And like a mountain of submarine marble that has been washed smooth by the waves till it resembles a block of rainbow-gleaming ice, the great Hunter was now exposed to the petrified stare of our young friend under his counterpane of striking sea-weed. The tremendous figure in the foreground was engaged, it was plain to see, in adjusting an arrow to the string.
Through the wavering atmospheric lustre that emanated from the fantastic object on his father’s head the whole spectacle struck the prostrate lad with a strange sense of some vast world-history reaching some long-prognosticated moment, where life in its mysterious essence, human, sub-human, super-human, cosmic, and astronomic, had arrived at some pivotal point where the whole business, inscrutable, unspeakable, absolutely real, but beyond both mind and matter, gathers itself together to become something for which naturally enough there is as yet no name.
Then he saw Orion draw the arrow back on its quivering bow-string against his naked breast and let it fly. It flew with a reverberating directness straight towards the reclining Typhon and past the very feet of the recumbent Creator of Atlantis. It passed clean through one of the outstretched hands of the Man-Dragon, nailing it to the ground; and Orion perceiving this and glorying in it had the same look upon his face as when with his arrows he drove the Pleiades into the sky, and again when he came at last upon the sun-god Helios newly-risen over the edge of the world and was cured of his blindness.
But the latest and greatest of the primeval children of our Mother the Earth was not overcome by this shock. He didn’t roar, nor did he howl; he didn’t shriek, nor did he bellow: he didn’t curse nor wail, nor yell, nor rumble, nor weep, nor moan. He only lifted as high as he could his right shoulder, for it was his left hand that had been hit, swung his right arm downward across his bent torso, seized the arrow and struggled to pull it out. The arrow, however, after piercing his hand, had gone deep into a very obstinate piece of rock, and pull as he might with that powerful arm and that powerful shoulder he couldn’t pull it out.
While he struggled with it Nisos could see the vast figure of Orion approaching with long strides and brandishing his bronze club. At that particular sight the young man’s mind moved very fast. He recalled what his father, lying now by his side, had told him, and how the words he used had of their own accord, so he declared, taken upon them the rhythm of poetry. In fact simultaneously with the approach of that tall terrifying figure, Nisos seemed to catch again the very syllables of what the old warrior had muttered at that moment.
“Tonde met’ Orionay pelorion eisenoeesa.”
“Chersin echone rapalon panchalkeon aien aages.”
What astonished the young man most in himself at that crucial second was that in spite of all tradition, convention, propriety, decency, law, order, education, custom, and harmonious necessity, he found that his sympathy was with the hunted and not the hunter, with the ugly and not the beautiful, with the Monster, and not the destroyer of Monsters, and he suddenly felt in himself a mad, wicked, rebellious, reckless impulse to jump up from the side of Odysseus, clutch the double-edged dagger that had belonged to the son of Arcadian Pan, leap on the shoulder of this god-defying Man-Dragon, and spur him on with a mocking and resounding challenge to withstand Orion to the death!
Odysseus must have become aware, by some psychic vibration passing from one light-giving Proteus-cord to the other, of this rebellious impulse in the life-blood of the child of his loins, for he suddenly handed to him his club, leapt to his feet with astonishing agility, crossed the few yards between them and Typhon in a couple of strides, and kneeling on one knee, and using both hands, pulled out the arrow! Nisos who was instantly at his side gave him back the club and helped him to his feet. But they now found themselves, while they watched Orion’s steady approach, standing so close to the Creator of Atlantis that this incalculable Entity was able to try its dangerous magic upon them both just as it pleased; one deadly-white phosphorescent tentacle of a finger being laid on the shoulder of Odysseus and the other on the shoulder of Nisos.
All three of them for a brief space, while every pulse-beat of time brought Orion nearer, were in any case reduced to helpless inactivity by the choking cloud of fire and smoke with which Typhon covered his retreat. But a retreat, and a very shrewd and very rapid retreat this enemy of Zeus was able to make under cover of his own fiery breath, so that when Orion, brandishing his club of bronze, arrived on the scene he had not the remotest idea whether his fugitive had fled east or west or north or south.
Nor did it appear to him that either of the two men he found awaiting him were in a condition capable of replying intelligently to any question he might ask as to the direction of the flight of the Enemy of Heaven. They were both, at least so it seemed to the simple mind of the great Hunter, so confused, so dazed, so numbed, so completely metagrabolized by the leprous white, death-worm-white, sarcophagus-toad-white dead-sea-eel-white fingers that rested upon them that he might equally well make enquiries of a heap of ordure dropped by the fugitive.
So he addressed himself to the Being who had reduced them to this condition.
“Tell me, you creator of drowned cities, you hypnotizer of men, whither has that monster whose belly-flame no water can quench and whose bladder-smoke no ocean can quell, shogged off on his wriggling tail?”
Neither the father with his unbelievable past nor the son with his doubtful future appeared able to utter a word. But the mental vibration between them was so aided by the cords of the Protean Helmet that Odysseus indicated to Nisos in a whisper below a whisper that the club of Herakles had begun to make curious little jerks, abrupt stirrings, and quiverings quite independent of the hand that held it. “Feel him, will you, son?” whispered the old hero, “and tell me what you think!”
Nisos laid his left hand on the club’s head, just above its life-crack where the hollow cord, clinging closely to it, still protected the sheltering insects from the pressure of the water. “If it wants to act on its own, my king and my father‚” the young man whispered, “I would risk it and let it do so!”
And the club, whom some called “Expectation”, and others called “Dokeesis”, said to itself: “That bronze affair which Orion is whirling about over our heads may be all right for breaking stones. It is far too unwieldy, mechanical, automatic, and impervious to all suggestion, to crack the skull of a dangerous magician. If I can only make Odysseus give me my complete freedom I’ll show him and this lad too how to deal with wicked and horrible Beings! I came near it at the cave of the Naiads; but this Living Horror lying on that dead seaweed is worse than the oldest natural-born monster. But I, Dokeesis, can deal with it! Only let me go, and you shall see!”
And then, as his own hand on the club’s head and his father’s hand round the club’s waist relaxed a little, Nisos heard the fly say to the moth: “It’s hard for a thinking person like myself to go on studying life while these gods and men and monsters make such a stir; but I’m at least lucky to have someone like you, not quite indifferent to philosophic conclusions. Before the Pillar stopped talking to the club just now, it revealed the real cause of all this hullabaloo. It said it had learnt from earth and water and air and fire that the death of every deity in the world was at hand. It said that the world, what it always calls ‘the Pillared Firmament’, would outlast every creator that was supposed to have made it. This boy Nisos thinks that our ancient classical language is too adverbial. Adverbial! How else, I should like to know, could any language express how perfectly, beautifully, intelligently, clearly, and completely the club, in whose bosom you and I are at peace, understands our old and subtle tongue? Anyway the Pillar has now revealed that as a result of a spontaneous and natural revolt all over the world against god-worship, all the gods that exist, from Zeus downwards, and all the goddesses that exist from Hera downwards, including Athene herself and Eros and Dionysos and of course including Aidoneus the god of the dead, and Poseidon the god of the sea, are fated to perish. They are not fated to perish rapidly. Some indeed, Athene and Hermes for example, will perish slowly.