He had done precisely that with the taking and looting of Troy. The sack of this royal city must have occupied the attention of his whole essential Being and this perfectly calm yet terrific preoccupation, nourished on the very marrow of his bones, was the thing that made it possible for him to indulge in the most outrageous lies and monstrous deceptions, without, as the saying is, turning a hair.
And now it was the same with this voyage above the waters under which lay the lost Atlantis. Odysseus had the power of “jollying along” every mortal person and thing, whether divine, or human, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, that could possibly, by any imaginable twist or turn of coaxing, cajoling, cozening, condensing, dilating, liquifying, vaporizing, euhemerizing, metamorphosing be made use of to help forward his individual purpose.
What would have needed the genius of Pontopereia’s progenitor himself, yes! even of the great Teiresias, to unravel, was the convoluted connection between the definite, concrete, actual, realistic achievement at which Odysseus was aiming and the glory, honour and fame he would get by this achievement.
It seems to the present chronicler, though it is only too likely that both Homer and Hesiod would take a different view, that the grape-juice of the glory of achieving, and the fir-tree sap of having achieved, when the achievement has been accomplished, are so inextricably intermingled that not all the Sirens, Harpies, Gorgons and Erinyes in the whole cosmos could unravel them.
To capture Troy, to return to Ithaca while Penelope still lived, to plunge down among the sunken temples and altars and streets and markets of drowned Atlantis, each one of these triumphs of the individual will over all that opposes it, had become so completely all that was, all that is, all that shall be for evermore, to the man Odysseus, that to separate these events from this man would be like separating the moon from its light or the water from the waves.
Thus it was when Odysseus required of Zeuks that he should speak, Zeuks himself seemed conscious of some special quality in the moonlight as well as conscious of the abnormally dramatic weight of what he had to tell, for it struck Nisos who was watching Zeuks closely that this latter gave a sort of half-shrug of his broad shoulders and although he didn’t remove his hands from his sides he opened them wide, with their palms exposed and their fingers widely extended, as if he were commencing to disclaim all possible responsibility for all conceivable events in this mad world.
And it was at that precise second that an infinitesimal and entirely haphazard thing occurred such as had happened to Nisos from his earliest childhood. The fact that he was watching Zeuks so closely sharpened his powers of observation to an abnormal extent. And the result of this was that his attention was caught and held by the fact that a small sea-swallow, swooping and swerving along this particular deck, had let fall upon the deck’s well-scrubbed surface a little clot of bird’s dung from which protruded not only the featherless stalk of a tiny feather but the clipt edge of a human toe-nail.
Nor did this extra discovery prevent Nisos in his moon-induced mania for minute observation, from noticing that Zeuks himself, as he straightened his shoulders to draw his breath before answering, laid bare upon his own chest a peculiar tuft of especially black hairs. “Is the sky going to fall when Zeuks answers?” thought Nisos: and certainly the general sigh that rose from the whole company just then struck him as curiously connected with all those aspects of human bodies of which human consciousness especially dislikes being reminded.
It was almost as if the unseemly parts of every corporeal frame in that whole company joined in that general sigh; joined in it indeed so pitifully that it seemed as if that sigh proceeded not so much from the lips of those gathered there as from those disparaged parts of their human bodies of which we only seem to grow fully aware when we are seized by an intense longing to escape from our bodies altogether!
It was a weird thought to come into a youthful head just then, but Nisos welcomed it, and indeed was proud of it, telling himself that his mother would have regarded it as an absolute proof that he was destined one day to be a prophet. Yes, he told himself, this great sigh from all these people came from every single one of the out-of-the-way hairs in their secret orifices of excretion and copulation, and from the ignoble hairs under their arms, whether male or female, and from every crushed, deformed, twisted, and squeezed-sideways toe-nail in that crowd, whether belonging to a male or a female.
Nor did the effect of the moon’s motionless motion, through those indifferent clouds, affect only human beings. It was especially potent where small, disregarded, insignificant material objects were concerned, objects such as pieces of burnt wood, broken shells, wisps of wool, flakes of foam, strips of sea-weed, frayed bits of cordage, and even certain infinitesimal scoriac fragments risen to the surface of the water and carried in circles over leagues and leagues of salt waves from the burning craters of the great mountain Kunthorax which towered above the city of Gom, the capital of drowned Atlantis.
Yes, this curious universal sigh rose not only from the less honourable portions of the bodies of the people upon the deck of the “Teras”, but from a host of derelict scraps and bits of scraps that winds and tides and sea-gull beaks had helped chance to collect at this particular moment and upon this particular deck. To the mind of our youthful prophet Nisos this heavy undulant sigh was drawn from every mortal thing there present that had, or could ever presume to claim that it had, suffered from the arrogance of immortal gods or the recklessness of mortal men.
A deep and spontaneous sigh like this was, he decided, clearly and unquestionably due to an obscure craving in existence itself to escape from every physical and every mental effort that was forever “having to be made” that it might remain what it was and not perish utterly in the abyss. All the animal, all the vegetable, all the mineral offscourings, castaways, shreds, patches, scrapings, splinters, parings, drift and flotsam, together with all the human abortions, misfits and degenerates and all the infected members of each particular corpus of corruption, seemed to Nisos just then as he tried desperately to unravel the psychic knot of that half-circle of suspended life and reluctant death under that intent moon as she passed those casual clouds, to be asking to be heard.
The universe seemed to be giving them some final pitiful chance that their breath should be audible and some broken syllable of their desire should be expressed, which, if Odysseus would only ask it or Zeuks would only answer it, might redeem all. But Odysseus was now repeating his question and Zeuks was now beginning to laugh.
Yes, it was with a laugh he commenced his answer, and with a laugh he finished his answer; and there were many there who must have thought that Odysseus would be overwhelmed by his answer. Zeuks told how it was soon after the “Teras” had sailed that the whole thing happened. Led by Krateros Naubolides, Nisos’ father, and by Agelaos Naubolides, Nisos’ brother, the enormous faction among the warriors of Ithaca who were opposed to the House of Odysseus swept down in a resolute mass upon the king’s palace, ransacked it, scoured it out, gutted it, scraped it clean of every trace and vestige of the House of Odysseus, till from the Corridor of Pillars to the innermost caverns of its washing-chambers, sculleries, pantries, and kitchens, it became a primitive, antiquarian annex to the prosperous barns and picturesque enclosures and to all the long-reverberating rural and insular traditions of the autochthonous House of Naubolides.