Atlantis (34 page)

“Atlantis! Atlantis.” Atlantis! And from the lovely head balanced on the ungainly little body, all the whole teeming mass of that portentous gathering, with its hosts of sullen-sultry spearmen and its agitated mothers and excited children in their
blood-bright
gaily-coloured clothes, and beneath them those blue waters that drew her down, and above them those white walls that lifted her up, were wholly and absolutely banished.

And it was at that very moment, for at such times strange
vibrations can pass between the oldest and the youngest among us, that Odysseus beckoned Pontopereia to his side.

Leaning with his right hand on his club, from the crack in whose breast both the moth and the fly were now gazing with absorbed interest at everything within the circuit of their vision, Odysseus told the daughter of Teiresias to use his left hand in place of the broken rung of that rotten ladder; “and make the devils, my brave girl,” he muttered, “give me a good pile of sound ‘othonia’ instead of all this false flattery about ‘wise old rulers’.”

With this physical help and moral stimulus Pontopereia did manage in spite of her awkward legs and heavy thighs to get to her feet on that absurd wooden erection. But, once mounted there, a tragedy took place that was completely unknown to every consciousness in the whole world except the girl’s own, a tragedy the mere existence of which justified up to the hilt what she had been feeling all that morning about the abysmal
loneliness
of every creature born into what we call “life”.

For Pontopereia, as she gazed at those shining spears, and at that blue sea-pavement, that kept drawing her down, and at those white walls that kept lifting her up, was suddenly seized by a fit of appalling shyness. This convulsion of shyness paralysed her mouth as if with a ghost-fish’s monstrous fins. It pressed against her throat as if with a bilge-smelling flattened-out
whale-bone
snout.

And finally it brought the thousand-times despairing
ship-wrecked
eye of a girl’s frustrated life-hope to fix itself upon her! Yes, it brought it closer and closer and closer to the self within the self, to the Pontopereia within Pontopereia, to the living, shrinking soul inside the innermost sheath of her calyx-like identity, so that nothing less than what was all she was should be exposed to this searching, reducing, unsympathetic, sardonic eye, the eye of a shyness that at that moment had gone stark mad.

The poor girl was helpless. What had suddenly come over her could no more be struggled against than she could have regained
her right arm if somebody had cut it off. And now quite
independently
of that fit of grotesque sub-human shyness, as if she had been a sparrow imagining itself a swan, she felt a natural, normal, overpowering human shame. She wanted nothing but to be allowed to hide her head and cry piteously. She could not even remember now, with the tears running down her cheeks and tasting salt on her lips and blotting out her sight, how she managed to slide down from that ridiculous wooden platform. But she did remember how the beard of Odysseus tickled her chin as the old king bent over her and tried to comfort her as she wept on the ground.

It was at that moment that the Priest of the Mysteries, who, like a holy and consecrated wolf, had been waiting for his chance to spring, snatched at his opportunity. And such was the power of this man’s demonic personality that although the collapse of Teiresias’ daughter had been followed by quite a lot of shouting and rushing hither and thither, accompanied by the angry brandishing of many spears in male hands and much
high-pitched
expostulation from female throats, the moment it was realized who it was who was now pulling himself up to the top of that shaky erection and using such obstinate determination in treading upon each broken rung and in clinging to each wretched bit of balustrade there was another of those queer gasps of
mass-attention
where the actual crowd itself seems to create for itself a unified Being with ears and eyes that can take things in, and get shocks of feeling from taking things in, just as ordinary
personalities
can.

Quite a considerable crowd of these islanders with spears, whose number had so impressed the moth that she had whispered the startling syllables “a thousand”, were close enough to the
speech-rock
to see what a teasing thing it was to mount that platform. Pontopereia had only managed it by the help of the old king.

It was the complete absence of anything traditional or romantic about that wholly silly erection that took the heart out of its ascent and may even have been the cause of the girl’s collapse when she had ascended it. One of the prices that had to be paid
for the Trojan War by the Island of Ithaca was that there was neither time nor money to obliterate the finger-prints of the flagrant bad taste left by the rich citizens of that particular epoch.

It was lucky that most of the work of that bad time was not done in materials that by their own nature were especially lasting. It should also be noted that since then, the general taste of the islanders had improved so much that had any of the younger men, even the eldest son of Krateros Naubolides for instance, been called upon to speak they would have certainly spoken from among the old traditional stone-seats and not approached that fatal erection of ill-chosen wood. It was just because these preposterous platforms had already become laughing-stocks, that, when the Priest of the Mysteries in his struggle to ascend was observed to be hanging by one arm from the balustrade with his “chlaines”, or professional philosophic cloak, flapping in the wind about his rump, till the wood-work broke and deposited him on his back on the ground, quite a number of the men in the crowd gave a vent to a rude burst of laughter.

The sound of this must have reached the priest’s ears for he leapt to his feet in one of his fits of blind rage, fits that always endowed him with superhuman strength and were therefore an advantage to him rather than anything else. At this moment what he did was to seize the actual main floor of the platform with both his hands and to shake it for a while, as if he were a besotted giant capable of shaking a king’s palace to dust and ashes.

Then with one grand shattering, heaving spasm what he did was to bring the whole erection crashing to the ground in pieces. This done the astonishing man completely regained his
self-control
, in fact more than his self-control, for he became a
supernaturally
competent commander with all the resources of an exceptionally brilliant orator at the absolute disposal of a
perfect
strategist.

He coolly kicked aside the relics of the dilapidated platform he had demolished, and advancing to the front of the marble eminence on which the thing had been erected, he made just the right gesture and uttered just the right appeal to the crowd to
command total attention. Indeed he did much more: for he allowed no second to pass, no pulse-beat to intervene, between this beginning of things and the torrential flow of burning words that followed it.

“Let no wind,” he cried, “O people of sacred Ithaca, fill any ship’s sail that leaves your consecrated coasts! Keep this feeble, doting, maudlin, crazy, despotic, degenerate old man on his throne till old age makes him drop from it like a rotten apple and drop straight into his grave! Meanwhile let him stay where he is! Let him keep the throne warm for your brave Krateros who is a strong, sensible, natural man like any other man, and all the better for not being an herald-trumpeted, bard-celebrated, minstrel-sung, lick-spittle old legend-maker who doesn’t think his cup of glory is full enough in just being accepted by you islanders as your king, doesn’t in fact think that to be king at all over a crew of miserly farmers and poor fishermen, such as he considers you to be, is worthy of a deathless, immortal hero, like himself!

“What he wants to do by this mad voyage of his over the drowned cities of Atlantis is to win for himself a name beyond that of any of our famous men, a name beyond the name of Agamemnon, beyond the name of Achilles, beyond the name of Diomed, and of course far beyond the names of any of your most glorious Trojan enemies, such as Priam or Hector or Aeneas or Paris!

“O my friends, my friends, it is only yesterday we all heard, through the mediumship of earth and air and fire and water of the drowning of Atlantis. These murderous gods always like their news to reach us drop by drop, as it suits their god-
almightynesses
’ cunning craftiness, and not for
our
interest really at all! But there’s one little, obvious, simple, human interpretation of their trick of revealing their own murderous behaviour in
connection
with these hints from earth and air and water and fire that may not yet have occurred to you—I mean the
double-dyed
craftiness of suggesting that what they have done purely and solely to protect themselves was done in the interest of a
faithful steering of human history, as it takes place on this old earth, and in the interest of progress on this old earth, or anywhere else in space.

“And now I would like to say something to you about this drowning of Atlantis of which we hear so much. I would like at this moment, my dear friends, humbly, patiently, submissively, and with all due respect where respect is due, to suggest to you that these curst Olympian rulers of ours recently made a great discovery. They discovered, never mind how, perhaps through earth or air or water or fire, or perhaps through some
treacherous
group of Atlanteans themselves, for there are traitors in every country, that some great Atlantean philosopher, who may now at this moment, for all we know, be wandering over the earth under a completely different name, anyway my suggestion is that somehow or other they found out that an Atlantic philosopher had got the secret of some new magnetic stone that can influence unborn embryos and that is probably called the ‘Embryo Stone’, and whose power—I am only humbly suggesting this to you, though, I confess, in my own philosophical researches I have discovered some very peculiar and very powerful magnetic stones that can change the sex of an embryo.

“The Atlantean philosopher’s stone may have the power of making the embryo bi-sexual. In which case, as you can well imagine, you warriors of Ithaca, the influence, the renown, the glory and the power of this Sage of Atlantis, not to mention his wealth, would be very great indeed! And naturally enough the high Olympians would hate him. They have always been
extremely
touchy and sensitive on such points; as they may well be! For doesn’t their authority with all of us ordinary mortals largely depend on their power over birth, and over the various issues of birth?—yes! extremely touchy they have always been about this whole problem of birth and sex; and if I may whisper this in your ears, you brave men and beautiful women of Ithaca, it is by the cunning trick of keeping sex, and birth, the issue of sex, completely under their control, that these Olympian gods retain their power over us.

“But they can be defied now and again for all that; and very successfully defied. You have only to visit the “Herm” of the great Goddess Themis, within a mile of where we are now, and as you can believe from my devotion to Eros and Dionysos I’m no fanatic champion of propriety and decency, to see the havoc done to her image by the hands of the chaotic Harpies; and yet upon the traditional order maintained by Themis the basic rule of these Olympians is declared by their champions to depend.

“Whereas I say it depends only on two things—on the
Thunder-bolts
of Zeus and on the plagues sent by the Queen of Heaven. O my friends! if you would listen to me and boldly defy all these false gods; if you would turn to the only deities and divinities in the whole pantheon of godlike creatures who really have the power of giving us new life—not just murdering us with
thunder-bolts
and with plagues and famines—but transporting us by mystic ecstasies and paradisic trances into Dimensions of Being, where what here we are deluded into calling reality is seen in its true light, and where nothing, I say again to you, my friends, where nothing is the secret of all the Mysteries beneath and above the Sun and the Moon, beneath and above the divine ether, except the mind that half-creates what it enjoys, except the mind that half-annihilates what it cannot enjoy!”

When Enorches had finished speaking he showed in the presence of that enormous crowd and in the presence, and before the steady eyes and pointed beard, of the unalterable old king, the same perfectly cool brain and perfectly poised intelligence that he had shown when he began speaking.

But neither the old king, who now held the awkward form of the daughter of Teiresias firmly by the waist while he slowly and indifferently swung the club of Herakles to and fro with his free hand, nor the agitated crowd of spear-waving men and excited women had time to note this serenity in their orator, for the attention of every person in that oldest portion of the “agora”, including king and crowd and prophet’s daughter, was suddenly and startlingly switched to a completely new occurrence.

This abrupt jerk to the particular set of nerves in them all that responded to dramatic events included in its field of operations, as may be easily supposed, both the moth and the fly who just then were peering out of the life-crack of the club of Herakles with concentrated interest. It also included the club itself who in following the rush of events at this particular crisis had the advantage of its vibratory contact with the Sixth Pillar in the Corridor of Pillars. This contact, based on a long series of experiences so homely and natural that they might almost be called domestic, was in its way as much of a philosophical
discovery
as any conceivable one made by the Atlantean sage, and neither the moth, whose silky wings quivered with the agitation of its emotion, nor the fly, whose great black head bulged with the intensity of its rumination, could do more than quietly accept such a verdict when they heard the club murmur aloud to itself what it had just caught from the massive Being that bore the signature of a son of Hephaistos, namely the words: “Hear therefore what the sage saith, “When the messenger flies or gallops, or drives, or runs, hope nothing, fear nothing, expect nothing, talk of nothing, till he’s standing on the ground at your gate.”