Table of Contents
Mount Atla is a volcano in a novel. It stands over Lamora, the capital of Atlantis, in The Romance of Atlantis by Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn (Fawcett Crest, 1975). It is a place in a novel, not a historical record.
I reviewed the novel in The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations. This page follows only the mountain. The page numbers are the printed pages of the Fawcett Crest edition. The quotes are short excerpts for review and study, and each one has its page.
The book names Mount Atla eight times, and once it says just “Atla itself”. It never gives the mountain a height, a god or a temple on top. It gives a volcano that is usually quiet, that has destroyed the capital before, and that has two buried technologies, one used and one ignored.
Where it stands
The first view comes in the council chamber. Salustra, the empress, looks past a noble who is speaking and sees the mountain beyond the harbour.
She looked beyond him to the slumbering Mount Atla. Through the blur of a heavy haze, a suggestion of red shone above the purple crags and peaks.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 22
“Slumbering” means sleeping. So the volcano is quiet, but even asleep it shows something red above the haze. The crags are purple. So the mountain can be seen from the Palace.
Later the mountain is seen at dusk. This line opens chapter 19.
Through one dusky crack in the clouds an evening star looked down bleakly upon mistcapped Mount Atla and an ominously quiet city.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), opening of chapter 19
“Mistcapped” means with a cap of mist. The city is “ominously quiet”, and the mood is waiting for something to happen.
On page 215 Salustra and Signar stand on the colonnade of the Palace in a storm. The sea in front is wild. The text says that behind them “Mount Atla was muttering again”. So the mountain overlooks the Palace and stands on the same coast as Lamora. It is not a distant range.
What it is
Inside the rejuvenation chamber, Salustra names the mountain to Signar.
You have seen our volcano, the hungry Mount Atla, which spews forth angrily every so often. It has razed three Lamoras in its time.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 182
“Razed” means flattened to the ground. This is the whole history the novel gives the volcano. It has destroyed three capitals, all called Lamora, and the Atlanteans rebuilt each one on the same ground. Signar asks why. Her answer is “We are a stubborn people, Sire.”
The mountain is not dead between eruptions. On page 22 it sleeps and on page 215 it mutters. At the end of the book it wakes. As the continent goes down, the air near the ship is heavy with “a noxious sulfurous miasma issuing from Mount Atla”. Then the land heaves and sinks.
Where Lamora stood there was a vast maelstrom.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 258
A maelstrom is a huge whirlpool. Just before this, the ship seems about to crash upon “Atla itself”. The mountain sinks with the city, and the book does not show the peak again.
The seismograph
A seismograph is an instrument that records earthquakes. In the novel one stands on Mount Atla. After a strong earthquake, the first minister Mahius says that
there has been no such activity on the seismograph on Mount Atla since the last atom-splitter convinced our ancestors this was too devastating a weapon to be controlled by man.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 32
An atom-splitter is the novel’s name for an atomic weapon. Mahius means that the instrument has been quiet since Atlantis gave up detonating them. The new shock is the first of that size since then. His fear is that someone in the north, probably Althrustri using Atlantean knowledge, has set off an atom in the air. The seismograph on the mountain is how Atlantis would know.
There is a second set of instruments at the Geological Institute. On page 60 it picks up “a mysterious earth tremor to the north”, a few days before the mist. The book does not say this is the Mount Atla machine. The geologist Molanti ties that northern tremor to the power failure. So I treat the Atla seismograph as the one that watches for the old, forbidden kind of blast.
The heat they refuse to use
On page 47 Salustra visits a darkened solar station. The ministers for solar energy and for tidal energy have blocked each other’s work, so that neither department would matter more than the other. Salustra says this about the mountain.
Underneath our Mount Atla and a hundred other mountains simmers enough volcanic energy to heat ten million homes
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 47 (first part of the sentence)
She calls it thermal energy, which is heat from inside the earth. Atlantis has done nothing with it, she says, because some people thought it would spoil the look of the mountain tops and others wanted their own department to come first. She calls this the sign of a dying civilization and adds that “jackals quarrel over the first bite”.
The solar stations in that scene are a chain climbing the mountain, with giant ruby-like crystals slanted at the sky. The book does not say in that sentence that the chain stands on Atla. It says only “the mountain”. The unused resource under Mount Atla is volcanic steam. The solar reflectors are a separate technology.
The chamber at its base
The rejuvenation chamber is the working room of Temple Beautiful. On pages 179 and 180 it is described as a small building at the base of Mount Atla. It looks over the College of Total Knowledge and, farther on, the Palace.
The door is twelve feet thick. It opens only when three people set a combination in order: Jupia, then Mahius, then the empress. Lazar, the late emperor, also had his scientists install a private entry that only he controlled. The jeweled necklace that Salustra wears, which can stimulate the body, is its key. She opens the door by speaking archaic words at a certain loudness, which sets up a sound wave. The mountain also guards the chamber. Salustra explains that
any vibration of a sufficiently violent nature to cut through marble would at the same time bring the mountain down on the chamber.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 180
So an army cannot break in. Destroying the door would destroy the mountain’s gift. Inside, the walls, the ceiling and the floor are one giant red crystal. Salustra tells Signar how it formed. The first atom-splitter was used against the dinosaurs and left a wide swath of destruction. In one place the heat turned mountains of stone into crystal, and the crystal began to give off life-renewing rays. Signar asks where that place was. She answers that he is standing in it.
Out of this furnace of vaporized destruction came the giant red crystal that you stand on and see.
Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 182
On that site the Atlanteans built their original capital. Salustra then points to the mountain that later destroyed the city three times, the hungry Mount Atla. The rays work slowly. The cells react after about twelve hours, and a full treatment takes twenty-four. Nobody can safely take more than about 30 or 36 hours over an extended period. More than that, she says, brings “a cancerlike growth”. In seventy years only Lazar and Mahius have been given the full honor.
So the mountain holds two technologies. Atlantis uses only the accidental one, the crystal made by the weapon it gave up. It leaves the volcanic heat alone, and it keeps a seismograph on the mountain to make sure the weapon is never used again. That reading is mine, but every part of it comes from the pages above.
The dream, not the plot
Caldwell’s 1974 postscript treats the book as a memory and records dreams of Atlantis. It does not use the name Atla. It does describe the same mountain. Describing the dream, Caldwell writes that
the volcanic mountain immediately above my city wore a pennant of fluttering scarlet smoke.
Taylor Caldwell, postscript to The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 267
A pennant is a small flag. The scarlet smoke matches the red above the purple crags on page 22. On the same page the pool water smells of sulfur, which matches the sulfurous breath on page 258. This is the author’s own dream of the mountain. It is not a scene in the story.
What the book never says
- It gives no height for Mount Atla.
- It gives no path to the top and no shrine on the summit.
- It never says that anyone lives on the mountain.
- It does not say the solar chain is on Atla.
- It does not say the northern tremor on page 60 was recorded on Atla.
- After the sinking it does not mention Atla again. The new shore has blue-white mountains, and the book does not say they are the same mountain.
My review reads the name as Atlas with the ending sanded off. That is my reading of the name. The book does not say it, and I do not link the volcano to the Titan Atlas or to the Atlas mountains.
Sources
- Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (Fawcett Crest, 1975), pages as given above, and the 1974 postscript by Caldwell.
- My review of the novel, for the names and the plot.
Related
- Temple Beautiful: Cayce’s temple in Egypt, and the rejuvenation clinic at the base of this mountain in the novel.
- The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations: the novel in full.
- Cultural Characteristics of Atlantis: the names of the novel, including Mount Atla, listed with other Atlantean names.
- Locations, objects & materials: all places and objects on this site.
- The Atlantis Readings Series: what Edgar Cayce’s readings say about atomic energy and volcanic eruptions in the fall of Atlantis. I know of no link between those readings and this novel.
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