Atlantis by John Cowper Powys

name; a name she had received from a patroness of hers, one of the less well-known Graces, a Spartan Grace named Kleta, or “the one called for in time of need”.
    The Dryad Kleta was indeed a touchy, highly-strung, super-sensitive Nymph, whose chief pleasure was in what she persisted in calling her “garden”: and if you wanted to bring down her anger upon you you had only to meddle with this obsession of hers. Kleta’s garden in reality was simply and solely a wild strip of uncultivated woodland, not as rocky or swampy as the haunted “Arima”, but, like it, belonging to no individual owner, andextending as far as the crest of an up-land ridge from which the wooded peak of the mountain known as Neriton was visible as well as the high rock above that Naiad’s cave where on his return to slay the suitors Odysseus had been helped by Athene herself to hide his Phaiakian treasure.
    The oak-tree from which this disturbing appeal reached him through the thick darkness was not only large enough and hollow enough to hide three or four old Dryads as emaciated as Kleta; but it was disfigured and deformed under its lowest branch, as well as above its largest branch, by two deeply-cut indentations, now almost filled up with mosses and small ferns, one of which, the lower one, having been made by the childish axe of Laertes and the other upper one by a similar childish tool wielded by himself.
    As he leaned now out of that wooden aperture and murmured his response to that quavering voice he couldn’t help thinking of the days when his mother had stopped him from interfering with Kleta’s so-called “garden”. What the old Nymph liked to do was to arrange every tree, every shrub, every flower, every clump of grass, every dead or living root, every wild fern, every spray of ivy, so as to make exquisite patterns and delicate arrangements , and even to design suggestions of god-like terraces, and the mystic purlieus or enchanted courts and secret vistas leading into divine sanctuaries where the smallest insects and the weakest worms could be safe at last from all those abominable injustices and cruel outrages, and all those stupid brutalities and careless mutilations that lack even the excuse of lust.
    But it was not only of things like these that the aged Dryad Kleta constructed what she called her garden. What she really set herself to be was a protector and fulfiller of the intentions of her universal mother Gaia, the Earth. Kleta was in fact a sort of voluntary gardener of wild nature, planting and re-planting and trimming and cutting and watering and grafting and designing , as if she were a spirit-like impersonation of all the various maturing elements and an embodied shield-bearer against all the destructive ones.
    Not an inch of Kleta’s garden in the slow long passing of the years was neglected. That spartan grace who visiting Ithaca once every five-hundred years had noticed this young oak-tree with its entwining “hetaira”, or devoted “companion”, and had given the Dryad her own name, was well-satisfied with her protégée. If that portion of the island called Arima was dedicated to mystery and prophecy, the portion of it tended by Kleta was dedicated to the unruffled preservation of what is usually obliterated.
    Kleta would arrange with absorbed contemplation and deeply pondered purpose all those little separate twigs and straws and tiny pieces of wood and fungus and fir-cone that lend themselves to some subtle extension of the power of Themis even over such chaotic realms of pure chance as are offered by the man-trodden and creature-trodden trails and tracks and paths in a wild island like Ithaca.
    Anyone, whether human or more than human, who turns nature into a garden is liable to find an unbelievable number of very small things that have once been parts of other things but are now entities on their own such as bits of wood, bits of stalk, bits of fungus, bits of small snail-shells, bits of empty birds’