“Come on, you two! Come on, for the sake of your poor old Zeuks, if not at the command of cloud-compelling Zeus! Come on, or Odysseus will be jumping into the sea with nothing but that ridiculous ‘prumneesia’ on his silly old pate!”
They both leapt to their feet, followed him at a run to the ladder, scrambled up helter-skelter, Arsinöe clinging to Nisos, while Zeuks, his left hand on the small of the man’s back and his right on the woman’s waist, pushed them violently from the rear.
Yes! Odysseus was standing alone at the base of the figure-head gripping “Expectation”, otherwise “Dokeesis”, firmly by the middle, and disentangling from the extraordinary object on his head what looked like a couple of dangling, elongated, devil-fish tentacles. Of these tentacles he was earnestly and gravely testing the strength, giving them a series of sharp tugs and using for this purpose both the hand that held the club and the one which was free and unencumbered.
Close to the mast stood Akron, watching over the curved spines and quiveringly extended arms of Pontos and Proros who were holding the swaying and dripping rope by which the “Teras” was moored to the rock that in shape resembled the Titan Atlas, and, as he watched those quivering arms and that massive rope, repeatedly turning his head away from the rock and towards Eumolpos at the helm.
Zeuks led the agitated and excited lovers straight up to Odysseus who swung round at once and regarded them from above his beard with a quiet and approving look, a look that said: “You’re doing very well, my children. Go on as you’ve begun and all will be well.”
It was only when Nisos realised the direction in which both the eyes and the pointed beard of the old man were now turned that a cold shudder of terror ran through him amounting to something like sheer panic though it didn’t quite reach that point.
Odysseus was calmly regarding the water, his body stone-still, while both from the hand that held the club and from the other hand trailed those two weird streamers. What these streamers really resembled were the long-drawn-out single hairs of a certain prehistoric creature that swam the salt seas aeons of centuries ago and lived by devouring monstrous cuttle-fish which floated in chasms of water that descended to the centre of the earth.
Contemplating the greenish-black depths, into which Odysseus kept dangling these streamers from his fantastic helmet and testing their strength, Nisos began to feel more real nervous dismay than he had ever felt in his life before.
“By Aidoneus if this isn’t worse,” he said to himself, “than when I was in that prison of Enorches!” And then as he stared at that black-green swirling water, into which some deadly intimation told him Odysseus would soon force him to plunge, it suddenly came to him how the image of that mark on the base of the Sixth Pillar—“the Son of Hephaistos”—had acted like an incantation or a magic spell to free him from that cruel Priest’s prison. And wasn’t Hephaistos the god of Fire?
Well then, wasn’t this mysterious Son of Hephaistos, or rather the Pillar raised up by him, the very saviour dedicated to come to the aid of a person in peril from Water? Thus, just as he had suddenly seen those two Letters on the wall of his prison, so he now saw them in the midst of that swirling green-black water.
And it was at that second that Odysseus swung round and shouted to Akron: “Keep her off the rocks till we come back!” and then in the same tone addressing Zeuks, just as if the daughter of Hector had been, like the “Teras”, another “Prodigy” of a Ship, “Guard my son’s Trojan as carefully as if she were Helen herself till we return!” Then turning his back upon everything but the miles of water that covered Atlantis: “Now you, my son, watch me carefully and do exactly what you see me do.”
Thus speaking the old king disentangled the long single hair, that was his Ariadne’s clue, from his Helmet of Proteus and placed the end of it between his teeth. Nisos, after one last hurried glance round, in which he saw the moonlit tips of Zeuks’ knuckles at Arsinöe’s waist but also noted that the knuckles of both her hands were pressed violently against her closed eyes, thrust the end of his “clue” into his mouth and shut his teeth upon it.
It was at that indrawn beat of the tense heart of their ship “Teras” that Arsinöe snatched her hands from her eyes, fumbled with the clothes of her companion, drew forth Zeuks’ habitual defence, his short double-edged sword-dagger, and thrust it into Nisos’ hand, thus it was not weaponless that our young friend, imitating to a nicety every movement of the old man, followed him over the ship’s side, and plunging feet-first into the water, disappeared from view.
What did not disappear, however, and it can be imagined the queer feeling the sight of these things gave to Arsinöe, were the two elongated single hairs, so vividly suggestive, whether or not such was their real origin, of some aboriginal prehistoric feminine monster, of that grotesque Helmet of Proteus, These objects remained on the surface of the water; and it was the weirdest thing Arsinöe had ever seen in her life to observe these thin streaks of moon-lit silveriness, bobbing up and down and round and round each other, and every now and then shooting off a certain distance from each other, where, although separated, they would recommence their sport of bobbing up and down and round and round, as if the other one were there, when in reality it was completely outside that particular radius of the game.
Zeuks was also watching this ocean dance of a couple of moonlit filaments constituting themselves a curious sort of comic-cosmic choroio; but his attention was so taken up with the delight he got from pressing Arsinöe’s body against his own that this dithyrambic crescendo-diminuendo upon the water became merely an outward projection of the deliciousness of the dalliance in which he was indulging.
To Arsinöe on the other hand, though she could no more help staring at it than she could prevent her senses responding to her companion’s caresses, it was as if the everlasting elements themselves were mocking her and making sport of her; but when Zeuks’ ecstatic embrace subsided and she had once more to deal with the less wrought-up occurrences of the more normal succession of things she forced herself to recall what she had felt when in that “Arima” of Ithaca day after day, with the carving-tool tight between her fingers, she had carved the indomitable features of the defender of Troy out of the heart of an island ash-tree.
While the son of Arcadian Pan and the daughter of Hector of Troy watched the dance of those nameless things that were like the antennae of some primordial insect-monster of the ocean, our friend Nisos found he needed every gasp of breath, every drop of semen, every throb of blood, every microcosm of will, every spurt of energy, every burst of blind desperation he could call up if he were to remain “cheerful”, as his island school-teachers had always taught him must be at the root of the philosophy of life of every pious son of an Achaian father, while side by side with Odysseus he sank through the water to the roofs and streets and temples of the capital-city of Atlantis.
They landed on a vast expanse of grey pavement and what was really an enormous space of perfectly smooth and carefully fitted flagstones; and while Odysseus was slowly turning round on his heels and with very little shuffling or stretching or stumbling was making a hurried but obviously a pretty careful survey of the panorama around them, the first thing that came into the head of Nisos to do was to snatch at his own silvery and swaying life-line. When once he had clutched this gleaming object at about five yards distance from the Helmet of Proteus, he glanced quickly at Odysseus for permission, and proceeded to give the glittering thin thing a bold twist round the cavity in the bosom of the Club of Herakles as the weapon reposed horizontally in the hand of Odysseus.