Odysseus swung slowly round. “It’s curious,” he said, “that you should have spoken of Orion; for the line I composed, and I really do consider it a proper, authentic, natural line, though the only poetic part of it is the fact that it is rhythmical and runs smoothly, is about Orion. Well, I can’t really say it’s about him. But at any rate it refers to him, and the syllables of the line run musically together! In fact it’s because they run so musically that I can repeat the line now. It’s the simple sound of it that works the trick. In fact it’s the sort of thing a child could invent without having to give it any particular significance.
“Yes, a child, if it tried to make up a story in poetry would be delighted if a line like this suddenly came into its head. It would probably even try to compose a second line, such as in its rhythm and smooth flow could follow the first.
“It was when I was in the Garden of Alkinöos to which Nausikaa guided me and when I was telling her father and mother, indeed when I was telling them all, about the ghosts of the Heroes I saw in Erebos, that this line suddenly came into my head.
“I had been explaining to them how I beheld the holy and upright Minos, that great son of Zeus, acting as Judge among the Ghosts in Hades when suddenly I thought: ‘I must tell them how I saw the great Orion’; and it was only then, when, without premeditation, I uttered the words ‘Ton de met Orionay pelorion eisenoeesa’, that I realised I had uttered a line of real poetry. And yet all I’d said was just quite simply that ‘after him’—by which I meant of course after Minos—‘I beheld the gigantic Orion’. But I must have instinctively realized that the words I was using had suddenly, like a boat from a muddy ditch into a flowing stream, emerged out of prose and into poetry; for I knew the poetic rhythm in what I added to this, namely:
‘Chersin echone ropalon panchalkion aien aages.’
‘In his hands holding his club, all-bronzed and ever unbroken.’”
Nisos spontaneously brandished his double-edged dagger as Odysseus, moving on with a firmer stride, mounted a short flight of broad stone steps and began to cross a marble square of immense size in the middle of which must have been a grove of enormous trees. It was painful to observe the lost and condemned trunks of this grove, not merely blackened by the salt water but curst with a peculiar shade of blackness to which an exquisitely faint blue tinge had been in some way added.
As they followed the marble roadway between these weird tree-trunks that were like ghosts gathered in a desolate flock by some invisible enchanter, Odysseus turned to his son. “I can’t tell how it is, my boy, but I have an instinct that it’s not for nothing that you and I were brought at the same moment into contact with the name ‘Orion’.”
Nisos stood so still that he might himself have been one of those ghastly tree-trunks with their weird metallic glitter in that pale light.
“Do you mean, my father—” began the young man. But his words, whatever they were going to be, dissolved in that circumambient greyness; for as he met his father’s glance he knew without any exchange of words what the older man was thinking. In fact their separate thought-streams at that critical moment in their lives whirled together in a silent circular eddy. “You think, my Lord,” the younger man whispered, “that we’re in the line of the great Hunter’s arrows where we now stand; and that we might be hit and turned into ghosts ourselves at any second?”
Odysseus lowered his club till it rested on the pavement of the road they were following and they both gazed with instinctive apprehension at a group of colossal Sea-Weeds that rose, tough, wiry, weltering, succulent and elastic into the water, and seemed to be treating the water itself as if it were a thick undulating mass of weirdly smelling rubber that bent into curves and grooves and hollows as they pressed against it, and into it too, as you might say, without causing it to split or crack or bleed or sweat or melt; causing it to yield where it was pressed against, but always finding it impossible to prevent it returning, like a squeezed bubble, or like a vast impressionable bladder, the moment the pressure was relaxed.
“Have you realized, my Lord,” whispered Nisos; and it showed the nature of the intimate crisis that was intensifying itself about them, like an elemental process, parallel to, but not the same as, the process of freezing, that the young man without consciousness of what he did reverted to his mood of utterance before he knew his parentage, “have you realized that we’re on the edge of—”
His voice died away as he looked down; and there came no responding reply from the old man, as he too looked down. And well might the two of them — mere mental human animals of fibres and nerves as they were! — look down and look long, at what lay before them. They were indeed confronted by what might have struck them as a vast reserve of creation-material out of which all the multitudinous formations of earth-life could be replenished, reproduced, refilled with pith and sap and blood-juice.
They were indeed standing on the brink of a vast precipitous chasm that apparently descended to the centre of the earth but which the water of the ocean had now wholly filled. Huge rubber-like sea-growths protruded so thickly out of this indescribable gulf that it was clearly a horrible possibility that impulsive wayfarers might mistake the tops of these elastic weeds of the great salt deep for just a rougher portion of the paving-ground of the road they were following; but the idea that at any moment they might catch, carried to them by this weird element that could scarcely be called water, the twang of an arrow’s flight from the bow of the great Hunter Orion, subdued to a minor degree of tension their reaction to this precipice beneath their feet.
Once more Nisos was, as they used to say in his island-school, bowled over by his new parent’s calm. For the old man turned his back upon this cosmic chasm in the floor of the world just as he might have done if it had only been a muddy ditch near their old Dryad’s decayed oak-tree.
“Well, sonny,” he said, “we must go back a little way, but it won’t have to be far. We’ll find a way of getting our direction again if I’m not mistaken when we’re at that arch.” He was not mistaken. They soon found, exactly at the point he’d mentioned, sweeping upwards from that same arch, a tremendous flight of steps, a staircase, in fact, that soared up and up and up with such a stupendous urge that, in the process of their mounting it and ascending its grandly sweeping curves, neither of them, neither father nor son, could help feeling a curious exultant pride in belonging to the same type, if not to the same race, of human animals, who were responsible — quite apart from the Being who had tyrannized over them — for the building of this amazing city.
They had only to pause for a moment with their elbows on an ebony balustrade to realize what a sublime achievement this Metropolis of Atlantis was. The wonder was not only in the fact that its stairways and bridges and great squares and vast marketplaces were supported by the same colossal pillars, as the towering temples, which themselves, in their turn, were over-topped by yet more bridges, bridges above which still mightier and higher platforms had been erected, platforms which had been made the floors for still loftier towers. It was also in the fact that the whole mass of them, yes! the whole volume and weight of all these amazing constructions, were connected with one another, forming, so to speak, one vast musical composition in marble and stone. And if this drowned super-city was indeed by far the most remarkable creation that the world contained, how was it that the human race could calmly look on while some Titan built and some Olympian drowned its sublime structure? How was it that no desperate prayers to Atropos, who was the oldest and wisest even if she was the smallest and the most easily exhausted of the three Fates who govern the affairs of men and of nations, were not uplifted by the prophets of the people? But it now seemed to both the father and the son as they contemplated this spectacle, leaning upon that ebony balustrade with its summit disappearing in the salt water above them and the foundation disappearing in the salt water beneath them, that they really could hear the terrifying twang of the bow-string of Orion.