But Odysseus wasn’t one to remain paralysed and confounded even though in the presence of a menace from Orion on one side and from Typhon on the other. “If that’s the Hunter,” he remarked quietly, “that is, without question,” and he jerked his beard in the opposite direction, “the breathing of the Monster. So I suppose we’d better leave this point of vantage and swing round again, whether eastward or westward, or northward or southward; for I have now absolutely lost all sense of direction, and I expect you have too, my son! But I know we were just now following that damned Dragon, so, if I’m right to assume from the noise I can hear that the brute’s coming back this way we’ve got to return to our first direction, sonny, which was certainly directly opposite our present one.”
They turned their backs therefore to the still faint but extremely unpleasant sounds of which they both were now fully aware, and made their way, the father with Herakles’ club and the son with Zeuks’ double-edged dagger, back once more in the direction from which they had just been hastening.
“Was it an omen, my father, both of us thinking of Orion at the same time?” enquired Nisos rather timidly, for he was not sure, as nobody who knew Odysseus ever could be really sure, what his precise reaction would be to any question that had a mystical or religious over-tone.
In one sense this famous hero’s character was abnormally simple, as simple, you might almost say, as that of an animal, in another sense it was unpredictable, yes! not so much complicated, or subtle, as wholly unpredictable. Even here it might have been argued that there was something animal-like, although to anyone who has a long experience of any particular species of animal the absolutely incalculable never occurs.
But it was precisely this, the absolute incalculable, that did occur with Odysseus; and it was upon this peculiarity that the popular idea of his wiliness and cunning rested. Human cunning, like human honesty, is one of the hardest of all qualities to catch, isolate, hold, and clearly define, especially so when we agitate our measuring scales by the introduction of our moral emotions. Odysseus’ unpredictableness resembled in fact both the unpredictableness of the sort of super-animal we call “good”, like Pegasos, and the unpredictableness of the sort of super-animal we call “bad”, like Typhon.
But now to his son’s question about Orion the old man’s reply was both very gentle and very definite. “I have noticed,” he said, “that the intimation of a great friend’s approach or of a great enemy’s approach reaches us through the intervening space much more quickly and much more unmistakably when the personage arriving finds us entirely alone and with nothing around us and about us except the elemental, the mineral, the vegetable forms of existence. Get away, you little idiots!” and he brushed aside with his left hand a shoal of tiny fish who had evidently mistaken his projecting beard for a growth of the sort of seaweed that might be expected to harbour the particular kind of small creatures that were to these scaly little mouths and distended gills a veritable heaven of feasting. “Of course in this case, my dear child‚” Odysseus went on, “you and I, since we have the same friends and enemies, can well, for the argument’s sake, count as one person. To both of us, therefore, the presence of Orion down here at the bottom of the sea, exploring the metropolis of Atlantis, just as we are doing ourselves, is without question a menace to you and me. That he is, no doubt, much more of a menace to our enemy Typhon makes no difference to us. It is known that Orion was blinded for ravishing his mother and only restored to sight by the power of the Dawn. It is known that he has an insane passion for killing anything and everything with bow and arrow and that on one occasion he set out to destroy in this manner the whole human race. Whether he is here as a friend or as an enemy of the Being who rules this place and whose mysterious countenance our ship carries as her figure-head is completely unknown to us.
“Whether this mysterious Being to whose machinations, directed against the Son of Kronos, Atlantis owes her drowning, has the power to dominate Orion I have not the remotest idea. I can only assure you that when I saw Orion in Hades after my vision of Minos judging the Dead I felt very hostile to him. Ghost himself, he was killing for the second time, and for an everlasting Second Death, every creature he could discover, in a blind ecstasy of universal murder.
“Thus, my dear boy, when I hear you ask me whether the fact that the image or the eidolon or the actual living form of Orion coming into our two minds at the same moment when he is stalking through these deserted buildings in one of his insane murdering fits, is an omen, I can only answer, emphatically and definitely, no!
“No! It is no more an omen than when Polyphemos killed my companions and tried to kill me. It is a struggle, a battle, a contest, my little son. It is a fight! And everything in life is a fight, Nisos my friend, everything! That the idea of this savage Hunter, this madman, who some say raped his own mother, and whose very name means ‘to pour out semen’, and who others say had neither father nor mother, but was born of the semen of Zeus and Poseidon deliberately thrust into the hide of some slaughtered beast, and left to ferment there for the necessary nine or ten months, came into our minds at the same moment only shows how the eidola of dangerous men, who are threatening us, can pass through air and water and earth and fire till they fling themselves upon us like horrible projected shadows, warning us that very shortly the men themselves in their own flesh and blood will be upon us!
“Omens? It is the fight for life, the fight in life, the fight of life, and, by all the gods! the fight with life! But what we must set ourselves to do now is to discover the palace, the dwelling, the temple, the throne, the hiding-place of the Being who rules this place.”
He gathered up his own trailing cord of the Helmet of Proteus more effectively round his head and watched his son do the same for himself and also for the club of Herakles; and once more they went on with their exploratory journey. But their quest was soon at its end. Without warning, without the faintest hint of premonition, they were suddenly standing on a platform of green marble, marble that through all this water had itself the look of water and of water in motion too; while in front of them, but to their surprise not on the tremendous and awe-inspiring throne they were expecting and looking for, but on a heap of long-dead, long-decayed, long-rotted, long-dissolved, long-degenerated, filthily-stinking, foully-crumbling, horribly-putrifying mass of sea-weeds in accumulated decomposition, reclined, or rather sprawled, the god-titan, or goddess-titan, for this horrific and terrifying rebel against all Deities was completely bi-sexual and androgynous, who was by reason of his, or of her, or of its defiance of Zeus and of Poseidon and of Aidoneus, those three Olympian Rulers of Sky and Sea and Hades, responsible for the drowning of Atlantis.
This mysterious Being, whose physical appearance struck Nisos as more shocking and also more feminine than human words could convey, fixed her eyes upon the young man as he stared in stupefied horror and made with outstretched and inwardly curved fingers a series of gestures, of a dangerously magnetic nature, compelling him to approach her. This summoning gesture he felt unable to resist, and first with one of his feet and then with the other — and as each foot advanced he felt himself forced to move his arms, in a fumbling and groping manner, mechanically forward — he slowly and steadily, while he trembled from head to foot at what he was doing, advanced towards this indescribable creature’s embrace.