Atlantis (45 page)

Pontopereia hurriedly withdrew her hand. She had received such a shock that, hardly aware of what she was doing, she licked the longest finger of the hand that had not been to blame and with it gently stroked the erring hand as if to cure it of its impetuosity.

“I can tell
you
of course,” went on Eione, seized by a sudden gust of confidential school-girlishness, “because you weren’t at school in Ithaca. But it was because of Thrasonica going on stroking her hair that Amaryllis Leporides drowned herself.”

Pontopereia’s face expressed all the astonishment she felt, though by no means all the moral indignation she felt. Eione nodded vigorously. “Nobody but the three youngest of us know,” she repeated; throwing into her tone the implication that in Ithaca a girl’s sophistication decreased rather than increased as she grew up.

And indeed this was a view of insular as compared with
continental
education which struck Pontopereia as entirely correct.

“Nisos told me,” announced Pontopereia, standing on her feet now, and sufficiently disturbed by the rebuff Eione had given her to hit back—woman
versus
woman—by dragging in Nisos, “that the great Epic Poem about the Beginning of All Things by the Ruler of Atlantis brings in the little island where Arcadian Pan
must have given you the Helmet of Proteus and told Pegasos to carry you to Odysseus! But Nisos tells me this little island, which he says is called ‘Wone’ and must be pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘tone’ is really the top of the tallest of the mountains of drowned Atlantis, a mountain which used to be called
Kunthorax
and whose foot-hills rose from a vast fir-forest which was only a couple of days’ ride from the great city of Gom which was—and I suppose still
is,
only it’s under the water—the capital of Atlantis.”

Eione had listened to all this with her eyes tightly shut and her whole face quiescent, as if, though perhaps not actually asleep, the treatment of this crucial subject by her philosophic friend had a somnolent effect upon her. But she was compelled to open her eyes, and open them pretty wide too, when Pontopereia seized the pole, with which they regulated the sky-light to the deck above, the sky-light from which came
most
of their air and, when they hadn’t lit their oil-lamp,
all
their light, and opening it wider than they had ever done before, shouted in a shrill voice: “Is Nisos Naubolides up there? If he is, for the sake of all the gods tell him to come down here for a moment!”

So loudly did the youthful voice of the daughter of Teiresias ring through the whole interior of the “Teras” that it crossed the mind of Odysseus as he swung himself backwards and
forwards
in his cabin that it was possible that one of these two young creatures might have tried to put an end to the life of the other; and vaguely endeavouring to allow this imaginary
supposition
its full weight the old adventurer caused his hammock of small cords to swing rhythmically backwards and forwards to a sort of musical argument in favour of the advantage of being alive compared with the advantage of being dead.

The four oarsmen who while so fresh a wind filled the great sail were able to take their pleasure with their special dice or “astragaloi”, and had just decided that until supper-time they would make the game more lively by making it less individualistic, turning it in fact into a battle between the starboard and
larboard
oarsmen of the “Teras”, with Teknon and Klytos on the
starboard side, and Euros and Halios on the larboard or port side; and it was this new and more communal game that was broken up by Pontopereia’s cry.

Having put its violent lid upon the dicing of these
astragoloi-players
the girl’s quivering cry rang from end to end of the
top-most
deck where Proros and Pontos, who were managing the ropes which held the great bulging sail upon whose one, taut, open curve their speed and safety of their speed entirely depended, repeated the cry at once, and not content with repeating it, they both imitated it, and did this so successfully that the first officer, Thon, who by general consent rather than by professional succession had become the outlookman of the “Teras”,
ransacked
the sea’s surface with his eyes in search of some
broken-winged
siren before he made it known to Akron the ship’s master, that the young man to whom that same skipper was courteously listening was wanted below.

“Better go down at once, my boy! There’s some serious trouble among your women-folk! I pray it’s between those young ones, and
not
between those older ones! Down with you, my son! Down with you! No! no! Don’t wait a second,
lad
!
These troubles
inside
the ship are far more serious than anything that goes on in the City of Gom or at the top of Kunthorax; or on the Island of Wone. Oh, you’ll settle this trouble, my lad, whatever it is! You’ve got the look of an ambassador. Down with you now; and quick about it!”

But it was several minutes before Nisos, buoyed up by feeling that it was especially exciting to be called upon to decide a quarrel between the daughter of Teiresias and the sister of Tis, managed to reach even the second deck of the “Teras”; and it was perhaps just because he kept telling himself that it was so quaint that a son of Krateros and Pandea should be the one destined by Atropos to hold these uncertain scales that he didn’t clamber down the ship’s first ladder with more headlong speed.

The ladder from the second deck to the third deck was at the stern of the vessel, whereas the one he had just descended was near the prow and the astonishing neck, scaled, feathered,
wrinkled, infundibular, that belonged to the figure-head of the “Teras”, the figure-head which so far he had only seen from the rear but which Akron assured him, when seen from the front, represented the most intellectual visage ever carved out of any substance upon earth by flint or stone or bronze or iron and was the face of “the unknown ruler” of Atlantis. Thus in order to reach the ladder to the lowest deck of the “Teras” where were the three cabins occupied at present by Nausikaa and Okyrhöe, by Eione and Pontopereia, and by Odysseus himself, Nisos had to step over the big round oars, either of Teknon and Klytos on the starboard side, or of Euros and Halios on the port side; and he selected the latter.

He did this, as we so often say, “for a trivial reason” but as we all, especially those of us who are historians, know only too well, reasons like this always appear to everybody trivial before the result is revealed, and the event which is the result
monumentalized
, made clear to all. His “trivial reason” was that the oarsman Euros had that deep indentation behind his skull and above his neck, which certain experiences had taught our young prophet was an infallible sign of refinement and of quite special sensitivity.

Greeting Euros therefore with diffidence and respect and
half-turning
to address the man’s up-tilted face as he paused, before stepping over the oar of Halios he continued to see, even while glancing into the man’s eyes, that particular indentation at the back of his head which he held in such high regard, while behind it as if it were a symbol of all that was delicate and vulnerable in humanity, as opposed to all that was inhuman in Nature, rolled the enormous weight of waters. But it is dangerous, as his hero Odysseus could have told him, to philosophize too minutely when you are acting with a rush: and his pause at that second made him trip up so blindly over Halios’ oar that down he came with a crash, sprawling absurdly on the carefully scrubbed deck, and uttering a blasphemous curse on the vindictive ways of Poseidon.

Halios lowered his great oar with rapid effectiveness as well as with exquisite nicety and helped Nisos to his feet while all their
six eyes, joined now by the four eyes of Teknon and Klytos on the starboard side, turned simultaneously seaward, totally
forgetting
Pontopereia’s wild cry.

And what they saw was indeed a sufficient marvel to justify any creature’s obliviousness to all else. For on one side a flaming red sun sank behind the horizon; and on the other a pale full moon rose above the horizon.

What was indeed curious in this sudden possession by the sinking Sun and the rising Moon of the entire consciousness of four middle-aged men and one young man was the fact that each of the two celestial luminaries was only visible through one of the oar-holes on one of the two sides of the ship.

In each case the bulk of the hole was filled by its particular oar; and, since each of the heavenly bodies was of a circular shape, the golden segment of the moon, which encircled the oar of Euros on one side, and the blood-red segment of the sun which encircled the oar of Teknon on the other side, produced, when the eyes of all five men moved from one to the other, a visual effect so strange that it was doubtful if any of them would ever, though he lived as long as the Ithacan palace Dryad, see such a sight again. Each of the five men received the startlingness of this queer vision in a different way. Euros, for instance, felt pure annoyance over the advantage that the deck-hands who dealt with the ropes and the sail had over themselves in regard to what they could see, and this feeling was increased when first on one side and then on the other the oar-holes were not only lined and inlaid with bloody sickles and golden crescents but crossed and re-crossed by the obstinate and greedy flight of a small sea-bird, for whose feather-covered cranium these creaking orifices were associated neither with the sun nor with the moon, but purely and solely with the fragments of terrestial garbage which the oarsmen got rid of through them. As for Nisos, he played with the crazy and fantastic fancy that the whole universe was the body of the giant Atlas, that great Titan whom the Son of Saturn compelled to hold up the sky lest it fall upon the earth.

And Nisos imagined himself following his hero Odysseus in a
winged ship that had the power of forcing its way through the body of the earth, as well as through the body of the sun, as well as through the body of the moon; but in his present fancy these three bodies were one body, the body that is to say of the entire universe, which was simply the body of Titan Atlas. His pet hawk was with him; and in his fancy he and his hawk kept flying through the whole body of Atlas and out on the other side: that is to say—into the void and back again into Atlas.

It was not long, however, before this Atlas fancy of our
youthful
prophet developed into a much bolder imagination; the idea namely, that he himself was a universe-devouring dragon who lived on the elements and fed on earth and fire and water as he hurled himself through the air from one universe to another, devouring each one in turn, while, out of his excrement,
vast-trailing
protoplasmic embryos of new universes were eternally coagulated afresh.

The queer trance into which all five men on the rowing-deck of the “Teras” had fallen may have been caused by the fact that in their awareness that the ship was sailing mid-way between sinking sun and rising moon each man felt he was being pitilessly pulled in opposite directions by two sanguinary opponents and that the end of it could only be that he would be torn into two halves. He could already feel himself becoming both these two half-selves which were now feebly drifting in opposite directions, their ragged edges raw and bloody while the flesh nearest those edges grew more and more gangrened. Was it perhaps that the screams of this sea-hawk, a bird that might easily have seemed to a prophetess, like that Nymph in the Italian cave, to be the return of a creature that had for hundreds of thousands of years been visiting and re-visiting the earth, stirred up in Nisos a desire to plunge deeper and deeper into the mystery of matter?

At any rate one thing was certainly clear, namely that the wood-work of the “Teras” herself was slowly being aroused to a sort of semi-human consciousness. Whether this would have a good effect on those who were voyaging in her, who could say?

But Nisos now set himself to scramble down to that lowest deck of all, from whence Pontopereia’s cry had ascended. It occurred to him, as he now rushed down, to wonder whether his delay in obeying her cry had hurt the feelings of the daughter of Teiresias, and as he climbed down the ladder, feeling slightly uncomfortable in his mind from remorse at not obeying her more quickly and slightly uncomfortable in his body from his crashing fall he cursed himself as a prize fool. “Where in the name of all the Harpies and Gorgons
is
the girl?” he muttered as he entered their cabin and found Tis’s sister asleep on their couch and not a sign of the other one. “Has she,” he thought, and as this fear shot through him he felt a queer sensation that he knew was different from any other feeling he had ever had before, “has she climbed up the ladder and thrown herself into the sea? And did she do this,” and he addressed his remark not to himself but to the sleeping figure of Eione, “because of something
you
said to her?”

He stood staring at the sleeping girl in the bed with what he pretended to himself was a look of fierce dramatic reproach. The sleeping girl would have been gratified however to observe that this fierce look was directed solely at her face and that upon her incredibly well-moulded limbs, as fully exposed to his view as her extremely rustic and almost grotesquely simple features, the look that was drawn out of him was of quite a different kind.

Different or not, all that Pontopereia knew about Nisos’
expression
when she crept up silently behind him from her
hiding-place
among the hampers and nets and wicker cases and
javelin-holders
and quivers made of twisted root-fibres full of feathered arrows, which Odysseus had piled up outside his cabin and which—for the lowest deck of the “Teras” was anything but spacious—did more than just impinge upon the cabin of the two girls—all indeed that Pontopereia could possibly know of the feelings of Nisos as he stood staring at her enemy-friend and incorrigible rival was the simple fact that he
did
stand thus staring. And so when she spoke to him and he swung round to face her as if she had pricked him with one of Odysseus’s darts, the look that was exchanged between them was one of those looks that young men
and young maids exchange now and again and that are as the primeval Welsh Prose Epic expresses it, “like the colour of lightning upon a sword-blade”.