Atlantis (57 page)

What struck Nisos most about Odysseus as they advanced side by side towards this writhing and twisting cloud of fire and smoke, till it was almost exactly above their heads, was the man’s absolutely amazing gift for adapting himself to a staggering and overwhelming situation with complete calm and balance of mind.

“As for myself,” Nisos thought, “I believe I might just manage to carry things off with a rush and be brave enough to scare my enemy with brandishings of my dagger as I flew at his throat; but what I couldn’t do would be to get rid of my secret dread, my stalking and skulking terror, the horror I’d feel in my jumpy nerves and the heart-beating throbs of my jittering pulses.

“Why, the old man behaves as if this terrifying dead city at the bottom of the sea were the friendly haunts of his family dryad. He seems able to note things and examine things and analyse things with as much calm and as much lively interest as if he were observing the beasts and birds and shrubs and trees and plants and rocks and stones of a new tract of totally unknown country that we had invaded and occupied.”

“I don’t like the idea,” said Odysseus at last, lowering his head after having kept it thrown back and tilted upwards with his bowsprit beard pointing to the world they had left, “of that creature up there dropping his
kopros
on our heads.”

Nisos in his turn lifted his head; and there did indeed seem to him a very potent probability that from the under-belly of Typhon or, worse still, from beneath his serpentine tail, extremely unpleasant excrement might descend upon them! From that unwieldy body gusts of the foulest-smelling wind, collected for long in those over-replenished bowels, were already beginning to explode in startling and menacing bursts of spluttering thunder; and it certainly wasn’t a pleasant prospect to imagine themselves being chased from one end of the ocean to the other by the droppings of this fire-breathing fugitive from the wrath of Zeus.

“I don’t know, my son,” the old man continued, “whether you can make out the width of that fresh-water aqueduct under his coils as he comes on; but from what I can see of the situation it strikes me that this final rebellious child of our old Earth has got himself on a road that’s too narrow for him to turn till he arrives at the end of it. It’s too high a jump even for him, and I really believe, now he’s once on that aqueduct, that there’s nothing he can do but go on to the end of the thing! We shall, no doubt, my dear boy, have many other vexations before we’ve got to the end of
our
aqueduct; but I think we’re in no immediate danger from that outrageous Man-Dragon up there.”

Forward therefore with free steps the father and son moved. They had to walk independently of each other because each held his weapon in his right hand, and when by any chance they
moved too close, the hilt of the son’s sword-dagger kept grazing the knuckles of the father’s left hand.

What Odysseus was thinking as they went forward in this way Nisos would have given a lot to know; but he had by this time discovered that one of the fundamental characteristics of this greatest of all leaders was his power of keeping his wandering and philosophical thoughts wholly and completely distinct from his practical thoughts, that is to say from his tactics, stratagems, decisions, and plannings for future action.

For himself, as father and son advanced in this manner, both cautiously and impulsively, along the bottom of the deepest of earth’s seas, Nisos was too absorbed and spell-bound by the external overpoweringness of what he saw to have any spirit left for mental reaction to it save awe and wonder. He decided that it must have been on the ground-floor so to say of the ocean-bed that they had found themselves after their dive.

But what a place it was, far more impressive than any city he had ever seen before, or ever was likely to see! The stones it was built of were all the same colour; but whether this was due to the action of the water or to the particular kind of rock or of marble that the builders had used he wasn’t enough of a traveller to know. But all the visible masonry, including the roads and the pavements, was certainly of one and the same tint, and this tint was of a grey shade, but quite unlike any other grey shade he could ever remember having seen.

What struck him most about this whole drowned city as it rose up before him now was, strangely enough, its suitability, its fittingness, its adaptability for being a drowned city. It lent itself to its doom. It was in fact the most perfect realization of a drowned city that could have entered, or the idea of which could have entered, any great poet’s imagination.

What especially struck Nisos about it was its unity with itself, the fact, namely, that it rose in so many levels, with its stair-ways and bridges and squares and platforms and tiers and terraces, as if conceived and created to support the pedestals and pillars of the metropolis of the universe with temples and
theatres and dance-halls and council-chambers and academies and ecclesias and arenas and hippodromes and senate-halls, towering up, one above another, towards the surface of the water that covered them, making in their colossal entirety one single isolated palace-house, where reigned and ruled in undisturbed supremacy the mysterious Being who had revolted against Heaven, defied the Human Race, and adapted its own
unfathomable
consciousness to a secret submarine life, with no companion but the Man-Dragon, Typhon.

It was the extraordinary way in which this city beneath the waters satisfied the whole deep-breathing desire in the ultimate chemical elements of existence that they should have nothing within them to the end of their days save what in silence uttereth speech and whose speech is the speech of air, water, fire, and earth, an elemental language which in its essence is the music of enjoyment, that gave the thing its real secret.

It was queer and quaint to notice, as the two of them
progressed
onwards in what they both divined would probably turn out to be intricate curves returning by degrees to the region of the city from which they had set forth, how the various fish and sea-creatures they were constantly encountering showed not the faintest alarm at their appearance and even came so close that they sometimes brushed against their necks and arms and faces with their fins and tails. One star-fish for instance struck Nisos so violently in the mouth that it made his lip bleed, and it gave him a very queer shock when this sudden taste of blood mixed with salt-water brought back to his memory an occasion when as a child he had picked up a jelly-fish on the sea-coast, and then, falling on his face as he tried to bite it, had bloodied his mouth.

A much more obscure memory may have been released when he saw the extremely elastic and singularly delicate skin of one queer-looking sea-creature, skin that resembled the caul with which new-born babes are sometimes covered, rent and torn by the stab of a small sword-fish. But it was when he noticed one luckless fish whose eye was gone that he suddenly remembered
how when he was questioning Eione as to the way the Helmet of Proteus, the thing that at this moment he and his father were using to such good effect, had come into her hands, she told him that Arcadian Pan had stolen it from the great Hunter Orion, whose consequent lack of it had resulted in his being blinded.

“The blinding of Orion! How very odd that I should never have given that piece of news a second thought!”

By one of those queer coincidences that it is always almost impossible to regard as
just
coincidences he had no sooner thought of the injury that Tis’s little sister had unwittingly done to the great Hunter Orion than his father suddenly turned to him and said with a smile: “I was just wondering why it is, my son, that only once in my life I’ve composed a line of poetry, while from my memory I can repeat so many lines.”

“What was the line you once composed?” enquired Nisos. “It would interest me so much if you’d repeat it to me now! Do, please, please, my father, let me hear that line of poetry you composed. Had it to do with what at that moment came into my head? I mean the blinding of Orion?”

Odysseus swung slowly round. “It’s curious,” he said, “that you should have spoken of Orion; for the line I composed, and I really do consider it a proper, authentic, natural line, though the only poetic part of it is the fact that it is rhythmical and runs smoothly,
is
about Orion. Well, I can’t really say it’s
about
him. But at any rate it refers to him, and the syllables of the line run musically together! In fact it’s because they run so musically that I can repeat the line now. It’s the simple sound of it that works the trick. In fact it’s the sort of thing a child could invent without having to give it any particular significance.

“Yes, a child, if it tried to make up a story in poetry would be delighted if a line like this suddenly came into its head. It would probably even try to compose a second line, such as in its rhythm and smooth flow could follow the first.

“It was when I was in the Garden of Alkinöos to which Nausikaa guided me and when I was telling her father and mother, indeed
when I was telling them all, about the ghosts of the Heroes I saw in Erebos, that this line suddenly came into my head.

“I had been explaining to them how I beheld the holy and upright Minos, that great son of Zeus, acting as Judge among the Ghosts in Hades when suddenly I thought: ‘I must tell them how I saw the great Orion’; and it was only then, when, without premeditation, I uttered the words ‘Ton de met Orionay pelorion eisenoeesa’, that I realised I had uttered a line of real poetry. And yet all I’d said was just quite simply that ‘after him’—by which I meant of course after Minos—‘I beheld the gigantic Orion’. But I must have instinctively realized that the words I was using had suddenly, like a boat from a muddy ditch into a flowing stream, emerged out of prose and into poetry; for I knew the poetic rhythm in what I added to this, namely:

Nisos spontaneously brandished his double-edged dagger as Odysseus, moving on with a firmer stride, mounted a short flight of broad stone steps and began to cross a marble square of immense size in the middle of which must have been a grove of enormous trees. It was painful to observe the lost and
condemned
trunks of this grove, not merely blackened by the salt water but curst with a peculiar shade of blackness to which an exquisitely faint blue tinge had been in some way added.

As they followed the marble roadway between these weird tree-trunks that were like ghosts gathered in a desolate flock by some invisible enchanter, Odysseus turned to his son. “I can’t tell how it is, my boy, but I have an instinct that it’s not for nothing that you and I were brought at the same moment into contact with the name ‘Orion’.”

Nisos stood so still that he might himself have been one of those ghastly tree-trunks with their weird metallic glitter in that pale light.

“Do you mean, my father——” began the young man. But his words, whatever they were going to be, dissolved in that
circumambient greyness; for as he met his father’s glance he knew without any exchange of words what the older man was thinking. In fact their separate thought-streams at that critical moment in their lives whirled together in a silent circular eddy. “You think, my Lord,” the younger man whispered, “that we’re in the line of the great Hunter’s arrows where we now stand; and that we might be hit and turned into ghosts ourselves at any second?”

Odysseus lowered his club till it rested on the pavement of the road they were following and they both gazed with instinctive apprehension at a group of colossal Sea-Weeds that rose, tough, wiry, weltering, succulent and elastic into the water, and seemed to be treating the water itself as if it were a thick undulating mass of weirdly smelling rubber that bent into curves and grooves and hollows as they pressed against it, and
into
it too, as you might say, without causing it to split or crack or bleed or sweat or melt; causing it to yield where it was pressed against, but always finding it impossible to prevent it returning, like a squeezed bubble, or like a vast impressionable bladder, the moment the pressure was relaxed.

“Have you realized, my Lord,” whispered Nisos; and it showed the nature of the intimate crisis that was intensifying itself about them, like an elemental process, parallel to, but not the same as, the process of freezing, that the young man without consciousness of what he did reverted to his mood of utterance before he knew his parentage, “have you realized that we’re on the edge of——”

His voice died away as he looked down; and there came no responding reply from the old man, as he too looked down. And well might the two of them—mere mental human animals of fibres and nerves as they were!—look down and look long, at what lay before them. They were indeed confronted by what might have struck them as a vast reserve of creation-material out of which all the multitudinous formations of earth-life could be replenished, reproduced, refilled with pith and sap and
blood-juice
.

They were indeed standing on the brink of a vast precipitous chasm that apparently descended to the centre of the earth but which the water of the ocean had now wholly filled. Huge rubber-like sea-growths protruded so thickly out of this
indescribable
gulf that it was clearly a horrible possibility that
impulsive
wayfarers might mistake the tops of these elastic weeds of the great salt deep for just a rougher portion of the
paving-ground
of the road they were following; but the idea that at any moment they might catch, carried to them by this weird element that could scarcely be called water, the twang of an arrow’s flight from the bow of the great Hunter Orion, subdued to a minor degree of tension their reaction to this precipice beneath their feet.

Once more Nisos was, as they used to say in his island-school, bowled over by his new parent’s calm. For the old man turned his back upon this cosmic chasm in the floor of the world just as he might have done if it had only been a muddy ditch near their old Dryad’s decayed oak-tree.