The mast was fixed in the keel of the vessel and reached up through both the two lower decks to where, on the top-deck, quite close to the spot on which our friend was now talking with Akron, the huge sail, made of the same sort of cloth that Odysseus had tried so desperately to obtain in Ithaca, was now carrying the “Teras” over the waves in a style that must have delighted every true sailor’s heart on board.
The way the vessel was behaving at this moment in a wind almost straight from the South-East, was certainly especially pleasing to the two men who just then were supervising the “protonoi” or “forestays”, the “kaloi” or “halliards”, and the “huperoi” or “braces”. These men were a pair of brothers, whose names, Pontos and Proros, were enough in themselves to suggest seafaring ability, but whose home-harbour, Skandeia in Kythera, was known over all Hellas to breed the best deck-hands in the world.
As he listened attentively and politely, though it must be confessed just a little cynically, to our friend Nisos’ rather prolonged but eloquent discourse on what particular feelings, whether enjoyable or the reverse, were aroused in him by air and water, Akron remained, according to the custom then prevalent in that best of all sea-going Hellenic circles, quietly, though not unsympathetically, detached from the chatter that was proceeding so happily between Pontos and Proros.
Both the brothers from Kythera were small in regard to their bodily form but they were smaller still in regard to the size of their skulls. Indeed so diminutive were these Kytharean craniums that the most studious and experienced of phrenologists would have been puzzled to say where there was room for any sort of bump of worship or for any sort of bump of mathematics or for any sort of bump of metaphysics in these quaint little rondures that resembled a couple of oak-apples as they kept bobbing up and down, rallying each other and making sport of the entire universe.
The oarsmen in the second deck, above sea-level, were not at that moment using their long, thick, heavy oars, which were the largest oars to be seen at that epoch in any harbour in the world, but had pulled them out of the water and were holding them across their knees while they themselves leant back in their seats, talking, or throwing “astragaloi”, the special kind of dice that sailors preferred, or just settling themselves to sleep. There were four of these oarsmen, a couple for each side of the “Teras” as she breasted the waves, Klytos and Teknon on her starboard side, and Euros and Halios on her port side.
All these four men came from the immediate vicinity of the palace of Nausikaa’s parents and their families were personally well-known to her. It was down on the third deck that the passengers’ cabins were situated; and the present possessors of these cabins had to be selected without any exhausting consideration of personal feelings. One of them for instance was shared between Nausikaa and Okyrhöe; and another between Pontopereia and Eione; while a third was given up entirely to Odysseus.
The most striking thing about the “Teras” however was not the number of her decks nor the number of her cabins. It was her Figure-Head. If the beard of Odysseus, which already had played its part in one of the queerest palace-plots ever revealed by a chronicler, bore, as has already been noted, a strong resemblance to a ship’s bowsprit, the real bowsprit of the “Teras’, had no sooner entered the harbours of the world than it was recognized as the most striking of all figure-heads known to civilization. It represented a unique creature whose form and shape had been invented by the Ruler of Lost Atlantis who had concluded the work by placing on the creature’s scaly neck his or her own head with all its striking features.
The name of this Ruler was unknown and the peculiarity of its unusual head was that it was hard to imagine it as the head of any mortal or immortal man, and still harder to accept it as the head of a god or head of the horribly scaly neck to which it was and is attached. This mysterious Being, whose extraordinary features were not those of a man or a god or a beast or a monster, was the author of a long poem about the beginning and the end of everything, a poem which still remains the greatest oracle of man’s destiny existing upon the earth.
The unfortunate thing about this tremendous hieroglyph is that by reason of the drowning of the continent that produced it, and by reason of its being chained with golden chains to the altar of the Hundred and Twenty-Five Gods of that sunken continent, only those who were permitted to read it before the waves covered the altar to which it was bound know anything of its secret; and among these only the Seven Wise Men of Italy have so much as begun to penetrate its contents; and these have only revealed the fact that it is landscape superimposed upon landscape rather than rhythm upon rhythm that is the method of its message.
Since, however, when any of these Seven Wise Men perish the remaining ones appoint successors there is still a hope that in spite of the punishment inflicted by Zeus, the wisdom of Atlantis-will never be entirely lost.
While Nisos was struggling to be as prophetic as he could in his talk to the Master of the “Teras”, Pontopereia, the daughter of a prophet, was doing the same sort of thing, only with more subtlety, in regard to Eione, as the two girls sipped the well-made red wine, mixed with plenty of pure spring-water, with which Nausikaa’s stores provided them, not to mention nibbling a few particularly well-spiced biscuits from Arabia, a taste for which the princess inherited from her mother.
“Oh don’t say that, darling Eione! I know so well the feeling you have that drives you to say it; but we women really must learn to slip under or slip over these crude urges of Nature that lift us off our feet and force us to utter things like that! The great thing is, I know I’m right in that anyway, the great thing is always to have two lives going; one of them the life we share with our friends, and the other the life we enjoy with our own mind and with our own senses.
“To keep this secret second life going, even while we are living the other to the full, is the supreme trick of existence for girls such as you and I.”
Eione lifted up her shapely legs from the couch where hitherto the two girls had been lying face to face, each pair of bare feet resting motionless against the neck of the owner of the other pair. But the easy nonchalance of that chaste yet familiar position was completely broken up by this provocative movement on the part of Tis’s sister. Their position blotted out from the daughter of Teiresias all view of her companion’s face. All she could see of her now was a couple of white shins and the extremely intimate shadows and outlines between them.
“When you talk of the life we ‘share with our friends’,” enquired a girlish voice from behind these uplifted knees, “do you mean our lovers?”
“Certainly I do,” replied Pontopereia almost sharply, “if we have such idiots; but what was in my mind was nothing as sexual as that.”
“Would you advocate living this double life even after marriage?”
“Most certainly I would! Don’t you see, my sweet, it is only after the actual moment of union has been consummated by the loss of our virginity that men, and women, can make love, as people call it, on equal terms. But does the ecstasy of such embraces so absorb us both as to completely blot out and obliterate our separate identities? Don’t you suppose, my lovely one, that we still go on — I won’t say thinking thoughts that have have no connection with the passionate pleasure we’re enjoying, but thinking such a thought as—‘oh how utterly and entirely this heavenly, this divine sensation beats all other sensations I’ve ever known!’”