Atlantis (2 page)

“I suppose you don’t want to tell me who sends her?”
whispered
the house-fly. “I don’t mind telling you at all,” replied the other, “or anyone else either. It is Enorches, the High-Priest of the Orphic Mysteries who sleeps in the big ante-chamber of Athene’s Temple where Telemachos ought to sleep. Instead of
which Telemachos sleeps in that hut you pass on the left as you go in.”

“Why does the Priest of Orpheus take that big ante-room for himself?” asked the house-fly, standing perfectly still now and staring at the brown moth whose wings were fanning the queer slit that went down the upper portion of the club of Herakles.

“That’s for Athene to answer, little fly,” replied olive-shoot with a curious hissing sound, as if its sap was seething.

“My Lord Telemachos has let himself be wheedled and worked upon by that Orpheus Priest ever since our Lady Penelope died. She would have scarce endured to see it.”

“You’re getting angry,” said the fly to itself. “By Zeus I believe if that Priest Enorches came in now you’d split into two and spurt poison over him.” The olive-shoot
was
getting angry and it wished it had wings like the fly so that it could accompany the fly to where the club was leaning.

“The Club is surely,” thought the olive-stump, “watching us now while it listens to the chatter of that silly little moth-girl Pyraust.” And the fly said to itself: “How tiresome it is that so many learned and scholarly philosophers have no eye into which you can look and read their thoughts! I’ve seen my own eyes reflected in a hundred different things and I may say
without
boasting that they are fierce and implacable. But even I can’t read any living creature’s thoughts with them. Now why is that? I can’t even read the thoughts of that silly little moth. Now why is it that I am no good at expressing the stem and majestic authority through my eyes which I feel so powerfully in the pit of my stomach? Isn’t it a funny thing that a person should feel inside him feelings that he can’t express in any possible way to other creatures? As for this poor amphibium of a half-in, half-out olive-shoot, it seems totally devoid of all real insight, it can only see through the inflamed pores of its touchy skin!

“And over there, within a dozen buzzing flaps of my wings, rests that great Club of Herakles as it has done for seventeen years! Yes! as it has done ever since Penelope died. Eurycleia
must have seen it for seventeen years balanced between those out-jutting pieces of quartz!

“All those years—think of it!—it has been keeping its position, upright and invincible, leaning first to the right but still upright, still straight and unbending; and then, just a tiny bit, to the left, but still straight and unbending! Aye! How I admire thee, O great Club!”

And the fly went on to think how it would love to throw some charm or spell over the Club that would force it to make known to Odysseus how this cunning Orphic Priest was ousting
Telemachos
from the great hall of the Temple! It longed to ask the Club how it could refrain from calling upon its former master Herakles, now that it was clear that the old Odysseus was
beginning
to lose his grip upon the sequence of events.

Thus as strongly moved in its heart as it was in its mind, the fly stared at the archway beside which the Club was resting. Meanwhile the great Club was being slowly aroused from a dim obscure and puzzled sleep by the approach of the dawn-goddess, that tiptoe-footed daughter of Helios Hyperion, whose rosy fingers were still pressed against the palms of her hands.

“So I am still myself,” was the first clear thought of the great weapon. “Yes, I am still myself.” And it began
deliberately
recalling that far-off day when Herakles snatched it up from a fire-burnt portion of that Nemean forest on the mainland when he was struggling with the monstrous lion.

The club had been seriously blackened by that fire; but long before the fire had touched it it had been deeply indented by the trailing and twisting around it of a honeysuckle intruder who eventually would have possessed itself of it entirely and have transformed it from a noble pine sapling, half-strangled by a deadly honeysuckle, into a flourishing honeysuckle beautifying a wretched dead pine-trunk already blackened in some forest-fire.

“Still myself,” continued the great weapon in its slow confused awakening under the gradual approach of dawn, “still old Dokeesis—who was embraced in that far-off forest by God knows what treacherous neighbour-plant, but who is still able to fit
himself as easily into the hand of an older hero as into the hand of a younger hero; Yea! by the gods, and into the hand of a mortal hero as into the hand of an immortal one!”

Pondering thus, the fire-blackened, well-polished club, deeply furrowed into rounded grooves and convoluted curves by the parasitic plant which had so assisted or impeded—who can say which?—its natural growth as to endow it with what resembled a female bosom, found himself recalling his feelings, when, years and years ago, he was washed up by the waves on the coast of Ithaca.

Broken pieces of sea-bitten wreckage from far older vessels than the one upon which the sea-god’s wrath had most recently been wreaked were strewn about him on the strip of shore beneath the rocky promontory where he lay. Sand-crusted fragments of
sea-shells
together with wind-tossed wisps of foam and salt-smelling ribands of slippery seaweed had drifted by pure chance and were piled up by pure chance against the rounded wooden curves of his female-looking bosom.

Just because he was the latest object to be cast up out of the deep upon that shelving shore the club of Herakles had felt in some dark and deep sense humiliated as well as ill-used.

It was curious, he thought, that this ancient feeling of
humiliation
should return to his consciousness at this particular moment of this February dawn; but as he tried to analyse what he felt, for the club had grown almost morbidly introspective during these long years of peaceful relaxation with his head resting
sometimes
against a piece of quartz to the East and sometimes against a piece of quartz to the West, he could only repeat over and over with a proud, furtive, sly, secret detachment, “I am myself”, and as he did so he felt detached not only from the service of Odysseus, but also, and this struck him as something quite new in his experience, from the service of his old master, the demi-god Herakles. He had therefore two introspective riddles about
himself
to ponder on as this cold pale light of this early dawn moved from pillar to pillar. Why should there be any sense of
humiliation
in his memory of surviving, in the way he had, the wrath of Poseidon?

And why should he be feeling this savagely cunning, ferociously sly sense of detachment from the service of
any
master, while at the same time he had such a self-confident sensation of power; of power to serve a mortal hero like Odysseus, quite equally with power to serve an immortal one like Herakles?

“Perhaps,” he said to himself, “I have spent so many days and months and years with my head drooping and slipping and sliding and sinking, first to the east and then to the west between these glittering blocks of quartz that when I try to form any clear-cut explanation of my real inner feelings I just swing from the extreme of shame to the extreme of self-confidence.

“But that seems a silly explanation when I think of the pride I felt in throwing my life into every blow I struck for Herakles, and when I think of the shame that shivered through me as I lay, like a swollen and bloated baby’s rattle, half-covered by seaweed, between two rock-pools, and felt the swishing of sea-gulls’ wings brush against my bare cheeks and my bare stump-end.”

But it was at that moment that the awakened consciousness in the club of Herakles decided that common decency as well as common courtesy, not to speak of prudence, demanded that he give some flicker of attention to the small brown moth that for the last half-an-hour, indeed long before any light entered that corridor, had been struggling to tell him things that concerned them all.

“
What
’s
that?
You imp of Erebos? What’s that you’re telling me now? Isn’t it enough that for more years than I can count I’ve been listening to you, and listening to your mother’s and your grandmother’s and your great-grandmother’s chatter about this infernal Priest of Orpheus who has ousted every other
prophet
and seer and soothsayer and omen-reader from the Temple of Athene, that I must now treat you seriously; and begin solemnly answering a whole series of ridiculous questions about the end of the world?

“
What
’
s
that,
you silliest of insects? No, of course I’ve felt nothing of the kind! Have I felt, do you say, that the world was coming to an end as soon as the sun was up? Of course I’ve felt nothing
of the kind! Don’t I feel it now, you ask, this terrible news? No! I certainly
don’t
feel it! I feel the confounded tickling of your tisty-wisty wings against my old life-crack; that crack from outer to inner, I mean, from what’s going on to my consciousness of what’s going on, that began when He—and if you don’t know who
He
is you’d better get back into your baby chrysalis as soon as you can!—hit that great roaring Beast over the head in that Nemean wood.

“It’s ever since then that my hearing’s been so good. Curious, isn’t it? Shows how wisely old Father Zeus governs the affairs of the world, eh? And so this blasted fool of an Enorches thinks the world’s coming to an end does he? He’ll soon learn the opposite if that great Son of Zeus whose business it is to purge the world of those who try to bring it to an end comes this way again!”

“Please, please,
please,
great Club,” pleaded the little Pyraust in her most tender tone: “Please believe me when I warn you that there is serious danger ahead for all who fear the gods.”

The voice of the club of Herakles shook with wrath. “I tell you, silliest of girl-moths, that this world of ours is founded forever on the will of Zeus the Father of All, he who wields the thunder and lightning, he who kills and makes alive, he who can cast those who refuse to serve him into the lowest depths of Tartaros; and Tartaros, you must remember, O most misled and most infatuated of small moths, is as far below the earth as the earth is below the starry heaven! Think, little whimperer, think, what it must have meant to an enemy of Zeus and of the Olympians when he felt himself falling, falling, falling, falling, even as the monster Typhon must have felt himself falling when, with Etna on the top of him to keep him perpendicular, down, down, down, down he went, down to a place—and don’t you forget it, little flutterer with a wren’s eye!—that is as far below the kingdom of the dead as
that
is below the earth!

“Yes, you flipperty-flap of an insect, what you’ve got to realize is that the Kingdom of the Dead is the Kingdom of Aidoneus; and that Aidoneus is the brother of Zeus and as much under his will as you and I are under his will.

“It is by the will of Zeus, as well as by the help of Queen Persephone, that Aidoneus keeps the ghastly myriads of the dead in control and compels them to submit to their fate. And do you know, you flicker-fan, what their fate is? What yours will be, yours will be,
yours
will be, if you flap at my crack of quietness, or disturb my groove of wisdom any more!

“But if you ask me, you silly flitter-fluff, what
their
fate is now, and what
yours
will soon be, I cannot answer. ‘Shadows they are and shadows cover them,’ as I heard Herakles muttering once when we brushed the dead leaves from his lion’s skin. Have you forgotten, O grain of sand on a pair of wings, the story of how our old Odysseus called up the Theban Prophet Teiresias from among these shadows?

“And how the Prophet had to drink blood before he could speak? So much for the most intellectual of mortal men when it comes to real knowledge!
Drink
blood
is what
they
have to do, little brown one, drink blood! Is your precious Priest of Orpheus prepared to do
that
?”

The wings of the moth-girl emitted a faint susurrating shiver. Then they relaxed and closed above her sunken head. But she was still perched on one of the bosom-curves of the
monster-killing
Club where she must have looked to any smaller creature, to a thirsty louse for instance, searching for half a drop of sweat from a human hand, like an exhausted sea-mew resting on the crest of a sea-wave.

And her voice filtered down like a distillation of mist into that long and narrow crevasse where dwelt the club’s consciousness.

“Is it true, O immortal one,” she asked—and behold! it was brought about by her very fear of the gods that the voice of Pyraust, the moth-girl, gathered up as she spoke some of the rhythmical lost notes from the wailing of the earth over the rape of Persephone; and thus, while not too faint to be audible to the smallest louse, had in them that which caused even the
pine-wood
sap in the club of Herakles to stir and rise—“please, please tell me if it is true what I heard the Priest of Orpheus tell the Priestess of Pallas Athene: namely that on the confines of the
country of the blameless Ethiopians there have now come back from the Kingdom of the Dead the First Man and the First Woman; and that the First Woman, whose name is Niobe, no longer weeps like a ceaseless torrent from an eternal rock; and that by her side once again is the first man, whose name is Phoroneus and who was the son of a Melian Nymph who came from ah Ash-Grove, even as thou thyself, O immortal one, came from a Pine-Forest.”

Now indeed had the moth-girl said the wrong thing! She had been taught from childhood about the Melian Nymphs and about their association with Ash-trees and there had been a family tradition among her own brown-moth ancestors that it had been by the special intercession of one particular Melian Nymph that the original pair of brown-moths had extricated themselves from the hidden parts of the Great Mother.

But what she had never been taught, or, if she had, what she could never keep in her head, was that the effect of every act and every word and every gesture of every living creature depends, not on the
nature
of what’s done, spoken, or indicated, but on the
manner
of these performances.