The Lost Continent

I read C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent as a novel, and I keep it as a novel. The copy in front of me is Project Gutenberg eBook 285, an EPUB. It has no printed page numbers. I cite by chapter. The cover and the ebook header spell the author C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The heading in the text spells him C. J. Cutliffe Hyne. I follow the cover and the header. Neither the cover nor the heading prints a year, a subtitle, or the name of a paper publisher. The header credits Judith Boss and David Widger, and it prints a release date of July 9, 2008, with a later update of January 28, 2021. That is the ebook’s date, not a first printing. The file’s own rights line says the text is public domain in the United States. The catalog page for this same ebook carries an automatically generated summary that calls it a novel published in 1899. I do not put that year in the title, because this copy does not print it. I do quote consecutive sentences, because the ebook itself marks the text as public domain.

I will not treat Yucatan, the Canaries, the Tin Islands, or the sinking as a dig. The names, places, counts, and customs below are the story’s own, as the prefatory frame reads them and as Deucalion tells them. The novel never names Plato, never counts ten kings, and never gives a year before Christ. For Plato’s own text, see Timaeus & Critias. For a research book that does argue a site and a date, see Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. This review stays inside Hyne’s story.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Lost Continent. This copy prints no subtitle. The contents run from a prefatory, “The Legatees of Deucalion,” through twenty numbered chapters, and they end on “On the Bosom of the Deep.”
• Author: C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne on the cover and in the ebook header. The heading in the text prints C. J. Cutliffe Hyne.
• Copy I read: Project Gutenberg eBook 285. No paper printer or publisher is named. No printed page numbers.
• What the novel claims, as story: A doctor named Coppinger reads a wax-on-talc book from a cave in Grand Canary and calls the writer Deucalion, an Atlantean. In that story Deucalion has ruled Yucatan and Mexico for twenty years. He is recalled by the Empress Phorenice, a swineherd’s daughter who has taken the throne from the Priests’ Clan. The old Priests later name him king, wake the woman Nais whom he had buried living under a granite throne, and put the two of them in the Ark of the Mysteries. The sea then drowns Atlantis. The surviving sheets do not name the shore where the Ark finally lands.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the novel’s figures, not a survey. Set them beside another writer only as story.

• Where the frame puts the continent. Coppinger, in Grand Canary, says Atlantis was very real, and that the continent where the Atlanteans lived lay just north of the Canaries. He does not give a latitude, a ridge, or a year.

They were very real, and so was Atlantis, the continent where they lived, which lay just north of the Canaries here.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Prefatory

• Yucatan, as the story spells it. Coppinger calls Yucatan a place in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, all ruins in his own day, and once a very prosperous colony of the Atlanteans. Deucalion later says he ruled “this country of Yucatan, and Mexico beyond” for twenty years, first under the old King and then as minister to the Empress. The novel never says Maya.

It's all ruins to-day, but once it was a very prosperous colony of the Atlanteans.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Prefatory

• The flood, inside the frame only. The finder recalls the Greek Deucalion and Pyrrha, and calls that pair their Noah. Coppinger says the swamping of the continent might very well correspond to the Flood. He has not found a Pyrrha. He has found a Phorenice, who seems to have been the reigning Empress, and who may be the same. The story never makes that identity. Phorenice is not Deucalion’s wife in the end, and she does not survive the sea.

The swamping of the continent of Atlantis might very well correspond to the Flood.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Prefatory

• Who may rule. Ancient law says a man should rule, and that all rulers must be drawn from the Priestly Clan. The Clan elects a new king and takes note of popular sentiment. Phorenice is a woman, and she is not of the Clan. She is a swineherd’s daughter from the mountains. She has declared herself a daughter of the Gods, and she has ordered burnt all those who seem to recollect her earthly origin.

She was a swineherd's daughter from the mountains, though this is never even whispered now, as she has declared herself to be a daughter of the Gods, with a miraculous birth and upbringing.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, My Recall

• The recall, and the only dated span that opens the tale. The proclamation says they relieve Deucalion because they have great need of his powers at home in the kingdom of Atlantis. He has not returned once in twenty years. Mothers in Atlantis name their sons Deucalion. The Gods occupy people very little in these latter years.

For twenty years now have I ruled this country of Yucatan, and Mexico beyond, first under the old King, and then as minister to this new Empress.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, My Recall

• Weapons, old and new. Tatho’s old army has sling and mace, bow and spear, axe and knife, sword and the throwing fire, with metal plates on the body and cattle driven in the rear. Phorenice’s fire-tubes cast a dart which will kill beyond two bowshots. Her troops are one to his eight, and he never gets a close action.

Out of her own brain Phorenice had made fire-tubes that cast a dart which would kill beyond two bowshots, and the fashion in which she handled her troops dazzled me.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, My Recall

• Who holds the ground against the beasts. Deucalion says that only in Atlantis, Egypt, and Yucatan has man dared to hold his own against the beasts. In Europe and mid-Africa the greater beasts hold full dominion, and men live in earth crannies and the higher tree-tops. On the oceans the beasts are lords.

In Europe and mid-Africa the greater beasts hold full dominion, and man admits his puny number and force, and lives in earth crannies and the higher tree-tops, as a fugitive confessed.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Back to Atlantis

• Ships. The Mariners’ Guild holds sea matters by royal patent. European rowing-slaves are not taken on a long passage, because modern humanity forbids letting them eat one another, which the story calls the home custom of their continent. When the Sun is free of cloud, a secret machine draws sea-water at the fore and ejects it at the stern. A little image in the forepart points constantly toward the Southern Cross. The newer mariner puts little trust in the Gods.

A little image has been made, and is stood balanced in the forepart of every vessel, with an arm outstretched, pointing constantly to the direction where the Southern Cross lies in the Heavens.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Back to Atlantis

• The capital. It stands at the head of an arm of the sea, with two vast headlands at the entrance to the inland waters, about two days from the capital once a ship is inside. A sacred mountain with eternal fires stands behind the city. The royal pyramid, a harbour closed by a chain between two castles, and gold rings on the royal quay belong to the reigning house. The great street shows new temples, new pyramids, new palaces, and statuary, and also hunger, nakedness, and a siege. Trade has nearly stopped for the last half-year.

• The old temple and the new goddess. The stone circle of the Sun has nine-and-forty undressed stones, with stones across the tops, and a still greater altar stone carved with the snake and the outstretched hand. The story says legend gives the circle to the Sun himself, and that modern men cannot move such blocks, though they can lift blocks weighing six hundred men. Phorenice calls down fire on a living cloven-hoofed horse and is hailed “Phorenice, Goddess of all Atlantis.” She later tells Deucalion that all seven higher priests know the trick of calling down the fire, and that she filched it. She does not want to be a goddess to him. She wants that for the common people.

There were nine-and-forty of the stones, alternating with spaces, and set in an accurate circle, and across the tops of them other stones were set, equally huge.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Phorenice, Goddess

• Egypt, inside the story. On an older mission Deucalion found the blacks clearly masters of the land, and the Atlantean people living there only on sufferance. Their pyramids were puny, and their cities nothing more than forts. In Phorenice’s day, gentry from the Nile still come to court. One of them, for ten pleasant words, cuts off his own right hand. She keeps the dried hand on a shelf. The Egypt voyage was a year in the old days of oar and sail. With the Sun machines it is a brace of months, and of three ships one can still be reckoned lost to the sea and its beasts. Much later a woman in the forest says Egypt is in its accustomed darkness, and that nobody cares for it.

• The Tin Islands, which are not the new home of Deucalion. Tob the sailor once found islands to the north of Europe, separated from the main by a strait, and he called them the Tin Islands because tin ore litters many of the beaches. He says no one else in Atlantis knows of them. The savages there go naked and stain themselves blue with woad. Cave-bears, cave-tigers, river-horses, and great snakes are there. The greater lizards seem to avoid the land. Tob wants that kingdom. Deucalion leaves the ship on the Atlantean coast that faces Europe, in the Dangerous Lands, and does not sail on.

I found once some islands to the north of Europe, separated from the main by a strait, which I called the Tin Islands, seeing that tin ore litters many of the beaches.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Again the Gods Make Change

• A hero set up as a god. Tob’s company, once clear of the coast, will have no more of the old Gods. They will worship the memory of a living hero, and later an image, with Tob’s sons as priests and the eldest a king. The hero’s name is Deucalion. He pours the last horn of wine to “Deucalion, great lord that is to-day, Hero that shall be to-morrow, God that will be in time to come.” Deucalion calls it blasphemy. The ship sails on.

• Yucatan’s end, still inside the story. Years later a nymph tells Deucalion there is no Yucatan. A vast nation of little hairy men came from the West. Their only arms were clubs of wood tipped with stone. They wanted no plunder and no slaves. They ate the Atlanteans, city by city, and they ate Tatho’s wife. Tatho and a few survivors sailed home. The novel does not name that nation.

There is no Yucatan.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Zaemon's Summons

• Phorenice’s later house. The same nymph says Phorenice is the mother of twin sons, and that Tatho has been her husband these three years. She has put an image of herself in all the temples, ordered prayers and sacrifices night and morning, and forbidden the worship of all other Gods. People who are not devout enough have their hamstrings slit so that they stay in a devotional attitude.

• How long Nais sleeps. Deucalion sees the granite throne from a wood outside the city and counts her sleep at eight years. When he wakes her on the Mountain he counts nine long years, and he tells her a history of her nine years’ sleep. Tatho, in the pass, says Deucalion has been dead any time these nine years. I keep both the eight and the nine, as the chapters print them.

• The Ark and the two who leave. The story says the Ark was built of old because this wiping-out was foreseen. No mortal implement can scratch it. Inside are sheets of the ancient writing, grain, sweet water for two persons for four years, seeds, and weapons. The High Gods’ decree, as Zaemon gives it, is that two shall not perish, a man and a woman. They are Deucalion and Nais. He is raised to the Three, then burns the old writing off the wax with hot irons and rewrites this chronicle on the sheets. The last surviving lines promise an account of the land they reach, and of their children. A note in this copy says the remaining sheets are too broken to be legible. The novel as it stands does not name that land.

Of old it was foreseen that this great wiping-out would happen through the sins of men, and to this end the Ark of the Mysteries was built under the direction of the Gods.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Destruction of Atlantis

The Legatees of Deucalion

The prefatory is a modern frame, not a chapter of Deucalion’s life. The unnamed finder and Dr. Coppinger have slept in the open in the middle of Grand Canary. Coppinger is a doctor of medicine, portly, nearer fifty than forty-five, and he takes a new degree about every other year. They are ten miles from the fonda at Santa Brigida, where they left their traps, and the finder later takes a carriage down to Las Palmas and a Liverpool boat home. Coppinger wants photographs and measurements of a cliff of caves. He already has two mummies sewn in goatskins. He talks of an old Guanche university or sacred college, like one on the other side of the island, and of goatskin rope ladders pulled up at the cave mouths. The finder calls this the imagination of a thorough-going archaeologist. I leave it as the frame’s talk, not as a report on the Canaries.

The cave that matters has been faced with cutting tools. The walls incline inwards. There is no inscription. A cemented ledge breaks and gives up sheets of talc smeared with a dark mineral, perhaps asphalt, worked with patterns. The lump is some twenty inches by fifteen, by fifteen. Coppinger first calls the character a variant on Egyptian, then says it is not Guanche at all, because there is no talc on the island. He says the spoiled top sheets probably held a unique account of the ancient civilisation of Yucatan. The margins show a cave-tiger, a colossal bat, and a cave-tiger trying to pull down a mammoth. Perspective is all wrong. Whole species have died out since the writing, a whole continent has been swept away, and three civilisations have been quenched. The handwriting is a highly educated man’s bad fist. Coppinger thinks a year’s hard work will translate it.

The finder is called home. At least a year later a newspaper says Coppinger has given the sheets to the British Museum, valued at ten thousand pounds at the lowest figure. Coppinger sends the English translation and says the profits of publication should pay the finder. Solicitors then stand between them. The history printed after the prefatory is that translation. The credit and the responsibility rest with Dr. Coppinger. The revenue goes to the finder of the sheets. This copy prints no further announcement that the bargain changed.

The finder thinks the Atlanteans were the people Herodotus wrote about, and then thinks they were mythical. Coppinger does not pick up the name Herodotus. He answers that they were very real. That is as far as the frame goes toward any older author.

It measured some twenty inches by fifteen, by fifteen, but it was not so heavy as it looked, and when I had taken the remaining photographs, I lowered it down to Coppinger on the end of the rope.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Prefatory

My Recall

Deucalion speaks from here to the end. He has just been relieved as viceroy. The new viceroy is Tatho, an old colleague of the Priests’ Clan. The ceremony is in a gilded council chamber under a pyramid in Yucatan. Tatho sits on the snake-throne and puts on the chain of gems that marks the supreme office. Drums and trumpets sound. He receives homage at the three lesser thrones of the lesser governors, of the East, the North, and the South. Deucalion follows with the prescribed meekness. The form, handed down from immemorial custom, lets people present on such a day bring petitions, accuse the retiring head with immunity, or offer theories of government. They make the circuit three times. Nobody speaks against Deucalion’s twenty years, and nobody asks for a change.

He has built roads, made rivers fit for shipping, fostered arts and crafts, and discoursed the cult of the Gods with his own lips three times each day. The private chambers are in the heart of the pyramid, a man’s length of solid stone, and he oversaw every course. Yucatan, he tells Tatho, does not listen at doors, because it counts that shame. Atlantis does.

Tatho reads the proclamation as a real need, not a form. The throne shakes. Phorenice wants the ablest men ready. Deucalion’s name at home is a household word, second only to one other human name, and the Gods are poor competitors because modern science has grown past the tether of the older Gods. No new god has appeared. Both men came up through the College of Priests, from hamlets and villages to towns, learning war and the art of ruling. In the old days they spent as much law on the ownership of a hay-byre as they would now spend on a rebellious city.

Phorenice’s rise, as Tatho tells it, starts with Zaemon, governor of the swineherd’s province. Zaemon’s wife adopts the girl. The swineherd and his woman die. Before she is fifteen she rules the household, Zaemon, and the province. She takes exercise as a man-at-arms. A rebellion breaks out and she leads Zaemon’s troops. The conquered get a choice between sword and service. Neighbour governors are sent to take her. She kills both. Three times soldiery is sent against her. The last army is the largest Atlantis had then raised, and Tatho commands it. The High Council of the priests points him at the throne. The old King is ailing, weary, and wrapped in the mysteries, and he may decide to die at any time. Tatho loses. The King is reported dead during the last melee. Phorenice offers sword or service. Tatho takes service and calls himself her slave. He is in love with her, and he calls Yucatan a detestable exile.

Deucalion is still unmarried. He says he has found no time to palter with women. Tatho says Atlantis has changed, especially the women. Under the old King they were uncomely, and their dress was painfully barbaric. The ladies of Yucatan are less provincial now than the ladies of Atlantis were then. The court ladies at home, he says, are delicious, and the Empress most of all.

Back to Atlantis

Deucalion must leave the territory at the next sunrise and report in Atlantis. His own property is the clothes he wears, a box of drugs, and three slaves, two of them scribes and the third a savage from Europe who cooks and fills the bath. He has taken a soldier’s ration and nothing beyond. If anyone has mulcted a creature in Yucatan of an ounce of bronze in his name, he asks Tatho to hang that man as a liar and a thief. Tatho has brought eight ships, a bodyguard, a wife, her women, and her slaves, and he means to tax. He will not let Deucalion go in one small ship. The voyage is in Tatho’s own ship, the “Bear,” with the rest of the navy as escort.

The ships need a careen. The refit takes barely over a month. Deucalion may not inspect the work, because the sea belongs to the Mariners’ Guild. He uses the time on the higher mysteries, without book, instrument, image, or temple. Before sailing, the mariners wash, dress in their bravery, sacrifice at some obscure temple whose god has little flavour with shore folk, and feast. Most of them put to sea drunken.

The course is eastward, straight across the open gulf, through the Carib Islands as if they were signposts, with two stops for wood, water, and fruit. The savages bring the goods freely, and there is no fight. Deucalion calls that a certificate of the growing power of Atlantis and of her finest over-sea colony. They make no sacrifice for a direction. Storms hit them. Twice a blazing stone from heaven hisses into the sea and hurts no ship. Three of the greater sea lizards attack the “Bear” at midday, hunting in a pack. Arrows and throwing fire do nothing to the hides. Deucalion puts a lance into an eye. Tob, the captain, thrusts a shipman into the jaws of each of the other two so that the beasts will leave. Tob is afraid of what Tatho will do if Deucalion is harmed.

The voyage also fixes the story’s map of beasts and men, which I quoted above. Deucalion’s axe, early in that fight, is said to do as little harm as if it had been delivered against the ark of the Mysteries. That is the first naming of the Ark. It is a simile here, not a description.

A Rival Navy

After the landfall, ten days of coasting still remain before the arm of the sea that leads to the capital. Many of the crews have died. Others are sick with scurvy, which the story lays either to the tossing or to the salt, unnatural food. The sight and smell of land raise them. Of the navy, five ships remain. Three fine ships and three galleys, black and clean, wait in a bay inside the two headlands, with no banner. No law carries out over the seas. A brother may harry a brother if they meet out of earshot of the beach, especially if the other is laden from foray or trade.

Dason, an old drinking mate of Tob, comes under green branches for a parley. Tob’s woman waits by the quay in Atlantis with four youngsters. Dason wants Deucalion, so that he cannot prop Phorenice. The rebels, not yet named as a camp, have laid this navy for that purpose. Tob refuses. He calls Dason a son of a European and a father of monkey children. The fight uses underwater beaks, arrows, axes, swords, and throwing fire. Man-eating birds hover, and man-eating fish take the men who fall. The battle cries are “Tob” and “Dason.” At the end only Dason’s galley and the burning “Bear” are left. Ten men take the galley. The slaves chained to the benches care nothing for either side. Tob cuts off Dason’s head and sticks it on the beak. A man-eating bird carries the body to a nest in the crags.

Deucalion pours a horn of wine at Tob’s feet and promises that if he comes into power again he will not forget the voyage. Tob splashes wine back at Deucalion’s feet. That libation at the feet is the old mark of respect. A later banquet will show the new custom, which is to drink the cup instead.

The Welcome of Phorenice

The arm of the sea varies. Where the mountains have sent liquid stone down, the channel is barely a river’s width. Then for the next half-day’s sail it opens into a lake. A runner who knows the flats, the swamps, and the smoking hills can beat a galley, if fire-streams, water, or wandering beasts do not take him. Phorenice had sent a corps of twenty couriers to the headland. Seven arrive. Quite three more are known to have survived.

They sight the peak of the sacred mountain, with its glare of eternal fires, at daybreak. Then the peaks of the pyramids and the towers show as if they floated on the water. Deucalion picks out the temple where he was admitted to manhood, the pyramid where he was initiated to the small mysteries, and the house where his father and mother reared him. It is twenty years since he saw Atlantis.

The harbour law is to wait outside the white walls. Here the chain drops at once. The port-captain does not know Deucalion in plain clothes. Deucalion will not change into the chamberlains’ frippery in the crimson pavilion. They offer him their swords so that he will kill them himself rather than send them to the tormentors. He reads a new Atlantis in that, where the cut of a coat can lead to torture. The bath in the pavilion is scented, and he thinks the scent takes away half the refreshment.

Phorenice times her procession to the moment the galley touches the royal quay. The order of march is soldiers, the Mariners’ Guild, more soldiers, merchants, tanners, spear-makers, and the other acknowledged guilds. Some ride beasts they have tamed. Then comes a bull mammoth, a giant even among mammoths, with a half-castle of gold stamped with the outstretched hand and bedecked with silver snakes. The tusks are gilded. Deucalion has hunted mammoths. He calls them more dangerous than the cave-tiger or the cave-bear, and second only to a few of the greater lizards. Phorenice sits under the sacred snakes. She is slight and rather small, with ruddy hair cut short in the new fashion and bunching on her shoulders. He will not put his forehead on the ground. She decrees that he need never do it again while she rules, and that he is above all other men. Others still do it once, twice, or several times, according to rank. The fan-girl behind them is Ylga.

On the ride he sees hunger and nakedness next to the new splendour. Phorenice blames an unhealthy season, kennels instead of fine houses, calentures, and rebels at the gates for the last half-year. They are giving the city a holiday from the siege so that she can welcome him. Her spies say the rebels are making new engines. She has an arrow wound from the day before, below the left breast, stopped by a rib. She tells him he is to be her minister, and she asks whether he will sigh to be her lover. He says the Empress is his mistress, and that with Phorenice the woman he will have little enough to do.

Zaemon’s Curse

They lodge him in the royal pyramid. At the door he turns, by instinct, toward the Sacred Mountain and makes the usual obeisance and the prescribed prayer before entering a house. Someone titters. Phorenice does not bow. She says no such obeisance has been made since she was sent to reign. Thanks, when they are given now, are not thrown at the old Gods. He refuses to accept a swineherd’s daughter as a god. She says she has found it as easy to convert the stubborn as to burn them, and that there has been little talk of burning.

The pyramid’s passages double through solid stone so that a stranger might search for hours or days. It is said that the king of the building time killed all who had built it, or who had even seen the lay of the inner stones. Ylga, daughter of Zaemon, has not seen her father for two years. She is second lady in the kingdom, and she warns Deucalion that women stand high in Atlantis now. Phorenice has been plotting his reception for two months. He will hear nothing against the Empress. Ylga says she will watch, and serve him if he wants a friend.

The banquet is called by the earth-shaking which the chiefs of the Priests’ Clan on the Sacred Mountain serve out yearly, to bid the world take count of its sins. The story’s doctrine, as he recalls it, is that man was born from roaring fire and monstrous earth-tremors, and that by those same agencies he will be swallowed, he and the sins in his breast. Phorenice uses the portent as a dinner bell. He cannot tell whether she has suborned a priest or found the key herself. The law of the Clan is to pursue both the betrayer of the mysteries and the one who received them.

The hall is lit by jets of earth-breath. Heartiness has become a barbarism. He is to sit on her divan and eat from her dish. A governor of an out-province, driven in by rebellion at home, drinks the Empress’s cup instead of pouring it at her feet. She says the newer code bids them enjoy life first. Partway through, Zaemon walks in, bare but for one cloth, muddy from the road, with the Symbol of the Sun glowing at the tip of his wand. He lives as an ascetic in the dangerous country of burning hills, where fire streams, evil vapours, fissures, and the greater lizards are daily peril. Those sojourners, the story says, gain powers that even the most learned of other men cannot reach.

Zaemon’s terms are bread for the starving, even if it is taken from the feasters, and Atlantis restored to the state in which it was entrusted to her. If not, she must be removed. He says that while she is yet Empress she will see this royal pyramid torn tier from tier and stone from stone. The priests have a weapon forged in no mortal smithy, whose key is now lodged in the Ark of the Mysteries. It is too awful to be told in words, and it is to be used only as a last resource. Other powers will be launched first. He will carry the matter through even if the cost is a universal burning and destruction. He calls her daughter of the swineherd, and says it is agreed among the most High Gods that she is too full of sin to continue unchecked.

She orders him whipped. No courtier and no soldier moves. Tarca, chief of the guard, touches Zaemon’s shoulder and takes a sudden leprosy that whitens half his face and spreads as he tears off clothes and a curled beard. Zaemon walks out. Deucalion sits still. He does not know whether Zaemon is the accredited envoy, or whether the Empress is still the commander of his duty.

We have a weapon that was forged in no mortal smithy, whereof the key is now lodged in the Ark of the Mysteries.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Zaemon's Curse

The Biters of the City Walls

That same night he walks the city with a score of the gate guard. Whole wards have been swept away for new palaces and new pyramids of the wealthy. He says Europeans and other barbarous savages worship such buildings as gods, because they think them too wonderful for human hands. From each cleared plot a hundred families have been evicted. The dead lie in the gutters with the bones starting through the skin. He is no pamperer of the poor. He says that if a man is left to hunger he will work, and if not he can die. What he sees here he calls blind oppression. Under the ancient law all the people, great and small, are servants of the king, and Phorenice stands in the king’s place, so he tries not to call it treason.

The city gates are four pairs of stone valves, each two man-heights square and a man-height thick, set in a doubled wall with an open circus between. Hidden machinery will not open one of a pair until the other is shut. In the circus, two cave-tigers are loose on bronze collars and chains, paid out from windlasses. The story calls them the most terrific of the fur-bearing land beasts, huge enough that in hunger they will often drag down a mammoth away from the herd. They are a new defence: while they are loose, nothing living can cross from gate to gate. Prisoners are stripped, because clothes have a value, and thrust out unarmed. Deucalion despises the sport. He has seen a fairer custom, a prisoner armed in a pit against beasts of reasonable strength.

A woman prisoner leaps and catches the sill of his arrow-slit. He pulls her in, then has the tigers shortened up and the captain of the gate put her down. The captain says the orders were that the tigers be kept fierce and accustomed to killing. Deucalion wants her clothed, because it is not decent that an Atlantean go bare like a savage from Europe. The captain’s lodge is packed with what Deucalion reads as private tribute from traders.

The Biters of the Walls (Further Account)

The woman is Nais. She says the rebels sent the fleet to take him at the entrance to the gulf. They had heard of his coming from Yucatan. Watchers on the high land reported the sea-fight, and before that they had an omen of great birds carrying the slain to the mountains. She came back into the city meaning to kill him, because Phorenice has tired of an unmated life and has proclaimed that she will have Deucalion for husband. Favourite after favourite has been tried and packed away. Every ship from the West said there was a stronger man in Yucatan. Nais’s charge is that the two together would be a double tyranny.

She and Ylga are daughters of one birth, and of Zaemon. Nais will not count with either of them now. Ylga is Phorenice’s creature. Zaemon, she says, fights to drag the old authority back to the Sacred Mountain, which would only exchange one slavery for another. Her own creed, and the creed of the camp, is a rule of no-rule. She says all Atlantis is with them except the city and a handful on the priests’ Mountain.

Deucalion answers from a voyage he made years back to Europe, gathering slaves. He found no rule there. The tyrants were the beasts. Men and women were rude savages, dressed in skins, harbouring in caves and the tree-tops, and they did not fight him for their liberty. He says a masterless freedom, once tasted, teaches even dull brains that no slavery could be worse. He also says that to conquer, her side must set up leaders, and that once leaders are set up they will not be pulled down. She agrees to that last point.

At dawn the floor of the captain’s chamber drops. The rebels have driven a galley, meaning a mine, from their camp, and they have bungled the length and the direction. The flagstone crushes four of them. The rest pour in. Deucalion is bound and dragged to a robbed temple that was once a fane for travellers giving thanks for a safe journey to the capital. From the slits he sees the besiegers’ camp. Most harbour on the bare ground. A few have bowers of mud and branches. They fight over food, eat meat raw and grain unground, and gnaw the soft inside of tree bark. The dead lie where they fall. Great man-eating birds gorge in the huts. He thinks three hundred well-disciplined troops could send them flying to the forest.

They put two captured warders into a stone-throwing engine and shoot them over the wall. One strikes the spike of a new-built pyramid and leaves a red stain. Nais comes to the temple and tells him the men who brought him are dead. She will not have the camp slaughtered. He is to stay in her chamber till night, then she will take him to a boat and the water-gate. His smooth chin would mark him. It is the only clean chin in the camp. The beard, curled or cut, is already a party sign.

The Preacher from the Mountains

They wait through a wet night. A horn brings the camp to a war engine, where Zaemon preaches, nearly naked, with the Symbol. The crowd’s cry is that they have no chiefs, that they are all equal, and that he may kill them with magic but shall not rule them. Nor shall the other priests, nor Phorenice, nor anybody. He tells the old claim. From the beginning the Gods set one clan apart to rule and be priests. Until Phorenice, that clan fought invaders, carried war against the beasts, and studied earth-movements so that they could foretell earthquakes and eruptions and warn the people. They were no self-seekers. Under them Atlantis reached the pinnacle of human prosperity. Then the people grew fat, thought their fortune was earned by their own brains and thews, and left the temples barren. The punishment was the adopted girl. The Gods fashioned her as a scourge. Those who will debase her are appointed, but not until the people are chastened enough to cry for the old rule.

A young man says they are done with rulers. Zaemon does not kill him. He strikes him dumb with a look, and the man jumps down. The crowd asks for a miracle, as if the Higher Mysteries were a mummers’ show. Zaemon refuses. He then gives the cult of the Gods in the ancient form, and the crowd makes the old responses in the old places. Two of the lines, as the chapter prints them, praise the most High Gods who stilled the burning of the mountains and made cool places on the earth, and who gave mastery over the lesser beasts and skill of ten times to prevail. The Symbol drives a lane through the press.

Zaemon comes to Deucalion and names him. The crowd wants him torn apart. The Symbol holds them. In the sacred tongue, which the common people do not know, Zaemon says the ships from Yucatan have carried sworn reports to the council, and that Deucalion’s record has found approval. He is to be the last human champion. If he fails, only the Powers locked in the Ark remain. Zaemon repeats the threat about the pyramid, which he says was revealed to him, not chosen as a boast. The order is that Deucalion stand at Phorenice’s side by the next dawn, as the husband she sent for, and make her see that the power which can be loosed against her is hopeless to fight. Words wasted on a maiden may go home to a wife. Deucalion has seen Nais, and the order costs him, but he takes it. They leave by a passage whose entrance is known only to the Seven among the Priests. Zaemon goes back to his hermitage in the dangerous lands.

Phorenice, Goddess

The passage is an old vein of the earth’s fire, warm and sulphurous, though it has carried no lava for long years. The branches and the pits that lead to the boil would kill anyone but one of the Seven. Deucalion carries the chart in his head from the initiation of twenty years back, when as an appointed viceroy he was raised to the highest degree but one, and given its secrets and implements. The drugs he brought from Yucatan were lost in the fight with Dason. He may not come out of the passage before a mortal eye. The city is agog. He emerges at last through a dusty temple of one of the lesser Gods.

The second priest there is Ro, a dullard from the same college, left in office because his colleagues deserted. He still curls his beard, and he still begs. Deucalion owns not a coin. Ro says Phorenice has declared herself Goddess and will light the sacrifice with her own divine fire. His superior was mangled the day before at the weekly sacrifice in the circle of the Sun’s great stones. The rubric says the priests go unarmed and trust the Gods. A great featherless man-eating bird settles on the pyre, eats the sacrifice, and brushes the priest off the altar. The people call it a portent. Some cry that the Sun is a God no longer. Some cry that there is no God. Some cry that a new God has come in the form of the bird. A few start the shout that Phorenice stands for all the Gods now, and the circle rings with it. There have been no offerings at Ro’s temple these five months.

Deucalion goes with the crowd to the secular ground round the stone circle, which even Phorenice has not built over. The nine-and-forty stones and the altar with the snake and the outstretched hand are the oldest holy place in the story. He has the right to enter. He waits outside until she has called the fire, and then he alone does not kneel. The victim is one of the small cloven-hoofed horses of the plains, a most acceptable sacrifice, and it is left living on the wood, which is an innovation. She speaks in the common tongue, not the priests’ tongue, though he thinks her clever enough to have learned it. She asks the Sun to acknowledge her as daughter, and to send heavenly fire because mortal priests have lit the wood weekly since the foundation of the land. A black mist forms in a clear sky. A noiseless flame stabs inside it. A flash kills the horse and lights the pyre. The mist is gone at once. The cry is “Phorenice, Goddess of all Atlantis.”

Ylga asks for his life and is threatened with the leprosy that Zaemon put on Tarca. Phorenice does not kill him. She has him ride back with her. The siege is still loud over the roofs. The city is used to rams and fire-darts. Only a storm would stir it.

A Wooing

On the mammoth she tells him the goddess-show was for the common people, to give her power and help her schemes. He is to speak to the woman, not the Empress. She offers marriage and a share of the government. He sets his terms. They will live in the royal pyramid, the rebels will go home to hunt and to fight the beasts in the provinces, the Priests’ Clan will be pacified, and Atlantis will again surpass the world for peace and prosperity. She is angry that he answers with Atlantis and not with love. She says she has had sighs from every bearded man in the kingdom, and that she has never felt this love either. Some of them tickled her fancy for a day.

He cannot court her. He says so. Diplomacy he was trained in. Light talk with women he neglected. She mocks the colony. She had heard that Yucatan was far ahead of Egypt in the arts and graces, and that he does the viceroyalty small credit. That is where he gives the older report on Egypt, the blacks, the puny pyramids, and the forts. She says the exiles on the Nile at least remember their manners, and she tells the story of the dried hand.

The rebels switch from stones to carcasses of wood lined with the throwing fire. The mammoth was trained, so its trainers swore, to stand fire, drums, shouting, arrows, and stones. It does not. Fire is the old weapon men have always used against mammoths in the savage ground, and the beast knows it. It bolts, falls into the harbour sludge where the great sewers of the old King’s time dump their solids, and mires. Phorenice will not have it killed. It is her property, and the property of Goddess Phorenice is sacred. Port-captains, she says, are easy to come by. They swim, and a ten-slave galley of the port picks them up. She changes clothes because wet clothes after sunset bring fevers. He notes, with some grim amusement, that she has little enough of the goddess in her fear of that human ailment.

The port-captain has two prisoners taken in the night, fouled on the chain between the harbour forts. The man is dead of his wounds. The woman is Nais. She had told the soldiers she was tired of living like a savage outside, and that a man inside the city drew her. To Phorenice she says there is no man. Phorenice offers pardon, a husband, and a dowry, since Nais’s estate is confiscate. She names Tarca, now leprous on half his face, Tatho overseas, Eron who has just lost an arm, and Rota the exquisite who changed his garb each day. Nais refuses them all. Phorenice has read Deucalion’s interest. The wedding gift she requires is that he build Nais, living, into a granite throne, with his own hands, while she watches.

An Affair with the Barbarous Fishers

He accepts, because the order from the Mountain stands first, and because a scheme for saving Nais has already come to him. A merchant robes them. Phorenice takes his whole stock of jewels, many of them held in partnership, which is the custom, and ruins him. She says she will come again when he has earned more. They share a litter. She will not go back to the pyramid or the walls. She wants to be wooed as a maiden.

Along the harbour he sees how thin the trade has become. In the old days ships waited outside for a berth, and memorials asked that the port be doubled. The Egypt run was a year, and one ship in three was lost. Now the run is a brace of months, and the basin is almost empty. Merchants who still have substance curl the beard and play the courtier. Weaving and farming have stopped because the men are levied or in rebellion. A month before he landed, a fine cargo of slaves from Europe had to be set ashore across the estuary and left free to starve or live wild. Nobody in Atlantis would take one more slave as a gift.

She shows him a stone house on a point of tide, where sea-water runs over rough metal plates and leaves gold in the ridges. The quiet moon draws the tides, and she has the volume computed so that her fellows cannot cheat her. Two of them she towed behind a galley until the cannibal fish ate them. She tells the city that only the Gods have this secret, and that they gave it to her as one of themselves. To him she says she may have dreamed it. A smith who wore a gold collar has had his neck divided. Yellow gold used to be dredged grain by grain from river gravels in the dangerous lands, so dear that a quill full cost a rich man’s savings, and only high station might wear it. Her culverts yield it by the double handful a day.

On the way back, fisher boats and a crowd from the mud-and-grass huts try to strip her jewels. This quarter rioted weekly even in the old King’s time. The fisher’s life, as Deucalion sets it down, is the hardest human toil. Wind, waves, and firestones are the daily portion. The great beasts of the sea hunt them, and it is a rare day when one of the guild fails to come home. Each man has a large sea-fowl, taken as a nestling. A bronze ring stops it swallowing the fish it brings. The head, tail, and inwards are its pay. The birds are treated more kindly than the wives or the children. If both a man’s birds die, the guild holds that the Gods of the sea have robbed him, and it is impious to deal with him. He may starve or rob. The men are those rejected by every other calling. They spend a month’s gain in a night, because tomorrow may take them.

Phorenice has come without a guard on purpose, to show her sword-play and to see his. They cut a way to a hide boat and get off the beach. A huge long-necked turtle takes one of the fishers. He throws her into the boat and drives it out. She shields them both from stones with her gold target and his hide buckler. The rocks between that beach and the harbour wall are a barrier she did not plan for. A wave which he reads as an earth tremor throws them clear. He takes it as an omen that the High Gods are not yet ready to drown her. The forts know their voices, drop the chain, and put them into dry clothes. The mammoth still stands shoulder-deep, watched by a boat with a lantern. He does not ask mercy for it.

The Drug of Our Lady the Moon

That night the banquet proclaims him the husband that is to be. The new fashion of drinking a health has been dropped. Each lord and lady spills a goblet at his feet, which is the old mark of respect. Dress is plainer. Beards are less curled. She says it is courtier instinct, not her order, and she will not have it go too far. There is to be only one clean chin in Atlantis, on the man who is husband to the Empress. She calls these small differences of dress a better mark of sovereignty than strength of arm and wit, because the second kind of claim makes people hate the ruler, and the first kind gives them something pleasant to envy. She is weary, sends the dancers away with a jewel, and threatens the poet with the stick if he is long-winded tomorrow. At her chamber door she tells him to go. She says she is her own God in all things but one, and that a woman esteems some things more if they are taken by rude force.

He has the plan of the pyramid from the archives. Ylga meets him and has lost her place as fan-girl. All the temples of the city are in immediate secret connection with the royal pyramid. The passages are known only to the Seven and to the Three above them, if three men living are learned enough to be installed in that degree. They may be used only at the greatest stress. A generation may pass with no foot in them. He enters the empty temple of the Lady the Moon, says the prayer required before these matters, and climbs a metal stair to the face of the image. The eyeball swings in. In the chamber hollowed from the head are three roughly rounded balls, grass green, hard like the wax of bees. He knows the effect from his teaching and not the structure. He takes the one that is needful. The earth-breath jet on the central altar lights her, and the jewel in her forehead throws sparkles. He reads her as the symbol of the rest which piety may earn in the hereafter, where the Lady the Moon and the other High Ones reign.

Ylga finds the cell but cannot open it. An old lover of hers commands the guard and will not risk the tormentors. An airshaft lets Deucalion speak to Nais and pass her the ball. When the upper stone closes and the light is gone, she is to take it between her lips and let it dissolve. Sleep will take her, and the High Gods will watch, even if centuries pass before she is roused. She asks that he not look at her eyes when the time comes, because Phorenice would read them.

The Burying Alive of Nais

Heralds cry the edict in every ward. Masons, labourers, stonecutters, sculptors, engineers, and architects drop their work. Any stone they seal inside the walls is taken without pay. They demolish buildings to move the blocks. The building guilds have grown in skill, with what he calls Phorenice’s marvellous invention to aid them, even while engines batter the walls. They still cannot move the stones of the Sun’s circle. They have rams, trucks, and cranes that handle amazing bulks.

The throne stands in the square before the royal pyramid. Seven tiers, each a knee-height deep, each cut with three steps in front. The uppermost layer has a cavity for Nais. The seat-stone is poised above it on lifting rams. No stone of the lower courses weighs less than twenty men. The upper stone is double the weight of any of those, carved so that the royal snake encircles the chair and the hooded head overshadows it. Men die in the night work. About half a score of bodies are cleared away with the chippings. He sits under a scarlet awning. She arrives in an open litter of gold and ivory carried by fantastic savages from Europe, whose brutish ugliness the story sets against her face.

Nais is brought in a metal collar, with chains, so that she cannot run on the spears and take a quick death, which is often the custom of those condemned to lingering punishments. She still wears her clothes. Custom gives the garments of the condemned to the guards. Someone has paid them to leave her dressed. He thinks of Ylga. Phorenice offers pardon and a husband one last time. Nais says she will not wed. He carries her up, clamps brazen bars over the hollow so that she cannot struggle out and be crushed, and gives the sign. The rams cool and the stone descends. He and the master architect then plumb and level it, because the guilds keep their forms. He says these middle-class people wish to appear mysterious to the poor.

The marriage of the rulers is not the people’s form. She will have neither priest nor scribe. She is the law, and he will soon be part of her. The record is to be cut in the granite and filled with gold. Her proclamation takes him as husband to share the prosperity of Atlantis and to join her in guarding it. His answering words are to the most High Gods, whose servant he is, and they take her as wife for the same public end. He has never been permitted to kiss Nais. The first kiss he has ever given a woman goes to Phorenice. They then make the symbolic joining. She pricks his forearm and takes the blood. He pricks her shoulder and takes hers. She says a woman is one and a man is one, and in marriage they merge.

A wounded runner breaks the rite. Rebels have burrowed into the city. The mine comes up through the floor of a middle-class house. They were discovered before they were ready. He reads it as a matter of time even without him. His wedding gift from her is troops and a gate a mile away. He takes five hundred, two hundred of them from this spot, and asks her to press the attack just enough to keep the rebels looking inward. She burns the wooden house at the mine’s head after he has fallen on the rear. The horde he breaks is fifteen times his handful. He says it is no feat of arms. An open battle on their own ground would have gone the other way, because they are Atlantean, and desperate from oppression. The siege is raised from that moment if no unreasonable harshness follows. Too great severity, he says, only drives such people to further desperation.

Again the Gods Make Change

He halts for the night in half-ruined houses, with meat from a drove of the little cloven-hoofed horses. Ylga comes out from the city muffled. Another airshaft had a prisoner in the next cell. He heard the talk of the drug, and his keepers tried to sell the tale. It was stale. Nais had already taken the green drug, and Phorenice had already tied herself to a husband in public. The prisoner is beheaded. Her wrath, as Ylga reports it, is not a simple killing. She will lop Deucalion’s right hand and left foot, so that he cannot fight, and drive him into the dangerous lands to learn fear. She will keep Nais living in the stone, to play with and to insult.

He will not go back to be mutilated. Ylga has bargained with Tob. Tob is done with Atlantis. His wife and children are hungry. The port is hard for a sailor. Men of skill have taken a woman or two and gone in companies to try other lands. Tob has a small old ship out of the Egypt trade, with worm and rot in the bottom, no machines, and not even a steering mannikin. He has fifty stout lads and eight women aboard. The port-captain nearly skinned him before so many fighting men might leave. Half a score of the men can work a ship. The rest are landsmen. Tob had thought of kingship for himself. He gives it up for Deucalion, then takes it back when Deucalion asks to be set ashore.

They drop down the estuary. Tob will not make for savage Europe. The Tin Islands are his secret, as I set out in the findings. For the present the ship has only two days’ food, so they coast, hunting as they go. Tob’s plan, before Deucalion changes it, is to haul up for the winter, because the gales are heavier than the ship can stomach, and to grow and thresh a crop before sailing again. He calls that the usual custom of these voyages. After two months of leisurely coasting, Deucalion is landed on the side that faces Europe. Tob names that shore the Dangerous Lands, and says a man must be a salamander and learned in magic to live there. Deucalion says the colleges taught the boundaries and the contents of the continent with more nicety than a mariner would expect.

The parting libation is the one I quoted. Tob will be priest of the new hero-cult, and the sons of his body after him. The ship is beyond recall while he shouts it. Deucalion stands at the edge of the forest and calls the loss of Tob a desolating shock. If a man like Tob can forsake the older Gods for a mortal who caught his fancy, he does not know what to expect from a mob swayed by Phorenice. A beast in the thicket ends the watch. He does not see the ship over the horizon.

Zaemon’s Summons

The chapter opens with a statement of the Dangerous Lands, as Deucalion has now to live them. Since men were created by Gods who looked down from another place, some ground has been ill-adapted for them, and none more than the part of Atlantis over against Europe and Africa. Common people avoid it because of a superstition that the spirits of the evil dead stalk there in daylight. Criminals have come back and given themselves to the tormentors rather than face it. The educated know many of the legends are mythical. What remains is enough. Mountains keep their contents on the boil. Earth tremors are every day’s experience. Unseen evil vapours choke. Rivers poison without changing colour. Cracks open to the fires, water falls in, and the explosion is devastating. Boiling mud and molten rock pour out. Under the trees the ground is water, and the air is hot steam. Fires in the herbage are rare because of the wet.

The lizards are the real neighbours. One that comes up from a lake after its day’s food makes the wet land shake. Deucalion says it could have taken Phorenice’s mammoth into its belly, and that a mammoth in full charge could not have harmed it. Horny plates cover it, and spines tear slivers from the black trees. This copy prints a translator’s note under that sentence, naming a Brontosaurus skeleton from Wyoming and giving lengths and a weight. That note is not Deucalion’s story, and I do not use it as a finding. In the story these beasts are few to catch in a fissure. They are fast, they know when the mountains will boil, and they shelter in deep lakes or mud wallows. Heat does not harm them. He has seen one cross molten rock and not be singed.

His clothes rot. He goes as naked as a savage from Europe. Agues, tree-grubs, and bad meat follow. He makes a house inside a great black tree, with footholds to a floor ten man-heights up, arrow-slit windows, and a hearth of sand. Green meat tastes of tars, and he never forces his palate to it. From an ivory tooth of a river-horse he tries to carve Nais and fails. The months mount into years. He cannot give his mind to the Higher Mysteries, because she holds it. Other priests have mortified the flesh in these lands and gone back with a reputation for magic, which the story says is allowed because it helps the cult. He cannot.

A far snow mountain, bloodied by the Sun at each setting, is the peak he used to watch when he was entering the priesthood and adored the Sun as He rose behind it. From that crest he can see, in his mind, across to the Sacred Mount and the city where he buried Nais. The climb nearly kills him. A huge man-eating bird follows, the kind that takes whatever is weakly and likely soon to die. Zaemon meets him on the snow, white-haired and feeble, but fast beyond his years because he carries the Symbol. He brings an order from the High Council seated before the Ark. Deucalion is the most skilful general left, and he is to return at once. Phorenice has laid siege to the Sacred Mountain and swears that not one soul shall be left alive in Atlantis who does not bend to her will.

Nais is still where he left her, untouched. Phorenice knows by her arts, for she has stolen nearly all the ancient knowledge, that he still lives. She keeps Nais unharmed as a weapon. Zaemon says he would sacrifice his own daughter blithely if her death did a tittle of good to Atlantis. Deucalion will not give the old blind obedience. He wants Nais promised, and Zaemon’s arts can snatch her, or he will see Atlantis piled in ruins as her funeral-stone. Zaemon calls it a price, and a broken vow, and pays it. Then he outruns him. The footprints in the snow grow shallow and vanish. Deucalion is not amazed. He knows he has neglected the uppermost mysteries for the memory of Nais. He believes Zaemon is already back on the Mountain, shaken and breathless.

The march home is a separate misery. A great green legged worm, very venomous, bites his thigh. He cuts it through the neck and stabs the wound so that the blood will wash the venom. A nymph finds him. She cures for offerings, tells fortunes, and claps a curse on those who do not pay according to their means. She will not visit the city. Phorenice would have her boiled in brine. It is her trade to get news, or she could not tell fortunes. From her he hears that Yucatan is gone, and that Tatho has been husband for three years, with twin sons. She has not seen the pestilence she describes. She says it grew from the unburied bodies of those Phorenice has slain, which lie thicker than the birds and beasts can eat. He stays six days. His payment is a fat cloven-hoofed horse.

The countryside is emptied. Tree-houses and log houses stand deserted. Villages built against beasts have lost the logs that barred the gates. Nearer the city, a watchtower cries “masterless man,” and the people try to take his weapons and appoint him a labourer. He will not kill them if words will move them. Women pray that the war will end, either with the rout of the Priests or with the killing of Phorenice, so the land can lick its wounds. An army invests the Mountain. The one approach is guarded. Force is useless. Ro finds him, paralysed in the right hand by Zaemon for apostasy. Ro’s temple now holds an image of the Empress, and he says the living is easier because offerings are greater. The message is a signal fire, then a rope on the sheer side of the Mountain, away from the city. Ro adds that Phorenice has found the Secret of Life, which Deucalion knows as a matter beyond the Seven and reserved to the Three. She says she is as good an immortal as any of them.

They haul him up. The men are old and panting. Zaemon hails him King of Atlantis, duly called by the High Council. Phorenice is not dead. The sentence is that she is to die, even if they must set loose the most dreadful powers in the Ark and wreck the continent. Zaemon had carried a last warning. She answered that Tatho should be immortal too, and that she might cry the secret aloud so that death from mere age would become a legend. She defied the Symbol in the banqueting-hall and called her magic as strong as his. Deucalion still asks for his queen before he will give his whole mind to the war. Zaemon says she shall be brought.

The woman Phorenice persists in her infamies.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Zaemon's Summons

Siege of the Sacred Mountain

The crest is never dark. A ring of fires, fed from the earth-breath, burns round one half of it and lights it like day. For a hundred paces on either side of the line the ground glows, and a man who tried to cross would be turned to ash. The story says men first came to the Mountain as a stronghold because of those fires. The other side is a sheer precipice, with one diagonal fissure for a path. Later ages bridged gaps and cut ledges until the way has steps and a balustrade. Eight stone gates cross it. Over each is a gallery from which stones can be hurled through the floor onto anyone below. Caves hold a hoard of those stones so that no enemy can take a gate merely by spending troops. The lowest gate is already lost, not by storm, but by threats, bribes, and promises. Phorenice’s men hold it behind a wall of their own.

The garrison he inherits is eighty, counting dotards who can barely walk, and barely a score of men not past their prime. Students have not entered the colleges for many a year. Half of those who remained walked out when she promised peace and a good subsistence, against torture and mutilation if she took the place. Zaemon wanted to mark the deserters with something that would not wear out. The rest of the High Council stayed his hand. The path is so narrow that two men cannot advance abreast, so the number is not yet desperate. His kingdom, he says, is the Sacred Mountain and no other part of Atlantis.

Grain saves them from being starved out. When grain was first grown, tribute to the Priests took that form, and those who had none had to barter for it before they could pay. Vast storehouses in the rock hold the heaps. Younger priests have wanted gold, weapons, or jewels instead, and more than once they nearly won the vote. The old constitution held. Tanks hold the rainfall. She could sit down for a score of years and not take them by hunger. The groves are unpruned. Leaves lie on the temple floors. The college of youths holds only a musty smell. He feels the promptings he calls nether Gods, asking what is wanting in a religion whose priests flee at the first persecution. His compromise with himself is that he will first destroy Phorenice, and only afterwards call the Seven and the Three to consider, without prejudice, whether any ancient ritual should be amended. He will not do that while it could look like surrender.

At sunrise the Ark of the Mysteries shows black on the highest crag against the Sun’s glory. To go nearer than a thousand paces, if one is not authorised, is instant death. On the day he was initiated as one of the Seven he was permitted to go near and press his lips once against it, and he may repeat that salute once on each day when a new year is born. What is inside, and how it is entered, is hidden even from the Seven. Only the Three know the powers stored there. He and Zaemon say the morning prayers. With his eyes on the Ark he vows that his whole strength will go to restoring the worship and glory of the High Gods.

Nais the Regained

From just below the crest the city lies like a map. The harbour and the estuary gleam. The hills beyond smoke. The stone circle stands bare in the middle of the city. The royal pyramid has been overlaid with sheets of gold from Phorenice’s new store, and it catches the Sun. The throne in the square is dwarfed to a mole’s hill. Zaemon says Deucalion the viceroy was a strong man, and the king they have chosen has his weakness. The plan is an earth tremor, strong enough to shift the capstone, and likely to warn Phorenice, because she has been given some knowledge of how these tremors are set moving. Deucalion is to go into the city that night, hairy, shaggy, naked, and dirty enough to pass for a savage new landed out of Europe, and bring Nais back. Zaemon and another of the Three will go into the Ark to prepare the powers. There is danger for them as well.

The Moon does not shine at that turn of the month. They lower him. He uses the old passage under the walls. The air is more noxious than before. Modern architects, no longer overseen by the Priests, have sealed many outlets. He comes up at the farther side, almost where the outer wall joins the harbour, and he still closes the exit, because even now he keeps that ordinance. The ground already springs like a deck. People sleep. He runs for the square. If daylight finds her exposed, he can see rude hands on her, or a corpse left as a jest.

Houses fall. The pyramid’s stones are dovetailed and clamped with tongues of metal. It was a boast that one half of the foundations could be dug away and it would still stand. Torches show the great doors open. Phorenice is in the square, calm, brushing dust from her red hair, with Ylga crouched sick on the same flagstone, restored as fan-girl. The capstone walks sideways, one jerk to each earth-pulse. A knot of people tries to climb the throne as a safe place. He beats them off. They call him a devil of the night. Zaemon’s old sentence is carried out. The pyramid splits, and its chambers fill with the masonry from above. Thunders and lightning show it. Then the capstone reaches the balance and the next shock throws it down.

She is still in the hollow, under the bars he clenched. He cannot see whether she has been touched. He gets her onto his shoulder and makes for the nearest gate, crying to the few he meets that the woman has the plague. There is no gate and no wall. The Gods, he says, have driven their plough through the rampart, and Atlantis stands as open as the country. The rope takes her up, and then him.

In a lit house she is half the weight he buried. There is no breath and no pulse, but she has not the look of ordinary death. Her hair is a cushion. Her nails are spirals. Her hands are so transparent that the bone shows. They bathe her in water tinctured with essences of the life of beasts, which the Priests extract and store against urgent need, and they hold the bath at blood heat. For hours there is nothing. He bars the door. At sunrise he breaks off only for the prescribed prayer. More essences and drugs follow, of the kind that may wake disused tissues. Colour returns. The pains of being born back rack her, and they rack him. Her eyes open. She knows him, and she says the dreams and the racking were worth it for this.

Outside, the passageway is already under attack. He has no spirit for it until she sends him. She asks about her looks. He tells her she is as she was the first night he saw her. She sleeps. He shaves the beard, because if a man is a king he owes a clean chin to the office, and he takes a robe in place of the skins.

Storm of the Sacred Mountain

She kisses him and tells him to go. He gives her the short history. She says he should not have let her stand in the way of Atlantis, and that it is sweet to know he was weak there for once. He tells her the marriage with Phorenice was a form the Empress invented, that he was never her husband beyond the word, and that she herself annulled it. Tatho is the husband, and the father of the children.

The gates fall one after another. Phorenice spends companies as if she meant to pave the stair with dead and walk over them. The defenders are too few to trade man for man. Arrows, sling-stones, and the darts of fire-tubes pick them off. He offers Tatho a champion’s duel that would bind both sides. Tatho refuses. Phorenice has ordered him not to peril himself. Tatho also says Deucalion is not chief, and not even one of the Three. The name King is new, and few but Deucalion would use it. Tatho will not take Yucatan back, because there is no Yucatan, and he will not take Egypt. He will not be a traitor to Phorenice, his wife and the mother of his children. He believes she has found the Great Secret, and that he and the twin sons are to be made immortal with her. Deucalion warns him that if there is no reign for the priest-king, there will be no Atlantis left to carry either king or empress.

Deucalion then wrecks the stair itself. Balustrade, statues, lettered stones, and cobbles go into the gulf. Rams, crows, acids, and hammers are set under the living rock. He pulls the last nine men off the gate they are holding, loses one to a fall on the final ledge, and heats the rams until the last link of the path tears away. For a while the check holds. She does not accept it. Below, out of sight behind a smoke of wet sedge and green wood, her craftsmen fit a tower that has already been cut and forged in pieces on the plain. It stands on greased wheels, slanted at the foot so that it stays upright on the steep path, hung with fresh hides so the throwing-fire will not take it. Inside are storeys and ladders. A bridge is carried upright and hinged at the third storey, to be dropped by cutting ropes, and spiked underneath so that it will bite where it falls.

He sees it when a ball of throwing-fire bursts among the men pushing it. He believes the Mountain is lost. His wish is to die on the rampart. A priest brings a bracelet from the elbow of Nais. The Three have her inside the Ark, and they forbid him the last fight. He obeys. The handful on the gate die hard. He does not see that fight. Zaemon meets him at the boundary temple, beyond which in milder days it was death to pass without right, and he will not let him through until the old ritual of dispensation has been said to the end. The conquering soldiers are already on the crest.

Destruction of Atlantis

From the Ark the drowning is already in sight. Our Lord the Sun burns in a clear sky. The mountains smoke more than ordinary, and some spout fire. The sea surges against the distant coast in enormous rolls, and up the estuary it comes in successive waves which do not return. The lower lands are blotted out. The harbour walls are drowned. The flood is creeping into the lower wards.

Zaemon tells him this is the beginning, and that the end will follow swiftly. The High Gods have a limit to their patience, and it has been passed. The city, the great continent beyond, and all who are in them are doomed. The Ark cannot be scratched or wrecked. Its stores are the ancient writing, grain, water for two persons for four years, seeds, and weapons. Two are to carry the learning away and rear a race who shall build another kingdom and do honour to the Sun and the other Gods in another place. Nais is already in the seat appointed for her. The man is Deucalion. He says he does not know that he cares to survive. He is not asked. It is an order. Habit makes him salute and obey.

They raise him to the Three with the full ceremony, under the open sky, while a burning mountain bursts as the water meets its fires, and while the troops break the last gate. He is not rapt. He tries to hold the sentences which are keys, and not only the phrases of devotion. He swears never to make improper use of the powers over the Earth which the degree grants. Zaemon and the other sage will not come into the Ark. They have a message for the Gods. He may look out while it is safe. He is forbidden to take a challenge.

Nais is in a little chamber. She wanted her father saved. The old ordinance is one woman and one man, and they are already the tenants. On the roof he watches the plains become foaming lakes. The great city vanishes. The mountains drown or burst and twist the sea into whirlpools of water, trees, and mud. Two oarless galleys are driven inland over what had been forest, and then they too are swallowed. For a few breaths the only people left are those on the upper slopes.

Phorenice comes in her gold and ivory litter, carried by the European slaves, with the two children at her feet. Tatho’s beard is curled and plaited into a thousand ringlets. Ylga walks as fan-girl again, and so is still second lady in what Deucalion calls this dwindling kingdom. The guards have cut a way through their own maddened fellows. Phorenice will not let them go near the old men, because of the rank odour and the lack of essences. She mocks Deucalion as a rustic king and as a man she has already tasted and thrown aside. Nais, she says, is welcome to her leavings. She claims she can look down on them from the Place behind the stars, and that her arts make life run on eternally. He says the waters will test those arts.

Zaemon curses her with the Symbol in his hand. The roar of the flood covers much of the curse. It does not cover the result. Her guards and her own arts cannot touch him while he holds the Symbol. She lies back sullenly, a beaten woman. Ylga alone can leave the knot. She will not come into the Ark. She will not take less than all. She says he will never forget that he came very near to loving her. Zaemon waves him to shut the door. He shoots the bolts. Men beat on the sheath and climb the battens. A surge lifts the Ark a hand’s breadth and sets it down. The next surge picks it up like a feather. They touch earth no more. The lamp has fallen. In the dark he holds Nais, and the burden he names is that they alone are saved out of what was yesterday a mighty nation.

Inside is stored on sheets of the ancient writing all that is known in the world of learning that is not shared by the common people, also there is grain in a store, and sweet water in tanks sufficient for two persons for the space of four years, together with seeds, weapons, and all such other matters as were deemed fit.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, Destruction of Atlantis

On the Bosom of the Deep

The Ark has no rudder, no oars, and no machines. It goes where the High Gods choose. He cannot find the fire-box, so they endure the tossing in the dark. When Atlantis sank she left whirlpools and spoutings from her drowned fires. Then, as he reasons it, a hurricane followed. They could not see it. The motion told him. The reckoner of hours inside the Ark counts seven nights and seven days of that turmoil. After that there is only a long oily swell.

He opens the door in the roof. They adore the Sun and give thanks that He has come to light another day. No land shows. The ring of ocean is unbroken. Trees, squared timber, a smashed boat of hides, and the rounded corpses of men and beasts drift with them. Sleep comes at last. When they wake they are ready to accept the station without repining, and they go below to eat and drink.

The Ark, now that they can see it, shows no leak and no sun-crack. The floor is bone dry. The wood shows grain, but no suture or joint. The living timbers were put in place and then grown together by an art the story says is lost, and a further treatment, also forgotten, made the wood as hard as metal. Tanks of grain stand on either side of a central alley. Sweet water is at the other end. Drugs, samples, and essences of the life of beasts are stored for the wandering. On the walls and partitions are carvings, in the rude art of a bygone time, of all the beasts which lived in Atlantis. Some are strange to him, and have died out with the men who carved them. There are weapons and the tools for handicrafts.

For many weeks the Gods drive them. They cannot add a hair’s breadth a day to the speed. In a great coffer in the centre of the floor the Mysteries learned during the study of ages are set down. He reads some of them. The powers appal him. He has seen some of those powers set loose, and he has seen Atlantis destroyed. Here are higher powers, and here is the great Secret of Life and Death which Phorenice also found, and for which she was destroyed. There are other things he will not even bring his stylo to write. He heats irons and sears the wax until every letter of the old writing is gone. If that was wrong, he says, the High Gods will punish him. If the secrets ought to endure, they will dictate them afresh. On the cleaned sheets he writes the matters which led to Atlantis being dragged to her death-throes.

The last full sentence of this copy begins “Nais, that I love so tenderly.” A translator’s note says the remaining sheets are too broken to be legible. He had promised, a little earlier, to tell of the land they reached, where they made their abiding place, and where their children were born. This copy does not contain that telling. I do not supply a shore, a people, or a date for it.

For seven nights and seven days did this dreadful turmoil continue, as counted for us afterwards by the reckoner of hours which hung within the Ark, and then the howling of the wind departed, and only the roll of a long still swell remained.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. The Lost Continent, On the Bosom of the Deep