Atlantis (25 page)

“Let us suppose that at this very moment there suddenly
crowded into this beautiful dining-hall twenty murderous pirates, from an unknown land beyond Ultima Thule, and carrying ropes woven of a breakable hemp! And let us imagine these pirates bind each of us, men and women alike, with their ropes, and deliberately begin chopping us to bits with their sharp knives! Call up such a scene, O great King, thou who hast known in thy vast travels worse scenes than this! Call up such a scene, sweet ladies! Call up such a scene, brave men!

“Now be absolutely honest with yourselves, every one of you here and tell yourselves, not aloud to the rest of us, but in silence, each heart to heart alone, exactly how you would feel as you watched what was going on and saw your own turn coming nearer and nearer, and heard the shrieks and groans of each particular victim.”

As Zeuks spoke in this way it was very clear what the feelings of Omphos and Kissos and Sykos would have been under the conditions he described as from behind the chair of Zenios they listened with awestruck attention. It was also clear that the three young men’s interest in what Zeuks was saying displeased their mistress Okyrhöe; for she promptly gave them a
peremptory
signal to go and help their mother in the kitchen; but as they discreetly followed one another out of the hall they received from Zeuks just as if they had been relatives of Zenios, and not servants at all, an extremely friendly and fraternal smile of recognizance.

Zenios himself, still absorbed in what remained on his large antique Babylonian plate, evidently considered that this drunken babbling horse-stealing bastard from a remote farm at the other end of the island whose future destiny even Atropos, unless the old lady had Anangke, or Necessity at one elbow, and Tyche, or Chance, at the other, would have been puzzled to predict, though he might propitiate a poverty-stricken king like Odysseus by his antics, was not the sort of person to interest a rich
frequenter
of the Bazaars and Markets of Thebes!

But Zeuks had not failed to notice that although the old King was too absorbed in his own thoughts to pay much attention to
what was going on round him, there had come a moment, the same moment no doubt when the speaker had caught that response in the faces of the three sons of Nemertes, at which the old hero’s pointed beard had suddenly jerked itself up in an automatic call to battle.

It was as if the bones of his jaw had answered a physiological summons independently of his mind. And this automatic jerk of the well-trimmed beard of the blinder of Polyphemus in some profoundly subtle way so completely satisfied the kidnapper of Pegasos that he suddenly became, at least in the eyes of Nisos who was watching him carefully a completely different person.

That curious appearance of being unnaturally bloated, as if his outer skin, like a leather bottle whereof the contents had become, by reason of some sort of spiritual fermentation, too powerful to be contained in such a prison had been replaced by a singular toughening, at least that is what appeared to have occurred, of the actual flesh of his face; and the result of this was to make the expression of his face harder, firmer, and though no less humorous, much more formidable in the nature of its humour.

Nisos noticed, something else too, though if he’d tried to describe it to his brother or his parents or even to his friend Tis, he would probably have become tongue-tied and might even have
retreated
into that quite special silence which we associate with idiots; but what he would have wanted to explain about this more powerful humour in Zeuks’ expressive countenance was that in its inherent nature it was not proud or vain or conceited, nor did it, like almost all so-called “prophets” and “thinkers”, shut all doors but the one it came in by, and close all windows but the one it looked out of!

By this time all their eyes were fixed upon Zeuks. The large platter upon which Zenios had been concentrating was now as empty as if that insatiable collector of every possible species of plate that the artists among men have ever carved and moulded in precious metal had licked it clean that night of every stain it had acquired while the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s
Rising carried it beneath the earth to the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Setting!

Odysseus himself had allowed his wandering mind to return to the immediate situation; and he was now watching Zeuks with the sort of steady, quiet, amused, contemplative interest that the master of a Circus of performing animals would display in the unexpected arrival of a caravan of freshly-caught creatures from the Mountains of the Moon.

As for Okyrhöe, she had very quickly decided that Zeuks was a person who had to be treated on completely different lines from any of the other original personalities she had hitherto succeeded in dominating.

“I must take him,” she told herself, “by a direct attack. It would be no good to try to get round him.”

Old Moros was watching Zeuks very much as Tis would have done. Indeed Nisos, as he glanced at him to see how he received this unexpected oration from a plain farmer from Cuckoo-Hill, was struck by the almost exact parallel in the old man’s features to the way Tis would open his mouth wider and wider as his wonder increased at the eloquence to which he was listening.

“He can’t follow a word,” Nisos told himself. “It’s the man’s power of stringing the words together that strikes him as the marvel!”

As for the fugitive from the Cave of Egeria, Nisos was still young enough to feel an intense discomfort every time she caught his attention, a discomfort which so far he had managed to ward off by repeating mechanically a little prayer to Hera about birth that Petraia had taught him in his childhood; but since by this time he had come to regard Zeuks as his
fellow-adventurer
and even had begun to tell himself an extremely romantic story of their more and more intimate association as in the wake of their heroic king they would trace in the
unrevealing
face of the waters the grave of lost Atlantis, it annoyed him to notice that whenever the pregnant woman looked at Zeuks she gave a queer kind of involuntary shudder, as if
something
about this startling apparition of a neatly-attired farmer
of middle height, moderate good looks, and respectfully
conventional
manner, abandoning himself to an obscure
thaumaturgic
incantation for the redemption of the world, gave her a weird shock and made her feel that she must escape such a spectacle or her pains might begin without warning.

Nisos himself as he leant forward with his elbows on the
wine-spilt
-board, dug the fingers of his right hand into a new loaf from Nemertes’ oven, while in his left hand he clutched tightly a small gourd. Little trickles of wine kept dripping from this latter object every time in his excitement he turned it
upside-down
; while fragments of sweet-smelling crust fell with almost equal frequency as he squeezed the loaf. The boy was in a queer mood; for although the immediate hoof-beat of each galloping moment of time thudded rough-shod, as you might say, over the fore-front of his consciousness, behind it there kept humming and drumming a troubled comparison, of which he felt heartily ashamed, and yet in which he was unable to stop indulging, a comparison between the daughter of Teiresias, who kept meeting his eyes and who was clearly studying him with interest, and his friend Eione, the youngest sister of Tis, the vision of whose exquisite limbs as she bent to re-arrange the folds of her dress had grown all the more vivid to him since his disturbing
encounter
with the goat-foot Pan.

But Eione’s childish features were unquestionably plain and homely; whereas, as he was now at such close quarters with Pontopereia he could dwell for steadily increasing spaces of time upon her beautiful and subtly intellectual face.

Ironically enough those two troublesome hamperers of the well-governed order of Themis, namely Tyche and Anangke, or chance and necessity, prevented him, though it was only by means of the very edge of the supper-board from noting how totally devoid of lightness and grace were the awkward limbs with which Nature in the reckless scattering of her bounty had
burdened
the daughter of Teiresias.

Had the competent and capable Nemertes not been busy in her kitchen preparing a culminating dish of sweet-meats it is quite
possible that she would have reacted to the words and behaviour of Zeuks in a manner that would have come nearer to the heart of the utterer than any of the rest.

As to Odysseus himself, that wily old hero had made it a rule long ago never to waste his energy in redundant reactions. He accepted the message of Zeuks at its purely practical and
pragmatic
face-value: and since only certain portions of it could fall in with his own purpose, his calm empirical mind had enough to do in isolating these from the rest without getting excited about anything else.

The moment he entered Okyrhöe’s dining-hall, the shrewd old king saw that it was she and not the collector of images who was responsible for the transformation of the aboriginal Ornax into a contemporary palace far more luxurious than his own; and in his diplomatic brain there began to take shape, as he cast glance after glance at the changing expressions, the lively gestures, the rapid decisive commands, of the lady of the house, the embryo idea that if the soothsaying daughter of a dead prophet was likely to help the advancement of his adventure, this
formidable
woman, if by any possible compulsion or enticement he could sweep her into his scheme, might turn out an even more effective aid. He hadn’t relinquished his faithful Heraklean club when he crossed the threshold of this complicated group of palatial erections. In fact from where he now sat, while the lady’s airy revelations of her life in the city of Kadmos were
interrupted
by Zeuks’ reverberating “prokleesis”, he could see the familiar curves of his queer-looking weapon propped against the elbow of a small stone-seat cut in the wall, a seat that would be far too narrow for any contemporary hips, whether male or female.

No smile came to his lips as he realized the direction his thoughts were on the verge of taking, as in spite of himself he listened to Zeuks’ description of the in-rush of the murderous crowd of imaginary pirates and projected himself, for the push of his practical imagination could hardly be described in any other way, into breaking his bonds, scattering the bodies of his enemies, and grasping his club by the middle!

But if Zeuks’ outburst of “prokleesis” had made even the paramour of the Daughter of the Sun jerk up his trim beard, it can be well understood how it made the two insects inside it jump and cry out. With them, however, the situation was just opposite to what it had been earlier that day; for now it was the fly who was keen to leave their shelter and the moth who was all for restraining him.

“But, Pyraust darling, I
must
find out whether the King is sweating under his beard! I know him so well that I know that
that
is the great sign. If there’s a drop of perspiration under his beard you may depend on it that he’s going to do something serious and do it soon. Please don’t hold me so tight, my sweet friend. I swear I won’t go further than that fold of his chiton. Once there I can crawl perfectly well between a few grey hairs, and soon discover what I want to know.

“It’ll only be like a microscopic thicket, and you know how good I am at threading my way through olive-branches and rose-bushes! Oh, I’ll find the least drop of sweat if there is one to be found! You see he’s still got that old nurse, Eurycleia, though she must be over a hundred years old, and you may depend on that old lady keeping him clean. You bet your life, my pretty one, I couldn’t settle on Zeuks’ chiton—you must remember, darling, that we house-flies are extremely sensitive to smells.

“We’re not like carrion-flies or dung-flies who live on filth and naturally seek it out!—no! I couldn’t settle on Zeuks’ chiton, though he’s a self-respecting, decently washed and well-dressed farmer, without being overpowered by the smell of his skin. But Eurycleia uses, though he’s old now, the same unguents and essences that she used for him when he was a child; so that you needn’t be afraid, dear heart, that your crazy Myos will faint from the old man’s stench, and slip down under the fellow’s shirt and be no more seen!

“Whatever happens, I can assure you, sweetest of Pyrausts, that I shall return safely to this heavenly shelter in the bosom of our Heraklean Club.

“No? You won’t let go? You won’t let me risk it? All right, I’m not going to break loose by force. So if you won’t let me go, you won’t let me go; and that’s the end of it. Of course some would say I’m taking the opportunity of your prohibition to escape doing what I’m really scared stiff of doing.

“But I know
you
don’t think like this; and yours is the only opinion I really value. As I have often confessed to you, there have been occasions in my peaceful life when I have had pleasure with exactly twenty-seven female flies. This I have never concealed from you. But when it becomes——”

It was at this point that the Moth—who so many times had heard her friend quote the well-known lines from Beelzebelle, the Sappho of Flies, that begin:

that there had been moments when she felt that if he didn’t stop before one, two, three more ticks of the clock she would rush straight into the nearest fire—beat a tattoo with her free wing upon the wall of their retreat of so decisive a character that the fly yielded in every sense.

He left the topic of female flies. He gave up his exploration of the neck of Odysseus for a drop of perspiration. And he replied to the unspoken question that was behind all the moth had been saying, by assuring her that even if there had been no drop of sweat under the king’s beard, and even if they all had to sleep where they were that night, they would without question be making their departure, if not by “Lykophos” or “
Wolf’s-light
”, certainly by the first streak of red in the sky….