Read Online Atlantis by John Cowper Powys - Free Book Online Page A

does he, Odysseus, does he reign in Hades still?—he ought to be marshalling them in their due order and bringing their leaders and chieftains, and especially those among them who were unjust and cruel, before the judgment-seats of Rhadamanthus and Minos.”
    The old Dryad, having poured out all this in one breath save for a gasp at the word “Atlantis” and another at the word “Aidoneus”, sank down on her knees in the inside of the hollow tree-trunk and rested her chin and her hands against the rough, powdery, thousand-year-old jaggedness of disintegration which for nearly a century had constituted the window-sill of the slowly dying oak which was in a sense her house, and in a sense herself.
    She breathed heavily, but freely enough now, as she watched the effect of her words upon the massive, upturned, almost bald head beneath her, as he squatted cross-legged upon the wolf-skin , while his torch from its muddy socket in the wet moss threw a wavering beam of light upon his outstretched bowsprit-beard which at noon-day was like the solid silver of a graven image in a temple.
    But the most silvery beard in that darkness, in spite of the crescent-moon and the stars and the torch, would have been reduced to a colour-levelling monotone by the encompassing gloom. He remained silent for a long moment. Then he said slowly: “My friend Athene is bound to appear soon. She will touch me with her immortal hand. She will counsel me with her divine wisdom.”
    After hearing this the dweller in the dying oak fell silent in her turn while far-away they both could catch the voice of some fortunate sea-bird that after losing itself inland fell to uttering repeated cries of relief when it caught once more the sound of waves breaking on the rocks.
    “Athene will probably appear to me,” began Odysseus again, “in the form of a young fisherman or goatherd when I go tomorrow ,today I mean, to the cave of the Naiads where I’m building my ship. It was clever of me—eh, Kleta, old friend?—to go to a place like that which all the island regards as so sacred to the sea-powers that they daren’t approach it? My difficulty, as I knew from the start, when I began working on the keel and the body of my ship, will be to collect enough sail-cloth to make a big enough main-sail.
    “You, of course, old friend, always busy as you are with tending your wild garden, have no idea of the things we men have to consider, especially in matters of war and of ships. I’ve made up my mind to hoist sail again before I die. I’m not going to rot here alive till I’m eaten by worms. You tell me Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus have between them drowned the whole of Atlantis. That doesn’t look to me as if the power of the gods were declining!
    “Zeus, the Father of Athene, has often been influenced by her far-sighted wisdom; and when she visits me she will tell me how to propitiate the Father of men and gods. Even if Atlantis is at the bottom of the ocean, why should I be worried? Answer me that , name-child of the loveliest of the Graces! Couldn’t I steer my ship, when once I’ve got her mainsail, over the graves of a hundred Atlantises?
    “I tell you’ old friend, I can’t see what there is in this news to make me miserable. I just can’t see! I feel at this moment as if I——”
    But he suddenly stopped; confounded by what he saw in the old face staring at him out of that hollow tree.
    “What’s the matter, Kleta-Dryad, old friend? For the sake of all the Olympians tell your child what’s the matter?”
    The Dryad uttered a choking sound in her throat that was like the sob of a sea-wave caught and imprisoned behind cruel rocks when it longs to leap and curve and curl and toss and crest and fume and foam and race over the ocean’s surface. Then she said, speaking in a queer voice that seemed to come from the middle of her old bent spine and to force itself between her ribs and her withered breasts: “I can’t hide it from you, my