Free Atlantis by John Cowper Powys

the gods that I’ve known, and I’ve known many, are such as teach us rulers how to overcome our enemies and how to break down the gates of their cities and take their women captive.
    “No, I can’t understand it, Kleta old friend. Do you remember how the other day you asked me why I didn’t go to the Agoraover there and make a public oration calling upon the people to collect all the sail-cloth they could get hold of and bring it to me? There are thousands and thousands of pieces of it woven into the huts and hovels of slaves in our city and hanging idly in the chambers of our merchants, when they ought to be filled with all the winds of heaven and carrying good well-benched ships over all the waves of the ocean.”
    He picked up his torch and looked about him. The torch had begun to burn badly and its smoke had an unnatural smell because of the moisture rising from the wet ground into which it had been thrust; but as he brandished it in the air to quicken its flame this badly-smelling cloud of smoke drifted away towards the Temple of Athene.
    The old king followed its departure with his eyes while his head remained turned to the West. Slowly that small cloud of evil-smelling vapour floated away over the Temple towards the Agora. With his imagination conjuring up his speech to the assembled people of Ithaca he followed that small cloud to the low walls of their compact little city and to the amphitheatre outside those walls, with its stone seats and wide stone platform, where the citizens of the whole island, if once gathered together in a popular “ekklesia”, could be conveniently harangued.
    Then turning once more to the troubled old Dryad who had taken to heart so bitterly this invasion of the Naiads’ cave by the monster-wife of the oldest of the “Old Men of the Sea” he saw that she was weeping silently with her forehead pressed against her knuckles and her hands clinging tightly to that uneven edge of rottenness, so frayed and so fragile and so soft and crumbling that it looked as if it had ceased to be a substance and had become a momentarily objectified taste or smell, such as, together with the aged transparency sobbing in its midst, might vanish like a ghost at cock-crow.
    As the king turned his back upon her and moved off towards the stair-way to his chamber he had the feeling that the bowed old creature were nibbling her own flesh as if it were a bread of phantom-sorrow made of the crumbling wood of an ancestral oak.
    Back in his room, however, Odysseus behaved exactly as he had declared to his old friend he would behave. He loosened his belt, wrapt his blanket more evenly round him, and lay down on his bed, shutting his eyes so as to replace any sort of steady staring into darkness by an absolute blindness to the whole phenomena of the visible world.
    Thus he remained, and no one but himself could possibly have told whether he were awake or asleep, till dawn was more than well advanced. In fact the sun was high above the horizon, and all the paths and vineyards and gardens and woods and desert-places were illuminated by full daylight when he rose from his bed and shouted for his ancient nurse.
    It was indeed in magnificently pleasant sunshine that Odysseus found his circular bath of polished stone awaiting his appearance . Eurycleia had already seen to it that no fewer than eight great water-jugs of carefully varied temperature were arranged in order round that hollow circumference of polished stone.
    From the surface of some of these jars the steam rose in clouds into the air, while, in other cases, ripples from newly dissolved circles of vanishing bubbles, all tinged with rainbow colours, proved from what clear fresh springs they had come. Here Eurycleia awaited him herself, and as, with the help of Leipephile and Arsinöe, the old nurse poured in alternation the cold and lukewarm and hot streams over him as he crouched and bent and straightened himself and moved this way and that, under the varying