Read Online Atlantis by John Cowper Powys - Free Book Online

beaks and wings and claws indistinguishable as they circled.
    But his vision of the former owner of the great club that nowadays was always so patiently waiting in the porch till its hour came round again, was gone with the gust that brought it. The old man leapt to the earth from the final rung of that wooden flight of steps and tightening his belt about his middle and holding his torch so that neither its flame nor its smoke should impede his movements he hurried across the uneven ground to the hollow oak.
    It was certainly a pitiful old face that looked out at him from that mouldering recess; but he had known it now for all the years since Penelope died; and though in its lines and wrinkles, and in its scooped out hollows where soft feminine flesh should be, and in its bony protuberances where beguiling girlish dimples should be, it was a ghastly enough mask of the ravaging power of time, it had the same strangely preoccupied look it always had.
    It was a beautiful face—no! not “beautiful” exactly—say rather haunting with its own special kind of poignant wistfulness—and it wore a permanent expression that betrayed the Dryad’s incurable inability to lose herself in any love or worship or devotion or absorbing affection that implied the sacrifice of the smallest fraction of that larger half of her conscious life that was given up to her struggle to be a tender nurse, not only to all the wild vegetation within her reach, but to the innumerable offscourings of animal, vegetable and even mineral life about her, that seemed to her queer mind to be in need of a friend.
    Arrived at the hollow oak the old king thrust the torch he carried into the ground, where its quiet flame, now that the gust of wind had subsided, burned as steadily as a large candle. “There’s so much, Odysseus, to tell you‚” the Dryad began, “that I don’t know where to start. Kleta-Charis, my name-mother , has been here: that’s the chief thing I wanted to tell you. She was resting for the night in that cave of yours belonging to the Naiads where Athene helped you to hide your treasure when you returned to slay the suitors.”
    “And where, now, old lady,” the king interrupted. “I am building my ship for my last voyage! But what did Kleta-Charis say? Don’t ’ee be afraid to tell me, old friend. I know of myself from what I’ve been feeling all night that there’s something new and strange on the wind; though whether from East or West the storm is coming, and whether Zeus or Poseidon is behind it I’ve not yet learnt.
    “What I cannot understand is why my friend Athene hasn’t come to tell me what has been happening tonight. In all my life until now she has always come to me at a great crisis. Is it so serious, do you suppose, Kleta-Dryad, that she has been summoned by the gods of Olympos to a grand council? Or has she gone to the East, whither the great gods were always accustomed to go at this time of year, to receive worship and reward worshippers among the blameless Ethiopians?”
    “Sit down on this, my child,” and the lady of the oak leaned forward from her hiding-place and using both of her long emaciated arms spread out on the dark mosses and small ferns between them the skin of a recently dead wolf.
    “Kleta-Charis,” murmured the old Dryad in a low hoarse voice, and it was clear to her hearer that she spoke with an effort and with a grim determination to let him hear the worst at once, “Kleta-Charis told me that the great gods were at this hour in such extreme danger themselves that they had no time to think of the fate of their votaries and champions. She said that the whole of Tartaros has broken loose, and that in their first attempt to resist this upheaval, Zeus and Poseidon, blind with anger,raised up such a world-swallowing sea-wave that it swallowed the whole continent of Atlantis; and that the cities of Atlantis with all their populations had now sunk into Hades, where, if Aidoneus reigns still—but