Atlantis (16 page)

“And when, as at this hour, in the presence of the most dangerous, crucial, important, and fatal conjunction of the Zodiacal Signs of my destiny upon earth, you my parents’ oldest friend, you the world-famous Dryad of the oldest oak in Hellas, take upon
yourself
the piloting of my boat through the earth-waves of mould and sand and gravel and clay, the only offering I have
wherewith
to thank you, Kleta-Dryad, is the cry of gratitude in my heart: ‘vox et praeterea nihil!’ as Petraia the Midwife always says, in the language of their New Troy, about her twin-sister’s Nymph in that Italian cave.”

He was silent, his eyes fixed steadily upon her face, his ten fingers, with the intention no doubt, in true Odyssean style, of simulating calm, resisting the natural human tendency to clasp and unclasp themselves under the pressure of agitating and anxious thought, tugging at the fastenings of his broad belt, while he even went so far as to indulge in the motion of a long shiver.

Then he straightened himself. “Well!” he muttered: “I must have a good bath and a mighty meal and a lordly action of the bowels; and I must get hold of Nisos, and, if I can do it without scaring any of them, discuss with him and with Tis and Eione at what hour we’d better make our visit to Ornax; and whether, we’d better assume, and I fancy Eione will be our best advisor on
that
point, that these mysterious strangers, Zenios and
Okyrhöe
, have come to Ithaca from Thebes and belong to the House of Kadmos, and that they have been within their legal right according to our Hellenic tradition in possessing themselves of the person of Pontopereia, the daughter of Teiresias.

“But you are the only one, I swear to you, Kleta darling, who have given me the true clue to my fate at this supreme crisis in my turbulent life; add thus while the Sun, once more Helios Hyperion, freed forever from the yoke of Apollo, looks down upon me, and the Moon, once more the virgin Selene, freed forever from the yoke of Artemis, looks down upon me, as, in this
stick-house
of a stable for immortal horses, I carry on my haggling with Zeuks—not with Zeus on the top of Gargaros in Ida, but with Zeuks on the top of Kokkys-Thronax in Ithaca—what I shall have in my heart will be neither the tricks of Zenios of Ornax, nor the wiles of Zeuks of Agdos, but the wisdom of the Dryad whose garden was the cradle of Odysseus.”

With these words the crafty hero did what even his father had never done—if Laertes
was
his father rather than that “Father of Lies”, the great Hermes himself—he flung his arms about the old creature’s neck and kissed her with such dexterity that the protruding point of his bowsprit beard rested tenderly upon the curve of her left shoulder.

He never knew, nor did any of his household ever know, far less any of the city-dwellers between the walls, or any
vineyard-owners
outside the walls, what the old Dryad did when in silence he had released her, in silence had turned his back upon her, in silence had re-mounted the steps to his bedroom; but the scattered offscourings of dismembered vegetation, the sheddings from dead leaves, the tiny bits of dead sticks, the half-stripped feathers, the empty husks of grass-seed, the pale straw-heads of withered stalks, not to mention the almost invisible insects for whom these minute objects were as stately avenues of cyclopean ruins, in fact all the unconsidered and unrecorded things that in their infinite multitude made up her “garden”, accepted the opinion of a small black slug who assured its neighbour, a still smaller beetle, that the gods had turned their Dryad, as they had once turned Niobe, the ancestress of the human race, into a fountain of tears.

But the sun mounted up, steadily and ever more steadily, into the heavens, until he reached a point when the phantom moon
that floated opposite to his rising, seemed to be drifting so
aimlessly
in a sky which was incapable of doing justice to more than one great luminary at the same time, that she looked as if nothing could hold her back from sliding down in an utter dive of
helplessness
into whatever element of complete extinction awaited such as sank and sank and sank, till they reached the nadir of the universe.

None of the three women, however, who poured first cold, then tepid, then pleasantly warm water, over the king in his bath, had the faintest resemblance in her mood just then to the moon in her vanishing. They were all indeed, although each in her different manner, far too intensely interested in the problem with which Odysseus had just confronted them to think of
anything
else. This was the question as to what special treasure or treasures he and Nisos had better take with them to
Kokkys-Thronax
if they were to be in any sort of secure position in bargaining with this madman, Zeuks.

Bargain with the fellow it was clear they had to; and from what the Dryad had said it was also clear that he was likely to prove an extremely shrewd bargainer. It did cross the cunning old hero’s mind that it might be possible to take a band of men up there, surround this homestead called Agdos, and carry off that immortal pair of horses by force; but the more he thought of such a violent and arbitrary way of going to work the less he liked it.

His one fixed idea, the one final purpose of all this planning and scheming was to hoist sail once more. What in every bone of his body, what in every pulse of his blood, what in every centre of his complicated nerves, he longed for was simply to sail again into the unknown. He couldn’t explain this urge, even to himself. It was deeper than any ordinary desire or intention.

His old friend the Dryad could have explained it to him. It was an obsession, like the migratory passion in birds and fish and insects and even in the spawn of eels!

In his old age it had become the final impulse of his energy, of his sex, of his fight for life, of his deepest secretive struggle, of
his struggle, not so much to obey a destiny imposed upon by fate, as to create his own destiny. All he wanted now was to hoist sail once more; and, when he had hoisted sail,
to
sail
!
It was not that he cared greatly
whither
he sailed, or to what end; but since he knew more about the coasts of the “blameless Ethiopians”,—for such was the name he had been brought up to use for the dwellers on
both
extremities
of the earth—to the East than to the West, it must be to the “blameless Ethiopians” of the
West
that he would sail.

Yes, he would sail West. And if to touch the limits of the earth in that direction and to reach the “blameless Ethiopians” who dwelt at those limits, that is to say where the Sun, who could travel a thousand times faster than any other living thing, was wont to rise, after traversing, swifter than the wind, the lower regions beneath the earth, was his destiny he would fulfil it.

Odysseus was impelled all the more strongly to make the supreme voyage of his life a voyage towards the West, because, if these late wild rumours told the truth, the whole of the
continent
of Atlantis had been sunk to the bottom of the sea. From his childhood he had been hearing tales of this mysterious continent, and now to learn that it had been forever submerged, in fact that it existed no longer, made the sort of impression on his peculiar mind, a mind at once obstinately and implacably adventurous, and yet craftily empirical and practical, such as a high-spirited boy would receive who suddenly learnt that what he had been taught were stars floating in space were really tiny holes in the arch of a colossal dome; an impression of which the practical effect was to strengthen his decision that at all cost this ultimate voyage of his must be to the West.

“I shall sail,” he told himself, “
over
the waves
under
which lies Atlantis!”

And it was extraordinarily exciting to the peculiar
temperament
of this insatiable adventurer to think of reaching some unknown archipelago of islands, on the Western side, that is to say the
further
side,
of a sunk continent.

Such were the old wanderer’s thoughts as the three women
gave him his bath in the upper chamber. While he was eating his breakfast, however, not only the three women to whom he was accustomed were called for consultation, but the little new-comer Eione was also brought in. It became indeed, before it ended, this breakfast of Odysseus on the morning of his
encounter
with Zeuks, what might be called a Council of State, for our young friend Nisos, now past his seventeenth birthday, stood proudly and demurely at the foot of the table from whose silver plates and flagons and salvers the well-browned, savoury-smelling hogsflesh and the barley-bread and the creamy milk and the fragrant red wine were soon, it was clear to all, putting the old hero into an especially good mood.

Among the women it was Leipephile who, for all her simplicity, watched the king of Ithaca with the most anxious expression. She could not quite understand her own feelings in the matter, but she had learnt enough from the teasing replies of Nisos and from certain rough and casual words dropped here and there by Tis to make her feel that the expedition which was now being planned had something at the back of it that was inimical to Agelaos her betrothed, something that not only her own mother Nosodea but Agelaos’ mother Pandea would most certainly regard with serious concern and alarm.

As for the Trojan girl, or rather the Trojan woman, her
bewildered
resentment bred from years of captivity and always seething in her veins was now assuming, as it had never done before, a definite personal apprehension. They were discussing what particular treasure had better be brought up from the subterranean vaults beneath the palace and it naturally entered the Trojan prisoner’s head that some golden object from the world-famous arms of Achilles that by the secret aid of Athene had been awarded to Odysseus instead of to the more daring, more fool-hardy, and far more powerful Ajax, might occur to the crafty old king as a more tempting exchange for the winged Gorgonian steed and the black-maned abortion of the great Mother than any vase or goblet or jug or cup among the rare gifts brought by Odysseus from the palace of Alcinous, the father
of that young Nausikaa who had fixed upon the wanderer the first-love of a romantic maiden.

This armour of Achilles, as the Trojan captive well knew, had been brought to Ithaca in one of the ships of Menelaos long before the winner of it had himself got home: and what if it now occurred to Eurycleia his aged nurse, if not to the old king himself, to descend to that secretest chamber of all in the caves beneath the palace only to find it empty? Arsinöe had never been greatly worried at the thought of anybody finding her graven image of Hector, now so glittering in the armour of his slayer, within the haunted purlieus of Arima, since she knew that where abode those two terrible Phantasms, Eurybia the sister of the monstrous Keto, and Echidna, Keto’s daughter, and where Odysseus
himself
never dared to go, it was unlikely that anyone, even if they risked it, would reveal to a soul where they had been or what they had seen there.

But to descend to that lowest of all the treasure-caves beneath the palace with the idea of finding something wherewith to bargain with this crazy Zeuks,
that
was quite a possible move. But even if the old man or this handsome boy-pet of Eurycleia’s
did
find that chamber empty, was it likely that anyone would accuse her? Who would guess she had learnt the art of carving? Who would suppose she had ever lived closely enough to Hector to recall his features so well as to be able to carve them?

The aged Eurycleia was the only one during that quaintly palatial and yet so wholly domestic council of war to guess the meaning of the gloomy prognostication lowering in the frowning brow of Agelaos’ simple betrothed, or to puzzle over the furtive glances now at the king, now at Nisos, now at Tis, by which were revealed the nervous apprehensions of Arsinöe. The final issue of the discussion had probably been foreseen all along by the shrewd old nurse, who was, though she would have vigorously denied it, quite as “polumetis”, or full of the wisdom that wrestles with life’s realities, as was Odysseus himself.

It was in fact decided that Nisos should carry over his shoulder in a capacious sack, as he followed closely behind Odysseus, three
precious objects, a golden Tripod, a golden Mixing-Bowl, and a golden Flagon. The two first of these came from the Phaeacian palace; while the third had been brought to Ithaca by Anticleia, the mother of Odysseus; and it was a marriage-gift to her from her own father Autolycos who all his days had been a great collector of such treasures. Wherever he went he found them; and whenever he found them he saw to it that they were not left behind when he moved on.

And now that these royal domestic female advisers had
concluded
their deliberations, while their chief was still devouring his meat and drinking his wine, it can easily be imagined in what high spirits our young friend Nisos was when he set off,
brimfull
of every kind of ambition to follow his aged hero and king on the first really official adventure, as you might put it, of his life.

Odysseus explained at the start to his excited follower that he had decided to avoid both the Temple and the City in
approaching
the homestead of Zeuks; so that their progress was less rapid than it would have been had they followed the various main thoroughfares.

Odysseus carried no weapon except our old acquaintance the club of Herakles, while Nisos, walking with a rhythmic swing of his whole body, balanced on his shoulders an enormous sack, to which, first on the right hand and then on the left, he kept lifting a hand, or, sometimes it might be, only a few fingers, to steady the thing’s weight under the shocks of the way.

The first thing they both realized when they crossed the border of Zeuks’ farm was the fact that for all the precautions they had taken to reach the place un-heralded there was already quite a gathering of Zeuks’ neighbours, small farmers with their wives and children, clearly collected there to get the thrill of an
immensely
grotesque and wildly comic, if not a shockingly startling, encounter.