Atlantis (60 page)

Odysseus must have become aware, by some psychic vibration passing from one light-giving Proteus-cord to the other, of this rebellious impulse in the life-blood of the child of his loins, for he suddenly handed to him his club, leapt to his feet with astonishing agility, crossed the few yards between them and Typhon in a couple of strides, and kneeling on one knee, and using both hands, pulled out the arrow! Nisos who was instantly at his side gave him back the club and helped him to his feet. But they now found themselves, while they watched Orion’s steady approach, standing so close to the Creator of Atlantis that this
incalculable
Entity was able to try its dangerous magic upon them both just as it pleased; one deadly-white phosphorescent tentacle of a finger being laid on the shoulder of Odysseus and the other on the shoulder of Nisos.

All three of them for a brief space, while every pulse-beat of time brought Orion nearer, were in any case reduced to helpless inactivity by the choking cloud of fire and smoke with which Typhon covered his retreat. But a retreat, and a very shrewd and very rapid retreat this enemy of Zeus was able to make under
cover of his own fiery breath, so that when Orion, brandishing his club of bronze, arrived on the scene he had not the remotest idea whether his fugitive had fled east or west or north or south.

Nor did it appear to him that either of the two men he found awaiting him were in a condition capable of replying
intelligently
to any question he might ask as to the direction of the flight of the Enemy of Heaven. They were both, at least so it seemed to the simple mind of the great Hunter, so confused, so dazed, so numbed, so completely metagrabolized by the leprous white, death-worm-white, sarcophagus-toad-white dead-sea-
eel-white
fingers that rested upon them that he might equally well make enquiries of a heap of ordure dropped by the fugitive.

So he addressed himself to the Being who had reduced them to this condition.

“Tell me, you creator of drowned cities, you hypnotizer of men, whither has that monster whose belly-flame no water can quench and whose bladder-smoke no ocean can quell, shogged off on his wriggling tail?”

Neither the father with his unbelievable past nor the son with his doubtful future appeared able to utter a word. But the mental vibration between them was so aided by the cords of the Protean Helmet that Odysseus indicated to Nisos in a whisper below a whisper that the club of Herakles had begun to make curious little jerks, abrupt stirrings, and quiverings quite independent of the hand that held it. “Feel him, will you, son?” whispered the old hero, “and tell me what you think!”

Nisos laid his left hand on the club’s head, just above its
life-crack
where the hollow cord, clinging closely to it, still protected the sheltering insects from the pressure of the water. “If it wants to act on its own, my king and my father‚” the young man whispered, “I would risk it and let it do so!”

And the club, whom some called “Expectation”, and others called “Dokeesis”, said to itself: “That bronze affair which Orion is whirling about over our heads may be all right for breaking stones. It is far too unwieldy, mechanical, automatic, and impervious to all suggestion, to crack the skull of a dangerous
magician. If I can only make Odysseus give me my complete freedom I’ll show him and this lad too how to deal with wicked and horrible Beings! I came near it at the cave of the Naiads; but this Living Horror lying on that dead seaweed is worse than the oldest natural-born monster. But I, Dokeesis, can deal with it! Only let me go, and you shall see!”

And then, as his own hand on the club’s head and his father’s hand round the club’s waist relaxed a little, Nisos heard the fly say to the moth: “It’s hard for a thinking person like myself to go on studying life while these gods and men and monsters make such a stir; but I’m at least lucky to have someone like you, not quite indifferent to philosophic conclusions. Before the Pillar stopped talking to the club just now, it revealed the real cause of all this hullabaloo. It said it had learnt from earth and water and air and fire that the death of every deity in the world was at hand. It said that the world, what it always calls ‘the Pillared
Firmament
’, would outlast every creator that was supposed to have made it. This boy Nisos thinks that our ancient classical language is too
adverbial.
Adverbial! How else, I should like to know, could any language express how perfectly, beautifully,
intelligently
, clearly, and completely the club, in whose bosom you and I are at peace, understands our old and subtle tongue? Anyway the Pillar has now revealed that as a result of a
spontaneous
and natural revolt all over the world against
god-worship
, all the gods that exist, from Zeus downwards, and all the goddesses that exist from Hera downwards, including Athene herself and Eros and Dionysos and of course including Aidoneus the god of the dead, and Poseidon the god of the sea, are fated to perish. They are not fated to perish rapidly. Some indeed, Athene and Hermes for example, will perish slowly.

“But perish they all will. And the fatal sickness that must ere long bring them to their end is caused by this growing refusal to worship them. If mortal beings depend on the sun and the rain, immortal beings depend on our worship of them. If we stop worshipping them, the juice, the sap, the pith, the oil, the ichor, the very blood of their life vanishes; and like plants without sun
and air, and plants without earth and water, they simply wither away.”

The fly now became silent; but Nisos heard the moth answering him in her most vehement manner. “I don’t see the use of dead things like sand and rocks and air and water and fire going on when living things like gods and men and insects have vanished away. That would mean that nothing would be left; for if no one knew they were there, there’d be nobody there and
everything
would be nothing.”

“Your voice, beautiful one,” said the fly, “sounds as if you’d rather like everything to be nothing.”

“I would! I would! I would!” cried the moth; “for then the greatest Priest who has ever lived would be right, and the Pillar and the Club and all the rest of you would be wrong!”

Nisos decided in his own mind that it must have been the abnormal excitement of the club itself that had communicated this tension to its inmates. “Shall I,” he said to himself, “take my hand off its head, and see what happens? My Father’s hardly holding it at all! Suppose I
did
take my hand off its head would it move of itself? Would it go for this horror?”

Nisos had never in his life been aware of so many cross-currents of thoughts and intentions, of revelations and counter-revelations, of insurrections and counter-insurrections. He was conscious of feelings that whirled one way and of feelings that whirled exactly the opposite way, through his consciousness. It was like being torn in half. With one part of his soul he longed to lift his hand from the club and see the club plunge itself with all the power that killed Nemean Lion into the face of this Mystery enthroned on this dead seaweed!

With the other part of his soul he felt that to see the terrible beauty of this majestic face mauled, crushed, churned up, smashed up, beaten up, pounded up, hammered up, reduced to an indistinguishable paste of pestilential mud and blood would be to assist at the most savage crime that his wickedest
imagination
had ever pictured. But there was an “I am I” within him that was deeper than his divided soul; and with this he felt that
the only conceivable alternative to letting the club obliterate this Ruler of Atlantis was to let the Horror have its way, to give up himself to it with absolute submission, to give up his father Odysseus to it, to give up his friend Zeuks, the son of Arcadian Pan, to it, and, worst of all, to give up to it his girl Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector of Troy. No, no, no, no! He couldn’t let this Being, whatever the mystery of its creative power, whatever the ineffable beauty of its face, whatever its justification as the
archenemy
of Olympos, triumph over all he loved, unresisted!

He felt too agitated, as the quivering of “Expectation”
alias
“Dokeesis” under the pressure of his hand indicated that at the withdrawal of his hand the club would act on its own and leap at that unspeakably lovely face bending towards them, to have the calm of mind to do what Odysseus was doing at this moment, namely keeping his eye fixed, not on the Creator-Survivor of Atlantis, but on the great Hunter Orion, who, towering above them, was now examining with the utmost nicety each arrow in his quiver, and as he did so kept turning north, south, east, west, and snuffing at the air for the direction of Typhon’s flight.

But he was absolutely amazed when he heard his father, who like himself was now on his feet, addressing Orion in a calm, quiet, but extremely authoritative voice.

“We have met without meeting, O mighty Orion, and I must request you to kneel down here for a moment at my side. I must ask you to do so in the name of your island of Chios. I must ask you to do so in the name of Merope. I must ask you to do so for the sake of the hide of that sacrificed bull, filled with the mingled semen of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes, and buried in the earth for ten months, out of which you were born.”

If the tone of Odysseus and the substance of his words were an astonishment to Nisos it was a still greater wonder to the boy when the towering giant submissively obeyed and knelt down by their side apparently quite indifferent to the fact that while he, a demi-god, was on his knees, they, a pair of mortal men, were on their feet.

Nisos now became painfully conscious of what might have been called the psychic helplessness of the four of them, Odysseus, Orion, the Nemean Club, and himself, arranged in a convenient row, as if they were Hesperidean Apples, to be devoured, one after another, by that Being reclining on the dead seaweed. Nor, it appeared, were any of the four of them very surprised by what they heard, though the tone of the Being’s voice when it first came forth might well have pulverized, or, at any rate, petrified, any one of them, caught by it alone.

It was not only the most scraping and jarring voice that Nisos had ever heard. It was the most mechanical, automatic, and metallic voice. It was a voice like the triumphant screaming of steel when in contact with tin. It was a voice like the voice of every instrument in the Smithy of Hephaistos if they had revolted and taken over for themselves the whole resounding and echoing place. It was not the voice of a god, or a man, or a beast, or a bird, or a reptile, or an insect. It was the voice of a vast
reverberating
arsenal full of every kind of instrument for every kind of creation and every kind of destruction.

“From now on, to the end of your lives,” the voice from the Entity reclining on the dead seaweed grimly grated like a wheel, or grievously groaned like a plough-share, “you three migrants to my kingdom, of which, as you know, having once come you are forever the loyal subjects, will go about the world proclaiming my kingdom’s laws. These laws will, in their own time and in due course, become the law of the whole earth, the law of every country and race and tribe and nation and people. This law will be absolutely and entirely scientific. As it is born of science, so it will grow, century by century and aeon by aeon, more purely scientific. Its one and sole purpose will be science for the sake of science. It will care nothing about such trifling, frivolous, unimportant matters as faith, hope and charity. It will care nothing about the happiness of people, or the comfort of people, or the education of people, still less, if that be possible, about the virtue or the righteousness or the compassion or the pity or the sympathy of people.

“It will use people—that is to say men, women, and children as it uses animals. It will practise upon them and experiment with them, not for their sake, but always purely and solely, as it ought to be, for the only Purpose, the only Religion, the only Object, the only Ideal, the only Patriotism, the only Cause, Reason or Consideration worth anything in the world—
to
under
stand
everything
that
exists
in
every
aspect
of
its
existence.

“For the sake of Science we must create. For the sake of Science we must destroy. For the sake of Science we must go so deeply into the secret of the power of one human mind over another, and of all human minds over the substance of earth, the substance of air, the substance of water, and, above all, the substance of fire, so that in the final event the whole earth will be as
completely
under control as my ship of state the ‘Teras’. As
completely
, do I say? O much, much more! For though it will be worked and handled by human beings, just as the ‘Teras’ is worked by Akron and Teknon, and Pontos and Proros, and Klyton and Halios and Euros, they will be scientific human beings, that is to say every man, woman, and child, in the whole world will be dominated absolutely and entirely by me, or by someone appointed by me; and, in this new ‘Teras’ of mine, I shall sail to the furthest limit of the Cosmos carrying my war-cry of ‘Science or Death!’ to the end of Space and Time.”

“Shut your eyes, darling!” murmured the fly to the moth, “for
our
‘cosmos’, or whatever you call our old club, is going to hit this Science-Horror pretty heavily, furiously, bloodily,
murderously
on the head!”

Nisos was so close to the “life-crack” within the club’s bosom that in the dead silence following the voice from that terribly beautiful countenance he couldn’t help catching, as the
adverb-loaded
buzz of the fly ceased, the moth’s contribution to
the crisis, which, as can be imagined, was contained in two
monosyllabic
sighs—“priest”—“death”. But such was his sympathy with the club’s emotion that the boy now deliberately removed his hand. “Like son, like father,” might have been a proverb among flies, for Odysseus also completely relaxed his hold upon
the club. Whether the savour of “poisonous brass and metal sick” from the brazen club held by the kneeling Orion, who with his height thus reduced by half was still taller by a head than the father and son who were on their feet, had anything to do with the violence of its wooden rival neither Odysseus or Nisos ever knew; and the bronze and the wooden weapon never met again. But, after a desperate, whirling circle, the self-brandished
pine-tree
-stump from that Nemean wood crashed down head-foremost full into the forehead of the mysterious Being on that seaweed heap, breaking its skull to bits.