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saved himself in his lonely hours by thinking. He invented mathematical puzzles and solved them. He plotted the course of the stars. He tried to understand the ways of gods and men, and was mentally constructing a giant history of the world. His thoughts kept him from dying. His thoughts kept him from feeling. What was there to feel anyway – but pain and weight?
    Now, gazing at this tiny world, he felt an emotion he hardly recognised. He did not dare to name it.
    * * *
    Heracles, his strength bound without motion, was having a panic attack. He was alone. There were no fires, no lights, no cooking smells. There was no one to listen to his stories, or to get drunk with, or to praise him. His only company was the hornet buzzing outside of his head, the thought-wasp, buzzing Why? Why? Why?
       
    In the garden, Atlas put away the second apple and reached for the third. There was a crashing around his head, and a saw of lightning, as yellow as the apple, cut the third fruit from the very top of the tree and hurled it at him. Atlas stretched to catch it, and hit the ground. The apple was heavy as thought. It lay beside him in the grass and try as he might, he could not pick it up.
    Atlas was scared. Like all the sons of Mother Earth, his strength was renewed when he came in contact with the ground. His brother Antaeus had been in hand to hand combat with Heracles, and for a long time it looked as though Antaeus would win,for every time Heracles wrestled him to the ground, Antaeus sprang up again with new strength.
    Heracles, who could be smart when his life was at stake, finally realised that he must hold Antaeus above his head and crack his ribs. It worked.
    But now, Atlas was in his own element and he couldn’t manage to pick up an apple. With huge difficulty he rolled it towards him, and lay looking at it, beside his head.
    His forced exile had taught him to concentrate. He used to go about the world as busy as a man could be, organising, building, farming, making his wine, selling it, supplying jewels to the wealthy, talking with the powerful. He had been one of the powerful.
    A powerful man doesn’t notice much. He doesn’t need to. Other people notice things for him.
    Atlas, alone in the cosmos, keeper of the world, had learned to interpret every sound, every sign. He knew when there would be a storm or an earthquake. He smelled the burning waste of collided stars. Heunderstood even the smallest sounds – a man turning over in bed, a bird calling danger when a hyena passed. He listened to rocks compress creatures into fossils. He heard the crack of tree-fall, as men cleared the forests.
    Now, lying with his face in the grass, he heard angry shouts from Tartarus, where the dead are, where some of his own brothers were, hating death, wanting life, crowded in a limbo of eternity, longing for time.
    There had never been enough time for all the things Atlas liked to do, and now that he was immortal, he had only the punishment of forever. Forever to be the same person. Forever to perform the same task.
    He listened. He heard a woman pounding beetles to make purple dye. She would do that forever wouldn’t she? That was her work, and though she might spend the evenings eating and drinking and singing and visiting her friends, her life would never change.Did she care? Atlas listened to hear if she sighed – no she did not sigh – she hummed as she pounded, and her mind was elsewhere, on her lover, on her children, on the pleasure of a warm day.
    Would he now, this minute, change his life for hers, give her the world and pick up her pestle and mortar?
    He deceived himself. When he cried for any relief from his monstrous burden, he did not really mean it. He was still Atlas. He was Lord of the Kosmos, wonder of the universe.
    His punishment was a clever one – it engaged his vanity.
       
    He looked at the apple. For the first time he began to think that he had colluded in his punishment. Why had he fought against the gods?