It was mid-autumn when the thunder came. The grey skies made for a bland and vast contrast to the trees of muddy browns, ruddy maroons, and vivid oranges. A breeze in the wind kicked up sending some of the older leaves scattering in the breeze. Urias looked up at the rolling grey seas of cloud above him and wondered what his people did to warrant such an impending storm. Once and again the thunder roared from the depths of the swirling mass like a snarling beast caught in the heavens.
'It looks like the gods are angry again' cooed Sara, Urias' wife of two decades and still going strong.
The fire of youth will burn in this one for long he thought, there’s no doubt about that.
'Aye, pity the sailors' Urias lamented, he was good at that, he was a philosopher he made it his life’s work to feel sorry about everything.
'Pity our son' she paused and looked out of the porch way into the mass above, wavering a moment, then she went back to her task of sewing tunics as another belt of thunder bade her goodbye.
When their son had become a merchant sailor and a man of his own accord Urias and his wife moved to the higher reaches of the mountain of their quaint island. To escape the cities and the towns where noise became constant and the people seemed to succumb to sin and vice like diseases, needless to say Urias found it distracting. Too much had changed in these times to what he knew, too much too fast. Sin knew a place in the city and the devil could always find a home to rest. The old gods were fading, forsaken and replaced with a new one, singular, one god, this still made Urias laugh, one god, the simplicity of it all.
This belief in a great god also bought about great evil and men fell to it in legions. Whores lined the streets selling themselves for food and wine and sometimes for the pure sake of it. Murderers and thieves lurked in every dark corner waiting for the right fool to tread their way. The rich ate well and lived on great excesses like golden furnishings, wine spooling fountains and the great shows of the amphitheatre. While the poor grew sick and died in the gutter. The land was a place of total moral abandon, and Urias seemed the only righteous man, he liked to believe so anyway.
He gazed out dreamily at the autumn leaves in his back garden. It was not so much of a garden as it was an outcropping out looking the vast wilderness of the mountain range but it sufficed enough to stir his imagination and his old probing mind. He wondered what labours his son was enacting as he dreamt. Struggling with a baited rope out to sea and reeling in a huge leviathan of unfathomable imaginations aboard his humble vessel. With the other members of the crew fighting the beast as he did so. All of them holding their own against Poseidon’s realm, water roaring at the boat and turning it over and over, making it lurch nervously from side to side. With the first flickers of lightning starting to appear he drew back inside to his own reality and to his home to prepare for the working day,
He 'worked' in the city along with fellow philosophers, these wise men took refuge in a building of marble and granite to sit in comfy seating and think about everything and all things for nothing more than the sake of thinking about it. philosophy was one of the most misunderstood occupations by those who did not enact it. It is both useless and all important at the same time. To them it was a noble profession, cast by the gods as a part of human wisdom. To others however it was only highly paid layabouts wining and dining and doing nothing in particular other than being an annoying questioning child with impressive facial hair. The common topics were affairs of state, laws and morals of their fellow men, the gods and new ways of doing things. However today's topic went to the overhead storm.
The thunder went on ahead completely unperturbed and indifferent to the fact that men talked avidly about it below. It rumbled its lazy roar and began to drizzle softly. Urias stood outside the building and basked in the rain, it felt...unnatural, so pure, so clean and fine. He did not want to leave it and trek inside to listen to other old men talk and think. Urias could not stand other philosophers. He ran his hands through his grey thinning hair and felt the rain stain his clean white tunic. it felt like it was cleansing his entre being and he was completely bewitched by it but soon the feeling faded, 'it was just rain' he resolved and eventually but reluctantly he made his way inside past the ornate marble pillars and through the wooden door.
The hall was a dark cavern of a room but was bathed in a bright and comfy glow of a waning candle. It cast its light over the room far beyond its normal reach by mirrors on mirrors in a wonderful fixture made from crystals and glass arranged in a conical pattern suspended from an ornate brass fitting on one of the ceilings. It twinkled and glittered in the light and made Urias think of the rain. That unearthly beauty that he was almost lost in. he was almost once again lost in it and barely heard Sohcas' ramblings about the gods. He phased back into the room.
'The city is in such a state of decadence that i fear we will feel their wrath upon us soon’ the thunder roared angrily like a stirring beast and he seemed to shy away from this.
'the rich are robbed by the poor, the poor robbed by the rich and damned if the enforcers aren’t a part of it too' he grumbled, he was the old man of them, the moaner, the complainer, nothing was as good now as it was in 'his day' then again that was the same with all of them. Urias was possibly the youngest there being barely fifty and the others around sixty odd or even pushing seventy.
another elder pitched in 'surely our great island is not truly beyond redemption, we simply have fallen on economic troubles, send word to the senate in Greece to help us out, we are their kin and they cannot shut us out of the empire' he whined.
Urias felt the unrest within the room. They were scared, not for themselves but of their country and their leader. They were scared for their very mortal souls and beings. This was beyond petty thinking; they wanted to be redeemed and free of this sin.
'Greece does not care for us anymore, we are on our own' a solemn old man proclaimed from his lounger. 'We are past the times of redemption, all we must do now is simply await our fate'
'So we are consigned to fate now?' Urias retorted, he was never a strong believer in fate and believed that man made his own path in life 'are we seeing that as a certain thing now?' he asked the room, gesturing to all of them with his arm.
'So what say you Urias? Surely you know of us mortal men down here in the quagmire...even from your mountain palace' the others had never approved of his seclusion. They could not understand that it helped him think 'forgive me but the matters of men are better handled by those who live among them' it was Racus, a hot headed old goat just older than Urias himself, His rival in thinking and living.
'I say, that although we are in a desperate state of affairs, this storm of the gods is just a storm. And it will pass...' he began
'ah, the sceptic of us shows his head and denies the gods power, 'just a storm' he says, in that case then i say we all leave our doors and windows open to the breeze...if we keep them on the ground for long enough' said Racus
'If Racus would let me finish,' he growled it loudly and glared at Racus, sensing his time will come later he sat down and waited for his turn.
'It will pass, but not without precedent. It will damage and it will destroy, to what extent i do not know. but i know this, pity the men who do not fear the gods and also to those who are naive to see their actions in all things when a storm could just be a storm, a day could be just a day'. He sat down as Racus rose. He puffed out his chest and let his snowy blonde hair grace his back as he stroked his matching beard and paced the room.
'Perhaps...You are right on this occasion, perhaps' he consigned, Urias felt triumphant and took a celebratory sip of the wine that a slave had just brought in. 'But perhaps not. I have been in the rain and believe me when i say that the gods have filled up the cup of the heavens to overflow onto us, i have felt its cleansing touch and have experienced its ethereal taste. It is not of normal rain for i could not bring myself to leave it until i was soaked through to the skin and sodden like a dog. You 'pious Urias' have felt it too as i saw before you entered, you too were enthralled and enslaved by its power!' Racus stole the look of triumph from Urias' face, it was true he was a slave to the rain, he could not deny it, nor could he form a rebuttal. Racus was superior and had won this argument...for now.
Upon a large recliner a heady voice coughed, it was Sohcas once more ' I think, for the sake of Racus' throat and the two old dogs risk of hurting one another we should adjourn to our homes and to our wives and think again another day' with that the men left the hall and returned home, all the while the rain steadily increased its pace and strength.
That night Urias woke to hell in the skies, thunder boomed constantly in explosive vibrato off of the mountain and the flash of lightning was relentless. An earth shattering quake hit the house, Rushing outside the old thinker saw that an entire building had been demolished by a lightning bolt so that only charred rubble remained. Black rain relentlessly beat down upon every inch of the city and dyed it all a foreboding cobalt blue. That was not the strangest of all though, for even though they were amidst chaos itself there were no screams to be heard, no cries for help or angered pleas at the gods. Instead all who were caught in the rain advanced only to one spot, the well of Poseidon in the centre of the city. They were all enthralled by the rain, all looking up towards it with love and awe. Within the mass Urias could just make out his son Joseph happily drinking the downpour. Urias ran out of the house as fast as possible, he had only one thing on his mind. To get his son away from the rain and to try to get off of the island, rubble exploded in fiery bursts all around him as Zeus' fury stormed above.
Soon however he forgot why he was flustered, forgot why he was running for he too had fallen prey to the spell of the rain, and so he too walked to the statue of Poseidon, looking merciful in the apocalypse and crying black tears. Urias along with all other citizens of that island kneeled down in the rain praying to the god of the sea. As their island city slowly sank down into the depths of the seas...Atlantis had fallen.
No comments:
Post a Comment