferred to ignore just then, that is to say to the human pathos of his present situation, as an extremely old man without a wife, or a daughter, or a grand-daughter, whose only son had become an austere, inhuman, unsympathetic recluse and a devotee of some contemplative cult, about which, save that it had nothing to do with Dionysos or Eros, and was in no favour with Enorches, it was very hard to get any information.

The old Dryad stood in front of them for a perceptible number of pulse-beats, staring at them as if they were trespassers and intruders of an extremely suspicious kind; not necessarily
outsiders
to be crushed as we crush black-beetles but entities to beware of and to be guarded against.

The old lady already knew Arsinöe by sight and was fully aware she was Trojan; and her first thought was that Okyrhöe must have just arrived by sea from the same part of the country. It may be believed she did not miss the royal eccentricity of the fabulous Podandrikon skin; and her mind began vaguely flapping like an aged phantom albatross from one to another of all the far-off harbours of which she had ever heard, leaving, as it flew, a feather caught in the sea-weed of one promontory and a splash of white dropping upon the rocks of another.

“Take notice, proud visitor,” she murmured, and then, with a quick glance at Arsinöe, “but you’ve been warned already, that we have to guard our renowned Odysseus from every agitating shock until the moment comes when he has got his ship ready to hoist sail and to sail away whither none of us will ever know! But sail he must and sail he will—away—away—away; and our duty now is to make everything as easy for him as we can until that heaven-appointed moment. Therefore,
proud one, from far off, the best thing I can say to you is to bid you go—go quickly—go quietly—go at once! If you came by sea, find a ship and be off!

“There are ships sailing from this side of our island and there are ships sailing from the other side of our island. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t gold to pay your way. Well, stranger, find a ship and pay the master of that ship to take you to the harbour nearest the place where you would be!”

Okyrhöe made an effort to look more than humanly lovely and her features had certainly never been as goddess-like as at that moment. The sun was still overhead, though his tremendous arsenal of refulgence had sunk sufficiently from the Zenith to pour itself into every curve and cranny of Okyrhöe’s countenance.

There are faces that cannot endure exposure of this kind, but Okyrhöe’s face could endure anything. Indeed it looked to Arsinöe as she glanced at her companion that the intense emotion in the old Dryad’s voice stirred up in the beautiful wearer of the Podandrikon skin a quivering vibration of
self-assertion
that rushed like a sea-breath touched by fire through nerves and veins and muscles and fibres and cells.