Atlantis (47 page)

The real essence of the man’s shrewdness, for it was more like
the measured sagacity of some huge sea-lion than it was like the wily cunning of a fox or the crafty vigilance of a hungry hyaena or the distracted desperation of a solitary wolf, had a
super-animal
obstinacy in it which had the power of keeping intact, like some monumental idol, the achievement towards which he kept advancing.

He had done precisely that with the taking and looting of Troy. The sack of this royal city must have occupied the
attention
of his whole essential Being and this perfectly calm yet terrific preoccupation, nourished on the very marrow of his bones, was the thing that made it possible for him to indulge in the most outrageous lies and monstrous deceptions, without, as the saying is, turning a hair.

And now it was the same with this voyage above the waters under which lay the lost Atlantis. Odysseus had the power of “jollying along” every mortal person and thing, whether divine, or human, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, that could possibly, by any imaginable twist or turn of coaxing, cajoling, cozening, condensing, dilating, liquifying, vaporizing,
euhemerizing
, metamorphosing be made use of to help forward his individual purpose.

What would have needed the genius of Pontopereia’s
progenitor
himself, yes! even of the great Teiresias, to unravel, was the convoluted connection between the definite, concrete, actual, realistic achievement at which Odysseus was aiming and the glory, honour and fame he would get by this achievement.

It seems to the present chronicler, though it is only too likely that both Homer and Hesiod would take a different view, that the grape-juice of the glory of achieving, and the fir-tree sap of having achieved, when the achievement has been accomplished, are so inextricably intermingled that not all the Sirens, Harpies, Gorgons and Erinyes in the whole cosmos could unravel them.

To capture Troy, to return to Ithaca while Penelope still lived, to plunge down among the sunken temples and altars and streets and markets of drowned Atlantis, each one of these triumphs of the individual will over all that opposes it, had
become so completely all that was, all that is, all that shall be for evermore, to the man Odysseus, that to separate these events from this man would be like separating the moon from its light or the water from the waves.

Thus it was when Odysseus required of Zeuks that he should speak, Zeuks himself seemed conscious of some special quality in the moonlight as well as conscious of the abnormally dramatic weight of what he had to tell, for it struck Nisos who was watching Zeuks closely that this latter gave a sort of half-shrug of his broad shoulders and although he didn’t remove his hands from his sides he opened them wide, with their palms exposed and their fingers widely extended, as if he were commencing to disclaim all possible responsibility for all conceivable events in this mad world.

And it was at that precise second that an infinitesimal and entirely haphazard thing occurred such as had happened to Nisos from his earliest childhood. The fact that he was watching Zeuks so closely sharpened his powers of observation to an abnormal extent. And the result of this was that his attention was caught and held by the fact that a small sea-swallow, swooping and swerving along this particular deck, had let fall upon the deck’s well-scrubbed surface a little clot of bird’s dung from which protruded not only the featherless stalk of a tiny feather but the clipt edge of a human toe-nail.

Nor did this extra discovery prevent Nisos in his
moon-induced
mania for minute observation, from noticing that Zeuks himself, as he straightened his shoulders to draw his breath before answering, laid bare upon his own chest a peculiar tuft of especially black hairs. “Is the sky going to fall when Zeuks answers?” thought Nisos: and certainly the general sigh that rose from the whole company just then struck him as curiously connected with all those aspects of human bodies of which human consciousness especially dislikes being reminded.

It was almost as if the unseemly parts of every corporeal frame in that whole company joined in that general sigh; joined in it indeed so pitifully that it seemed as if that sigh proceeded not so
much from the lips of those gathered there as from those
disparaged
parts of their human bodies of which we only seem to grow fully aware when we are seized by an intense longing to escape from our bodies altogether!

It was a weird thought to come into a youthful head just then, but Nisos welcomed it, and indeed was proud of it, telling
himself
that his mother would have regarded it as an absolute proof that he was destined one day to be a prophet. Yes, he told himself, this great sigh from all these people came from every single one of the out-of-the-way hairs in their secret orifices of excretion and copulation, and from the ignoble hairs under their arms, whether male or female, and from every crushed, deformed, twisted, and squeezed-sideways toe-nail in that crowd, whether belonging to a male or a female.

Nor did the effect of the moon’s motionless motion, through those indifferent clouds, affect only human beings. It was especially potent where small, disregarded, insignificant material objects were concerned, objects such as pieces of burnt wood, broken shells, wisps of wool, flakes of foam, strips of sea-weed, frayed bits of cordage, and even certain infinitesimal scoriac fragments risen to the surface of the water and carried in circles over leagues and leagues of salt waves from the burning craters of the great mountain Kunthorax which towered above the city of Gom, the capital of drowned Atlantis.

Yes, this curious universal sigh rose not only from the less honourable portions of the bodies of the people upon the deck of the “Teras”, but from a host of derelict scraps and bits of scraps that winds and tides and sea-gull beaks had helped chance to collect at this particular moment and upon this particular deck. To the mind of our youthful prophet Nisos this heavy undulant sigh was drawn from every mortal thing there present that had, or could ever presume to claim that it had, suffered from the arrogance of immortal gods or the recklessness of mortal men.

A deep and spontaneous sigh like this was, he decided, clearly and unquestionably due to an obscure craving in existence itself to escape from every physical and every mental effort that was
forever
“having
to
be
made”
that it might remain what it was and not perish utterly in the abyss. All the animal, all the vegetable, all the mineral offscourings, castaways, shreds, patches, scrapings, splinters, parings, drift and flotsam, together with all the human abortions, misfits and degenerates and all the infected members of each particular corpus of corruption, seemed to Nisos just then as he tried desperately to unravel the psychic knot of that
half-circle
of suspended life and reluctant death under that intent moon as she passed those casual clouds, to be asking to be heard.

The universe seemed to be giving them some final pitiful chance that their breath should be audible and some broken syllable of their desire should be expressed, which, if Odysseus would only ask it or Zeuks would only answer it, might redeem all. But Odysseus was now repeating his question and Zeuks was now beginning to laugh.

Yes, it was with a laugh he commenced his answer, and with a laugh he finished his answer; and there were many there who must have thought that Odysseus would be overwhelmed by his answer. Zeuks told how it was soon after the “Teras” had sailed that the whole thing happened. Led by Krateros Naubolides, Nisos’ father, and by Agelaos Naubolides, Nisos’ brother, the enormous faction among the warriors of Ithaca who were opposed to the House of Odysseus swept down in a resolute mass upon the king’s palace, ransacked it, scoured it out, gutted it, scraped it clean of every trace and vestige of the House of
Odysseus
, till from the Corridor of Pillars to the innermost caverns of its washing-chambers, sculleries, pantries, and kitchens, it became a primitive, antiquarian annex to the prosperous barns and picturesque enclosures and to all the long-reverberating rural and insular traditions of the autochthonous House of Naubolides.

“And
Eurycleia?”
enquired Odysseus, fixing upon the narrator a long, deep, quiet, steady look, not in the least degree an excited or emotional look, and not at all what could be called an
inscrutable
look. What it really was was a patient ritualistic look, like the look of a priest who has uttered the same words so many
times that his emotional reaction to them has the modified, qualified, calmly reverential feeling such as is really the reaction to their destiny of many generations of a closely knit nation, gravely, but not solemnly, honouring their past, guarding their present as something sacred, and facing their future with a massively unruffled assurance.

Zeuks clearly found it difficult to tell the truth as to just how Eurycleia perished; but after a good many noises in his throat that were too like the sounds in an ox-stall to be called laughing and too like the sounds in a cow-shed to be called crying, he explained that when the old nurse saw Leipephile by her
betrothed’s
side among the foremost intruders she was unable to restrain her indignation and burst out in a rhapsody of
vituperation
. She abandoned herself indeed to such “
shame-crying
” and to flinging such “momon” or reproach upon
Leipephile
that Leipephile, who is, as we all know, a mightily big and powerful wench, lost her temper completely and struck her such a blow over the head with a large marble mixing-bowl or “depas” which she snatched from a side table that the old lady fell down and died instantaneously.

“In the confusion that followed, I fancy I began myself to behave in a wild and excited way and I think I must have drunk quite a lot too, for there was a great deal of wine floating round and I remember that the more adventurous of the
intruders
soon struck me as being a good deal more intoxicated than I was myself.

“Our Trojan Arsinöe here will bear witness to the truth of what I am narrating to you, O king; for in my tipsy folly I well remember thinking that it was my first duty to you to keep a tight hold on all your captives from the old Trojan War: and it was in the spirit of this sense of duty, O King, that I found myself clinging so closely to the maiden Arsinöe when we took our places on the back of the flying horse. It was your wise and cool-headed herdsman Tis, the brother of the maiden Eione who I understand is with you on board this ship, who insisted on our making use of Pegasos to follow you all this way across the sea.

“I tried to persuade him to accompany us rather than enter the service of the House of Naubolides but he maintained that his duty was first and foremost to the cow Babba, and that Babba’s shed and hay-loft and her field of meadow-grass were, taken together, enough of a kingdom for any man to guard and fight for. He also said that if it was the will of Atropos that Krateros Naubolides should rule in Ithaca while its King was sailing where no mortal had ever sailed before, it might well be her will also that when you returned you would find your cow Babba as ready to give you as good milk and as perfect cream as she did before you sailed away.

“‘The land,’ said Master Tis, ‘is my mother and my father and my grandmother and my grandfather. The grass growing on the land is my cow’s salvation and the milk from the udders of my cow is my redemption. The bread, made of the wheat which grows on my land, is, as I munch it, the only heaven I need, and furthermore,’ said Tis, the grandson of Moros, ‘the sweetness of the bread I munch increases as it nears the crust. My bread needs neither honey nor sugar to make it sweet but it needs land as good as my land to make bread as good as my bread; and it needs a cow as good as my cow to keep me from following my King across drowned Atlantis.’”

It was at this point, just as if the mention of the name “Atlantis” had softened some tension in the minds of all, that as Enorches, the Priest of the Mysteries, left the side of the ship and began to pace up and down within the limited space left between the mast with its reduced sail and the half-circle of listeners to this weird scene while his chiton, or body-shirt, having become ruffled in his violent disposal of his rags, his nakedness, unknown to himself, was startlingly exposed in quite a flagrant fashion.

This shameless sight combined with its exhibitor’s complete unconsciousness evoked a loud and profane chuckle from Euros which communicated itself to Pontos and from him extended to Klytos and Teknon. Whether Odysseus saw what they were laughing at or not this was one of those occasions when the root cause of all his triumphant endurances had a perfect chance to
show itself. His senses might be stirred by the mischievous and provocative smile that Okyrhöe was now directing towards him: his anger might be roused by the thought of the murder of his old nurse Eurycleia, the one person in the world who had known him in the intimate sense in which our father or our mother knows us, or our mate knows us, and by the fact that the blow that killed her was struck by the woman who herself had been waiting at his table since she was a child: but as neither of these things seemed able to change by a jot or a tittle the obstinate bulk of his intention, so no burst of bawdy laughter, even though directed at the privy parts of his worst enemy, could distract him just then from the moon that covered the waters and from the waters that covered Atlantis.

“How did you come, my good friend,” he now calmly enquired of Zeuks, indicating the grotesque figure of Enorches, “to bring this confounded fellow with you on the back of Pegasos?”

“I don’t wonder, O great King,” replied Zeuks, “at your asking how it was that
he
came with us! Well, I can soon tell you how
that
happened. Your herdsman Tis, the brother of Eione here—I’m right in
that,
aren’t I, Eione?—was the sole cause of the whole business. None of us would be here now if it weren’t for him; and you saw just now how submissively the horse obeyed the priestess Spartika—all owing to wise treatment he received in Tis’s stable. Herdsman Tis must have learnt from that old cow Babba he so dotes on some secret language that all animals, whether mortal or immortal, make use of when alone with each other.