Atlantis (8 page)

It was indeed in magnificently pleasant sunshine that Odysseus found his circular bath of polished stone awaiting his
appearance
. Eurycleia had already seen to it that no fewer than eight great water-jugs of carefully varied temperature were arranged in order round that hollow circumference of polished stone.

From the surface of some of these jars the steam rose in clouds into the air, while, in other cases, ripples from newly dissolved circles of vanishing bubbles, all tinged with rainbow colours, proved from what clear fresh springs they had come. Here Eurycleia awaited him herself, and as, with the help of Leipephile and Arsinöe, the old nurse poured in alternation the cold and lukewarm and hot streams over him as he crouched and bent and straightened himself and moved this way and that, under the varying temperatures of those jars of water, his thoughts took shape and formulated themselves into a resolution to quicken to a much more rapid speed his preparations for hoisting sail once more and setting out to explore the world again.

“Yes,” he thought, “I’ve given this pleasant routine of the beautiful seasons repeating themselves, and the beautiful days following the beautiful nights in beautiful succession as Themis the great Goddess of order under the will of Zeus decrees, its full opportunity to soothe this itching, fretting, chafing, gnawing, fermenting, biting, seething ache in my wicked old midriff!

“But this happy easy lazy time has not done it! The marrow in my bones howls and growls for the random odds of the old great Circus! I must, I must taste again the salty taste of real plotting and real planning and real deceiving and real achieving!”

In his massive, caustic, long-sighted, super-human and yet subhuman way Odysseus had acquired the power of what might be called a “postponement of thought” while a series of instinctive impulses directed his actions. This power which would certainly appear an odd one to most clever people, had not so much been forced upon him by the particular nature of his experiences as by the prevailing mood of his reactions to these experiences.

This power was not essentially a philosophical one, nor was it even a predominantly intellectual one. What it really might be called was the controlled release of that deep intimate rush of life which at special moments takes possession of us all with what feels as if it were a wild prophetic force under the direction of a calm calculating will.

While he gave himself up, therefore, to all the small physical movements which the process of being bathed by a commanding and rather cantankerous old woman, a beautiful, secretive, middle-aged woman, and a lovely but incredibly simple young woman, his whole nature was gathering itself together, not so much to follow a thought-out plan of action as to have his nervous, electric, magnetic soul kept, in intensely conscious reserve, just under his physical skin and ready for any event, a soul that was not necessarily composed of a single compact consciousness but retained the power of dividing itself at will.

It was indeed a very curious power that his soul possessed, of splitting itself up, if need were, into an array of square-headed conscious souls that still were Odysseus “pro tem”, though they were Odysseus in multiplicity rather than Odysseus in unity!

By the time the old hero was seated on his simple throne in the great open dining-hall of the palace, to which hidden steps descended from the upper chambers, and had begun to break his fast with bowls of red wine thickened by various powdered
nuts and sweetened by a particular kind of honey, while he accompanied this rich beverage, after pouring out a libation to Zeus, by devouring greedily—for this first meal of the day was a good deal later than usual—the particular portion of the
backbone
of a fatted hog which best pleased him, he was fairly at rest in his mind.

He knew more or less what he was going to do, and he left the details of the thing to chance and occasion. Never in the history, not only of Ithaca, but of all Hellas, had there been such a born opportunist as Odysseus was. He had always been a difficult one for women to mould to their will.

It was because her powerful personality took the line of
indomitable
independence that Penelope had suited him so well; and it was probably because she had brought up their only child to live his own life independently of each of them that as a mature man Telemachos was so reserved and self-centred.

On this particular day therefore the old king had already thrust clean out of his contemplated groove of action any visit to or visit from his ritual-absorbed offspring. What he had to do was to visit the Naiads’ Cave and find out if Keto the Sea-Monster had meddled in any way with the building of his ship of escape. “How queer,” he told himself as he swallowed his final bowl of enriched and thickened wine, “that I should think of my ship as a way of
escape
! Escape from what? Have I acquired a hatred for an honoured, peaceful, well-regulated life? Is it now again just as it was on the Isles of Circe and Calypso where women’s love was my accursed chain?

“No, no! That’s absurd. My wife is dead and has left none to take her place. What’s wrong with me then? To reach home from those immortal bitches was to escape slavery. But now that I’m at home and at peace, in rich, untroubled luxury, with my son a devoted priest of my divine protector, now that I am free from all ills of mind and body and have no enemy that I couldn’t destroy with a look, a step, a thrust, a blow, now that I’m within a bow-shot of the ‘herm’ of Themis, the Mistress of Order and Decency and Custom, and only a couple of
bow-shots 
from the Temple of the Daughter of Zeus, what’s the matter with me that I can’t rest by day or night till I’ve built my ship and hoisted my sail and am steering for an unknown horizon?

“Well, let’s see,” he was addressing the three women now, “what’s been happening in my Cave of the Naiads. No! I’m not going to rush off, Nurse darling, in any mad hurry nor with unmoved bowels nor unrelieved bladder, and I hope to find you, and Leipephile and Arsinöe too, ready to give me as good a bath as this when I come back tonight; and I can tell you, my dears, I fully expect I may need it! But we shall see. Good luck to us all!”

All was dim in that long, low corridor, for the Sun was steadily mounting towards high noon and not until dawn
tomorrow
would there be any striking sign of the lord of light again, whether written in fire or written in blood. The Sixth Pillar was aware of a queer throbbing sensation under each of those grimly-scrawled letters upon its pediment as the king approached it and passed it, making straight for the Club of Herakles near the low arch leading into the olive-garden.

“O my! O my! O my! O my!” sighed the up-lifted arm of the solitary olive-shoot that had reared up between the
flagstones
of that ancient threshold; but when Odysseus stopped in front of the swollen-bosom’d club and taking it up with his left hand and transferring it to his right took a firm hold of it in its narrowest place, which was about three-quarters of its whole length if you measured from head to heel, he proceeded to carry it at right angles to his hip as a hunter carries a boar-spear when making his way through a thick forest.

By no unusual chance or casual accident, for they had been hovering over the rough ground of the slaves’ graves, awaiting him for several hours, did Myos the house-fly and Pyraust the girl-moth settle upon the great weapon, as the old hero held it at this horizontal angle to his person, and secrete themselves, as best they could, in the deep life-crack of the club’s conscious identity, where existed all the organic pulses of its mortal being.

They were both still huddled close together in this dynamic concealment and were still keeping up the metaphysical debate
into which they delighted to throw the whole life-energy of their restless natures when Odysseus, after a rapid walk of four and a half miles, reached the sea-coast.

For a few moments the effect upon him of facing the sea was
overwhelming
. The purpose of his coming to where the waves broke was completely swept away by the waves themselves. In their breaking they took this purpose of his and tore it to tatters of lacy wisps and wind-tossed feathers and flying flurries of fleeting foam.

He had come to the same exact spot only a day or two ago when the waves were no wilder than they were today and the sun was no more dazzling; and yet the sight of this far-flung spray, of these gleaming sun-dazzlements hadn’t swallowed up then in such a gasping whirlpool of sensation every plan and scheme he had been carefully formulating.

What was there about the sea today that made its effect upon him so much more overpowering than it had been that other time? In the intensity of this question, which his whole spirit seemed to be putting to some faraway heart of the cosmos, he grasped more tightly the club which he carried in his right hand.

Ah! how well the club knew that tightening of the fingers! “Not quite as strongly grasped,” it thought, “as when Herakles heard the growl of that monstrous beast! But I know very well what my new wielder is worrying about now—what’s in these roaring waves that wasn’t in them before?

“
That
’
s
what’s sticking in his gullet, not the salt wings of the strangling wind nor the whirling spray. And I know what it is that’s in them. I know what it is that’s made them different. I know what it is that lurks behind these curving and cresting and breaking waves. It’s nothing less than Keto the unspeakable, Keto from the abysmal chasm in the floor of the Atlantic, Keto by whom Phorkys the Old Man of the Sea begot Echidna the Ghost-Serpent of Arima, who, by her own son Orthos the brother of Cerberos, gave birth to the feline abortion that called itself a Lion whose brains I converted into good rich dung for the ferns and honeysuckle of the Nemean Forest!”

Thus murmured the club of Herakles in the hand of its new
master, while Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth hugged each other in the crack of his body where his soul was most active, and while Odysseus with an impatient effort turned his back on those gleaming waves and entered the cave.

Then it was that the club endeavoured, by barging against every sea-weed-covered wall and colliding with every gigantic shell-fish that extended its wrinkled curves and scaly convolutions and encrusted horns from every obtruding buttress and arch, to catch his new master’s attention by creating a dying-away echo that could just out-reverberate the hoarse long-drawn roar of the retreating tide by repeating the syllables “
Keto-Keto
-Keto-Keto” over and over again.

At last they arrived–Odysseus and his vociferous weapon–to the palatial interior of the cave, where the roof was high and the walls smooth, and the pavement, by being lifted up well above shore-level was not only dry but free from all rocky or stony obstructions.

The central hall, so to speak, of this cavernous palace by the sea resembled a gigantic workshop under immortal jurisdiction –not the jurisdiction of Hephaistos the god of fire but of some antipodal God of the extreme opposite element, that of water, but nevertheless a great and divine artificer.

In the centre of this elevated floor, which was surrounded by several subsidiary caverns that Odysseus had converted into storehouses for the materials of ship-building, lay the unfinished hull of a well-formed sea-going ocean-ship.

When the old hero, with his still murmuring but now much less tightly held companion, reached this half-built ship, which had a most curious look in this ocean-temple, he swung round and faced the wide up-sloping approach by which he had come.

This incline, which, as he now gazed down its full length, had become an astonishingly steep ascent, grew narrower and narrower the nearer it got to the flying surf and wildly tossed spray of the breaking waves.

“What has become of all the Naiads?” the king asked himself, “who were wont to frequent this cave? Have they been frightened
away by that Monster of the Deep, Keto, the mate of Phorkys, the Old Man of the Sea?”

The king looked calmly round, evidently deciding, as not only his Heraklean club was deciding, but as the fly and the moth in their hiding-place in the bosom of the club were still more anxiously deciding, that some appeal to the absent Naiads to whom the cave belonged was called for at this juncture. Had the club, however, and, still more had the insects in the bosom of the club, made the appeal that followed, it would no doubt have been a more tactful one, but at any rate the king’s voice echoed mightily through the whole place.

“O divine Naiads, I know your lives are determined, even as the lives of your cousins the Dryads, by the lives of the Forests and the Fountains and the Groves and the Caverns which you deify by your dear presences but which you cannot survive, whereas the fifty daughters of Nereus remain undying and
imperishable
even as Keto herself, the monstrous wife of Phorkys, for the sea cannot cease to exist, any more than can the earth herself, mother of us all.

“But it was the great goddess Athene who met me here when I was brought home by the ship of the Phaiakians and she told me to pray to you and to worship you and to cry aloud to you whenever I came here to build my ship for myself. And thus I obey her; and through my weak old voice it is the great goddess herself who calls upon you, O heavenly Naiads, who calls upon you to tell why you have deserted this beautiful cave and whether the cave itself is soon to be destroyed under the wrath of Poseidon the Shaker of the Earth as he avenges himself on the
monstrous
——”

He was interrupted by a clear young girlish voice which was certainly not that of any Nymph, whether an immortal Nereid or a more vulnerable Naiad, but was obviously the voice, as Odysseus and his Heraklean club and those other living
consciousnesses
within the club, felt at once, not only of a maid of human origin but of a maid who spoke with the native island accent.

“Go away, you horrid thing! Go away! Or I’ll call the King!” The little girl had evidently been watching the approach of the wily old warrior and his war-experienced weapon; for she now sprang up from the deepest portion of the ship’s stern, where this one man’s dry-dock work had advanced furthest, and with
outstretched
arms and streaming hair began shaking her fists and staring with wide-open eyes at something at the waves’ edge.