Atlantis (56 page)

They both leapt to their feet, followed him at a run to the ladder, scrambled up helter-skelter, Arsinöe clinging to Nisos, while Zeuks, his left hand on the small of the man’s back and his right on the woman’s waist, pushed them violently from the rear.

Yes! Odysseus was standing alone at the base of the
figure-head
gripping “Expectation”, otherwise “Dokeesis”, firmly by the middle, and disentangling from the extraordinary object on his head what looked like a couple of dangling, elongated,
devil-fish
tentacles. Of these tentacles he was earnestly and gravely testing the strength, giving them a series of sharp tugs and using for this purpose both the hand that held the club and the one which was free and unencumbered.

Close to the mast stood Akron, watching over the curved spines and quiveringly extended arms of Pontos and Proros who were holding the swaying and dripping rope by which the “Teras” was moored to the rock that in shape resembled the Titan Atlas, and, as he watched those quivering arms and that massive rope,
repeatedly turning his head away from the rock and towards Eumolpos at the helm.

Zeuks led the agitated and excited lovers straight up to Odysseus who swung round at once and regarded them from above his beard with a quiet and approving look, a look that said: “You’re doing very well, my children. Go on as you’ve begun and all will be well.”

It was only when Nisos realised the direction in which both the eyes and the pointed beard of the old man were now turned that a cold shudder of terror ran through him amounting to something like sheer panic though it didn’t quite reach that point.

Odysseus was calmly regarding the water, his body stone-still, while both from the hand that held the club and from the other hand trailed those two weird streamers. What these streamers really resembled were the long-drawn-out single hairs of a certain prehistoric creature that swam the salt seas aeons of centuries ago and lived by devouring monstrous cuttle-fish which floated in chasms of water that descended to the centre of the earth.

Contemplating the greenish-black depths, into which Odysseus kept dangling these streamers from his fantastic helmet and
testing
their strength, Nisos began to feel more real nervous dismay than he had ever felt in his life before.

“By Aidoneus if this isn’t worse,” he said to himself, “than when I was in that prison of Enorches!” And then as he stared at that black-green swirling water, into which some deadly
intimation
told him Odysseus would soon force him to plunge, it suddenly came to him how the image of that mark on the base of the Sixth Pillar—“the Son of Hephaistos”—had acted like an incantation or a magic spell to free him from that cruel Priest’s prison. And wasn’t Hephaistos the god of Fire?

Well then, wasn’t this mysterious Son of Hephaistos, or rather the Pillar raised up by him, the very saviour dedicated to come to the aid of a person in peril from Water? Thus, just as he had suddenly seen those two Letters on the wall of his prison, so
he now saw them in the midst of that swirling green-black water.

And it was at that second that Odysseus swung round and shouted to Akron: “Keep her off the rocks till we come back!” and then in the same tone addressing Zeuks, just as if the daughter of Hector had been, like the “Teras”, another “Prodigy” of a Ship, “Guard my son’s Trojan as carefully as if she were Helen herself till we return!” Then turning his back upon everything but the miles of water that covered Atlantis: “Now you, my son, watch me carefully and do exactly what you see me do.”

Thus speaking the old king disentangled the long single hair, that was his Ariadne’s clue, from his Helmet of Proteus and placed the end of it between his teeth. Nisos, after one last hurried glance round, in which he saw the moonlit tips of Zeuks’ knuckles at Arsinöe’s waist but also noted that the knuckles of both
her
hands were pressed violently against her closed eyes, thrust the end of his “clue” into his mouth and shut his teeth upon it.

It was at that indrawn beat of the tense heart of their ship “Teras” that Arsinöe snatched her hands from her eyes, fumbled with the clothes of her companion, drew forth Zeuks’ habitual defence, his short double-edged sword-dagger, and thrust it into Nisos’ hand, thus it was not weaponless that our young friend, imitating to a nicety every movement of the old man, followed him over the ship’s side, and plunging feet-first into the water, disappeared from view.

What did not disappear, however, and it can be imagined the queer feeling the sight of these things gave to Arsinöe, were the two elongated single hairs, so vividly suggestive, whether or not such was their real origin, of some aboriginal prehistoric feminine monster, of that grotesque Helmet of Proteus, These objects remained on the surface of the water; and it was the weirdest thing Arsinöe had ever seen in her life to observe these thin streaks of moon-lit silveriness, bobbing up and down and round and round each other, and every now and then shooting off a certain distance from each other, where, although separated, they would recommence their sport of bobbing up and down and
round and round, as if the other one were there, when in reality it was completely outside that particular radius of the game.

Zeuks was also watching this ocean dance of a couple of moonlit filaments constituting themselves a curious sort of comic-cosmic choroio; but his attention was so taken up with the delight he got from pressing Arsinöe’s body against his own that this dithyrambic crescendo-diminuendo upon the water became merely an outward projection of the deliciousness of the dalliance in which he was indulging.

To Arsinöe on the other hand, though she could no more help staring at it than she could prevent her senses responding to her companion’s caresses, it was as if the everlasting elements
themselves
were mocking her and making sport of her; but when Zeuks’ ecstatic embrace subsided and she had once more to deal with the less wrought-up occurrences of the more normal succession of things she forced herself to recall what she had felt when in that “Arima” of Ithaca day after day, with the
carving-tool
tight between her fingers, she had carved the indomitable features of the defender of Troy out of the heart of an island
ash-tree
.

While the son of Arcadian Pan and the daughter of Hector of Troy watched the dance of those nameless things that were like the antennae of some primordial insect-monster of the ocean, our friend Nisos found he needed every gasp of breath, every drop of semen, every throb of blood, every microcosm of will, every spurt of energy, every burst of blind desperation he could call up if he were to remain “cheerful”, as his island school-teachers had always taught him must be at the root of the philosophy of life of every pious son of an Achaian father, while side by side with Odysseus he sank through the water to the roofs and streets and temples of the capital-city of Atlantis.

They landed on a vast expanse of grey pavement and what was really an enormous space of perfectly smooth and carefully fitted flagstones; and while Odysseus was slowly turning round on his heels and with very little shuffling or stretching or stumbling
was making a hurried but obviously a pretty careful survey of the panorama around them, the first thing that came into the head of Nisos to do was to snatch at his own silvery and swaying
life-line
. When once he had clutched this gleaming object at about five yards distance from the Helmet of Proteus, he glanced quickly at Odysseus for permission, and proceeded to give the glittering thin thing a bold twist round the cavity in the bosom of the Club of Herakles as the weapon reposed horizontally in the hand of Odysseus.

Noting his son’s action and divining that it had something to do with the curious “life-crack” or naturally-engendered slit in the bosom of “Dokeesis”
alias
“Expectation”, the old hero raised the weapon into a more perpendicular position and gave it the sort of brandishing shake that Herakles himself must have given it before between them they killed the Nemean lion.

Held quietly and firmly now at a slanting angle to the bottom of the ocean, and tangled in a twist of one of the two parallel life-lines that reached from the Helmet of Proteus to the surface of the sea, it was possible for our two world-voyaging insects to appear at the mouth of their unusually-shaped caravan and even plunge into verbal relations with their almost equally bewildered fellow-travellers.

“My friend the Moth keeps imploring me to tell her,”
murmured
the Fly, “just where in the circumambient trail of our cosmogonic excursion she may know she has arrived. I tell her that this is the only ship upon the sea that fulfils the longing of real adventures all over the world who long to exchange earth for air, air for fire, fire for water, in their natural, heaven-blest longing for new life.

“My friend the moth suffers unfortunately from one of those troublesome manias that so often afflict lovely and sensitive females. She maintains that the Orphic Priest, who confessed just now, when he saw Eurybia and Echidna on the island of Wone, that the gods he really worshipped were not Eros and Dionysos but Death and Nothingness, had been driven mad by the way we all treated him and by the hatred we all felt for him.

“She actually went so far as to say that if she could have spent a whole night when he was asleep caressing with her silky wings the frontal bone of his skull she could have restored him to sanity! I think myself that it is the pressure of all this dreadful volume of water upon a creature as delicate as she is that has disturbed her own brain.”

At this point Odysseus intervened, but quite carelessly and lightly. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “for this confounded weight of waters, in spite of our Helmet, makes me feel a trifle dizzy, I’ll rest here for a moment.” Saying this he seated himself upon a stone bench on a long, low wall; but he continued to keep the club in the same position and took care to hold it so that its “life-crack”, out of which the two insects were peering, might point towards Nisos.

“Please, O please, thou son of Odysseus,” cried the agitated moth, quickly recovering, under the powerful protection of the Helmet of Proteus, the spontaneous passion of her feelings, “don’t let him traduce by his terrible cleverness a person as holy, a person as chaste, a person as devoted, a person as spiritual as this great Priest of Orpheus! Where is he now, I ask you? Carried away by brute force on the back of a titanic animal who hates him even more than any of you do! Is that the way to treat the greatest Priest of the Highest Mysteries that the history of our world has known?

“If
he
were here now, instead of having to crouch as we are doing on the lowest bench in the lowest bottom of the world, we would be marching proudly across these bridges and in and out of these vast temples and forth and back down these sumptuous terraces and across these colossal squares and up and down these palatial flights of gently curving and softly undulating stairways, or we might even have found a chariot to ride in, for that would be the proper fashion for a man as old and famous as our sovereign the King of Ithaca!

“Please, O please, thou Son of Odysseus, call on your father to use his power to lift us out of this humiliation!”

“Is it not clear,” protested the fly, while the moth at his
side quickly recovered her equanimity, “that the poor darling has suffered a serious shock? Think of her assuming that an aged hero who has lived, loved, and fought with the gods and whose capture of Troy, as the Pillar in the Corridor has been telling me, is included in the poetical recitations of all the master-reciters in Hellas, is less poetical when resting by the wayside as an ordinary tired old man, than if under a gorgeous canopy he were riding on the back of an elephant followed by a procession of camels as the emperor of a host of jewelled Barbarians!

“It can only be, as you can see at once, my noble Lord Nisos, that our beautiful friend is suffering from a shock caused by the pressure of this appalling mass of water; and it would be very kind, as well as most appropriate, if, in order to turn her attention to other things, you would tell your King that the Sixth Pillar has just informed me that the fire-breathing Monster, Typhon, half-Dragon and half-Giant, and the arch-enemy of the Olympians, whom Zeus buried under a mountain in Italy, but who had been loose for several months, has now been decoyed by the Being who lives down here, and whose image is the Teras’ figure-head, into serving Him or Her or It, after the manner in which an obedient Beast serves its master. In fact, O most noble, O most loyal, O most sagacious grandson of Laertes, if you will forgive my turning for a moment from the philosophical aspects of life to those of more immediate concern”—and Nisos noticed that the head of the fly grew suddenly larger and blacker than usual and that both its orbicular eyes were gazing into the distance—“I believe the Monster I have just referred to, not the
figure-head
Being, if you understand, but the half-ophidian and
half-human
fire-breather, has smelt human blood down here and is hastening in our direction.”

The hand with which Nisos had hurriedly touched his master’s elbow, pointed now at a convulsive cloud of smoke and fire that he could see bending its course towards them over a sort of under-water aqueduct, and then, drawing from a slit in his own shirt, in a manner worthy of Zeuks himself, that dagger-sword with two edges that had been pressed into his hand as he went
over the side, he gave a little straightening jerk to the club in the old man’s hand as if indicating to it that battling with a Monster rather than philosophizing with a Fly must now be the order of the day.

It now became obvious once more to our friend what a perfect fellow-voyager and fellow-adventurer his new father was. Apparently Odysseus had so shrewdly and so quickly taken in the immediate topography of their position and the general nature of this astonishing metropolis of a drowned continent that he had no sooner caught sight of the Fire-breathing Typhon advancing towards them, swaying and heaving and writhing like a serpent with the lower half of its body, but steering itself with human arms and keeping a straight course along a sort of aqueduct, which perhaps still, though it only had the thirst of titans and monsters to quench, carried fresh streams in spite of all this intolerable weight of salt water: then with “Dokeesis”
otherwise
“Expectation” or the Nemean club in his right hand, and his son’s arm gripped tight above the elbow in his left, he hurried off in a straight line towards the advancing monster but upon such a different level of ground that to reach them Typhon would have had to risk a plunge of about a thousand feet, a leap which for all his dragon scales and serpent tail and the fearful strength of his gigantic arms was evidently beyond his power.