Atlantis (4 page)

This portion of that “holy ground” stood under a tall black rock of some primeval adamantine stone, at once much smoother and much darker than all the other geological strata in Ithaca. In substance as well as in appearance the “eidolon” of Echidna was completely different from the image of Eurybia. Neither of them possessed a realistic human shape, but each was a misty phantom, associated with a material and movable object. At close quarters Eurybia was nothing but a thick wooden stump; while Echidna “the Serpent” was a short but very massive pillar of clearly articulated white stones, each one of which contained, embedded in the texture of its substance, a
noticeable
array of fossils, many of which, though by no means all of them, had originally been shell-fish.

Above and around each of these two Images or Idols there swayed and wavered and hovered and moved and shook,
sometimes
growing thicker and sometimes lighter, a tremulous body
of palpable vapour unmistakably resembling a female human shape. Both shapes not only grew darker and lighter, thicker and thinner according to the occasion but they also contracted and expanded in actual size.

There was, however, one very curious thing about them. The mist that composed them was entirely impervious to the wildest winds. The wind might flow from North, South, East or West, and blow so softly that it would scarcely stir a feather, or so violently that it would rock the pinnacles of a mountain or
upheave
the roots of a deep-grown forest: in neither case was its presence so much as visible, however closely you watched, by any effect it had upon these two superhuman phantoms of mist. They exchanged human speech in the language common to both Achaeans and Trojans; speech that could be heard and
understood
by any native of that island who entered this unconsecrated, this unholy, this unwalled, unguarded, undefended, unassailable tract of demonic ground.

Yes, any reckless child, any rebellious prowler, any
philosophical
tramp, any desperate bandit, any life-weary beggar, any obsessed youth in pursuit of his ideal vision, could cross at will the boundary of this weird spot. Especially could any daring novice in religion, anxious to obtain supernatural support for his own particular interpretation of the Mysteries of Orpheus or of the Mysteries of Eleusis come stealthily and humbly to a smooth lawn equidistant between these two Beings, or between the wavering pillars of vapour that represented them, and, as he listened to the wind-impervious, storm-immune, rain-indifferent, unbridled and unholy dialogue between them, either be upheld in his special vein of mystical revelation about the secrets of the cosmos or be driven in a wild reaction against every spiritual cult in the civilised world to the desperate madness of parricide or matricide or to some astounding incest or bestiality or perhaps even some unheard-of attempt to side-track or undermine the very fountain-spring of human sexual life and to pervert the unmistakable intentions of nature.

But the absorbed intensity of the daughter of Hector, whose
uncle Dolon was the son of Eumedes of Troy, was as unaffected by this undying dialogue of the dead as was the carving-tool she carried in that special fold of her garment which was the mark of the highest-born maidens of Ilium. She went straight into the centre of a grove of Ash-Trees, or Meliai, just as if she herself had been one of those Melian Nymphs born of the Great Mother at the first separation of Heaven from Earth, a grove of trees that grew on the eastern margin of the smooth lawn of delicate grass that lay midway between those two demonic pillars of cloud. Had Tis the cow-herd and Nisos the princely young house-help been following her at this moment they would
certainly
have stopped in horrified amazement at what they saw.

Both of them knew well as indeed did all the retainers of the royal House of Odysseus that the long-cherished divinely sacred arms of Achilles had been kept in the treasure-crypt beneath the palace ever since by the influence of the goddess Athene over merchant-sailors, they had reached Odysseus’ island home.

Whether voyaging eastward or voyaging westward, they had been brought safe to Ithaca five years after his own miraculous return. But who would have believed that Arsinöe, the youngest niece of Dolon the Trojan spy, could have carried the divine art of carving to such a pitch that she could carve an Ash-Tree, devoid of branches though it was and standing erect in its death, into the actual shape and form, as he was when he lived, of Hector, son of Priam, husband of Andromache, defender of Ilium?

And where and how could the girl have learnt such a
god-given
gift? Had she strayed as a child, while following the chorus of the maidens of Troy in their Orphic worship and received secret lessons from some outlawed offspring of Hephaistos, the son of Zeus? But learn the great art to some purpose she had, and this grand figure of Hector himself, standing tall and stately in the heart of this Melian Grove, was the result.

And now upon this noble image, carved though it was in perishable wood rather than in immemorial marble, this sad, lost, helpless Trojan maid had hung all those Hephaestian
fragments of divine workmanship upon which the rising sun was already beginning to pour its pure blood-sprinkled gold. Holding it high with both her hands, as if it were a goblet of the very nectar of the Olympians, Arsinöe now disentangled the
horse-hair
-nodding helmet from its covering of white linen and placed it on the Trojan hero’s majestically moulded head.

Then at last carefully removing her carving-tool from that proud fold in her garment that marked her as having been a privileged attendant at Priam’s Court, the Trojan girl set to work to suggest by a series of delicate scoopings and indentations the precise appearance of Hector’s forehead—so un-Hellenic in its curious curves but so pitiably well-known to every dweller in Ilium—as its outlines, partly concealed and partly
emphasized
by the horse-hair helmet, emerged as if newly created to greet the glory of the sun’s first rays which now pierced with a long stream of golden light that little group of ancient ash-trees.

The moment she had completed her final touches to the dead, whose figure was now entirely accoutred in the divine armour of Achilles, which, piece by golden piece, save only the
world-renowned
shield which had never reached Ithaca, she had brought from the palace to that ash-grove, at first doing this month by month, and later week by week, as her purpose in its prosperous secrecy gathered momentum, she wrapped the linen cloth about her carving-tool and without giving her finished work any final glance turned to retrace her steps.

Her face as she turned to go re-assumed that look of Cimmerian hopelessness which had never left it since the day when her
companions
who had been pointed out so implacably, one by one, by Eurycleia, as the girls who had given their maiden-heads to the Suitors, had met their death by hanging—“no clean death for such” Telemachus had declared with all a young man’s righteous ferocity—and no graving-tool were it as powerful as the talons of the Erinyes themselves could have done for a human face what that event once for all had done, long ago as it was now, to the face of the youngest niece of Dolon.

But no sooner had she commenced her retreat over that square
mile of mystery called “Arima”, the boundary of which, as all the natives of Ithaca knew, Odysseus in his old age never cared to cross, than she was aware of a new sound, a sound entirely distinct from the wild and hoarse dialogue between those two pillars of cloud, to which she paid no more attention, perhaps less, than did the frogs in that haunted swamp.

But the sound she heard now was completely unusual and very startling in that ghostly place. It was the unmistakable cry of a wounded bird. She heard it long before the bird itself fell miserably to the ground at her feet and lay there helplessly fluttering. Quickly she bent down, seized it, and pressed it to her breast. This she did with no change of expression and with the same unmoved, unsmiling, unhappy, inscrutably fixed look.

But she knew what had happened, and she knew what bird this was; none other in fact than Heirax the Hawk, the
messenger-friend
of Nisos, the princely House-Helper. Heirax had been wounded in the air, either by an attack from some other bird, or by an arrow from a human bow, just as he was reaching the cliffs of Ithaca, and for the last few minutes he had been
desperately
flying forward in hectic jerks and feverish swoops, with the frantic hope of reaching the palace and of delivering to her friend Nisos the tremendous news he carried before loss of blood brought him down.

But his fatal day, or, as any native of the island would have put it, his predestined “Keer” had come. He felt himself falling, and impelled by the natural instinct of all dying creatures to seek a hiding-place, he deliberately swerved so as to fall in “Arima”. It was only when quite close to the ground that he realized that he was destined to fall at the feet of the one single person belonging to the palace who was no friend of his friend Nisos. Leipephile was his best girl-friend and in his thoughts Heirax always pronounced that simple creature’s name as if it had been Leip-filly; thus totally avoiding the proper stress with Its accent on the “peph” that flippant second syllable.

Heirax’s pronunciation made the name more dignified as
well as more appealing, though the sound of the word thus uttered would have made Agelaos, the girl’s betrothed, want to treat him as alas! the hawk was going to be treated now.

Not for nothing had the Trojan girl always stayed awake while the rest of them, including the king’s old nurse, nodded in weariness under the eternal divagations of their “much-enduring” lord. “Tell me, Heirax,” whispered Arsinöe now: “what your news is and I will swear by any oath you choose that I will tell it to Nisos. If you tell me, I will carry you back to the palace where they have drugs that will strengthen your spirit, and
ointments
that will stop the blood, and potions that will heal the pain. But if you will not tell me …” And she pressed her knuckles against the bird’s throat.

And Heirax the hawk said to himself: “It matters nothing whether I tell or refuse to tell. The news is bound to spread anyway. The only loss will be to Nisos and me. I shall lose the pleasure of telling him and he will lose the pleasure of being told by me.” He shifted his position slightly against her left breast and opening his beak made the sounds that Nisos had taught him.

Nisos had been a good teacher for a Hawk, especially for one born on a small island and accustomed to rocks and shores and sands and caves and curving waves and tossing wisps of foam. So his words were clear as to their meaning; though they were ungrammatical and disconnected in their utterance.

“Zeus,” he whistled—and at each sound drops of blood oozed from the wound in his side—“thunder lost …

Here there was a long pause; and in the interval the Trojan girl could hear the hoarse voices of those two Pillars of Cloud raised in an absorbed argument with each other. Eurybia was maintaining that what had happened was the overthrow of the Olympians by the Titans while Echidna was arguing that what was convulsing time and rocking space, and upheaving the Abyss till it was tilted as high as the Zodiacal Signs, was nothing more or less than the victory of the Eternal Feminine whether divine or human or diabolic or angelic or bestial or saurian or reptilian or earthly or aquatic or ethereal or fiery, over the male.

Then Heirax whistled: “Take me to Nisos or leave me to die in Arima!” Ever since she had heard the Hawk’s astounding news an absolute change had approached Arsinöe’s tragic face. It had not taken possession of it. It had only come near it. But it had come so near it that from now on to the end of her days at uneven intervals and for uncertain reasons there began to burst forth or rend forth or tear forth, or jet forth, or explode forth, a flame of exultation so formidable that anyone might have imagined that some fiery particle of the lost lightning of Zeus had by some mad chance got entangled in her hair giving to this already dangerous emotion of hers a supernatural power.

“And now I beseech you,” Heirax implored her, opening and shutting his beak with a queer, shrill, scraping sound, “take me to …” But it was out of a dead throat that the name “Nisos” dissolved in the air; for without a word the girl had wrung the bird’s neck.

But Heirax did have, for all his sudden end, a sort of tributary memorial set up in the scoriac floor of the Trojan girl’s memory; for whenever afterwards she recalled her exultation at the image of Zeus robbed of his aerial weapons and compelled to look down from one of those peaks in Ida, so officially familiar to him as the divine Umpire, and to hear news therefrom, without the power to interfere, of the rising of a new Troy on those Seven Italian Hills, she always felt herself lightly toying, as in her heart she derided the Fathers of Gods and Men, with the swaying neck and dangling head of that small enemy of Ilium, so limp in her hands.

But she didn’t toss that lump of blood-wet feathers either into Eurybia’s swamp or Echidna’s slaughter-cave. She carried it back to the feet of her tree-carved image of Hector and there as she curled it up, claws against beak and wings against belly, she murmured to it aloud: “I don’t fancy the worms of Arima will bother with
you
:
but you’ll be eaten for all that! In this little matter, the friends of great Hector and the enemies of great Hector are the same. Eaten of worms are we all when we come to it: but at least we give birth to our own worms and are devoured by what we ourselves have engendered.” It may have been that some dim little-girl memory of the funeral-rites of the man whose horse-hair-crest above the armour of Achilles seemed just then to stir in reciprocity, came into her mind at that moment; for as she stared at the bird on the ground and thought of the Son of Kronos on his Thunderless peak her triumphant mood relaxed a little. At any rate it relaxed enough to enable her to hear a thin little reedy voice like an infant’s pipe played in a subterranean gallery.