Free Atlantis by John Cowper Powys Page B

the building of his ship of escape. “How queer,” he told himself as he swallowed his final bowl of enriched and thickened wine, “that I should think of my ship as a way of escape ! Escape from what? Have I acquired a hatred for an honoured, peaceful, well-regulated life? Is it now again just as it was on the Isles of Circe and Calypso where women’s love was my accursed chain?
    “No, no! That’s absurd. My wife is dead and has left none to take her place. What’s wrong with me then? To reach home from those immortal bitches was to escape slavery. But now that I’m at home and at peace, in rich, untroubled luxury, with my son a devoted priest of my divine protector, now that I am free from all ills of mind and body and have no enemy that I couldn’t destroy with a look, a step, a thrust, a blow, now that I’m within a bow-shot of the ‘herm’ of Themis, the Mistress of Order and Decency and Custom, and only a couple of bow-shots  from the Temple of the Daughter of Zeus, what’s the matter with me that I can’t rest by day or night till I’ve built my ship and hoisted my sail and am steering for an unknown horizon?
    “Well, let’s see,” he was addressing the three women now, “what’s been happening in my Cave of the Naiads. No! I’m not going to rush off, Nurse darling, in any mad hurry nor with unmoved bowels nor unrelieved bladder, and I hope to find you, and Leipephile and Arsinöe too, ready to give me as good a bath as this when I come back tonight; and I can tell you, my dears, I fully expect I may need it! But we shall see. Good luck to us all!”
    All was dim in that long, low corridor, for the Sun was steadily mounting towards high noon and not until dawn tomorrow would there be any striking sign of the lord of light again, whether written in fire or written in blood. The Sixth Pillar was aware of a queer throbbing sensation under each of those grimly-scrawled letters upon its pediment as the king approached it and passed it, making straight for the Club of Herakles near the low arch leading into the olive-garden.
    “O my! O my! O my! O my!” sighed the up-lifted arm of the solitary olive-shoot that had reared up between the flagstones of that ancient threshold; but when Odysseus stopped in front of the swollen-bosom’d club and taking it up with his left hand and transferring it to his right took a firm hold of it in its narrowest place, which was about three-quarters of its whole length if you measured from head to heel, he proceeded to carry it at right angles to his hip as a hunter carries a boar-spear when making his way through a thick forest.
    By no unusual chance or casual accident, for they had been hovering over the rough ground of the slaves’ graves, awaiting him for several hours, did Myos the house-fly and Pyraust the girl-moth settle upon the great weapon, as the old hero held it at this horizontal angle to his person, and secrete themselves, as best they could, in the deep life-crack of the club’s conscious identity, where existed all the organic pulses of its mortal being.
    They were both still huddled close together in this dynamic concealment and were still keeping up the metaphysical debateinto which they delighted to throw the whole life-energy of their restless natures when Odysseus, after a rapid walk of four and a half miles, reached the sea-coast.
    For a few moments the effect upon him of facing the sea was overwhelming . The purpose of his coming to where the waves broke was completely swept away by the waves themselves. In their breaking they took this purpose of his and tore it to tatters of lacy wisps and wind-tossed feathers and flying flurries of fleeting foam.
    He had come to the same exact spot only a day or two ago when the waves were no wilder than they were today and the sun was no more dazzling; and yet the sight of this far-flung spray, of these gleaming sun-dazzlements hadn’t swallowed up then in such a gasping whirlpool of sensation every plan