"You must realize," he continued, "the mistake of those who, believing
in Atlantis, have sought to explain the cataclysm in which they
suppose the island to have sunk. Without exception, they have thought
that it was swallowed up. Actually, there has not been an immersion.
There has been an emersion. New lands have emerged from the Atlantic
wave. The desert has replaced the sea, the sebkhas, the salt lakes,
the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the desolate vestiges of the
free sea water over which, in former days, the fleets swept with a
fair wind towards the conquest of Attica. Sand swallows up
civilization better than water. To-day there remains nothing of the
beautiful isle that the sea and winds kept gay and verdant but this
chalky mass. Nothing has endured in this rocky basin, cut off forever
from the living world, but the marvelous oasis that you have at your
feet, these red fruits, this cascade, this blue lake, sacred witnesses
to the golden age that is gone. Last evening, in coming here, you had
to cross the five enclosures: the three belts of water, dry forever;
the two girdles of earth through which are hollowed the passages you
traversed on camel back, where, formerly, the triremes floated. The
only thing that, in this immense catastrophe, has preserved its
likeness to its former state, is this mountain, the mountain where
Neptune shut up his well-beloved Clito, the daughter of Evenor and
Leucippe, the mother of Atlas, and the ancestress of Antinea, the
sovereign under whose dominion you are about to enter forever."
"Sir," Morhange with the most exquisite courtesy, "it would be only a
natural anxiety which would urge us to inquire the reasons and the end
of this dominion. But behold to what extent your revelation interests
me; I defer this question of private interest. Of late, in two
caverns, it has been my fortune to discover Tifinar inscriptions of
this name, Antinea. My comrade is witness that I took it for a Greek
name. I understand now, thanks to you and the divine Plato, that I
need no longer feel surprised to hear a barbarian called by a Greek
name. But I am no less perplexed as to the etymology of the word. Can
you enlighten me?"
"I shall certainly not fail you there, sir," said M. Le Mesge. "I may
tell you, too, that you are not the first to put to me that question.
Most of the explorers that I have seen enter here in the past ten
years have been attracted in the same way, intrigued by this Greek
work reproduced in Tifinar. I have even arranged a fairly exact
catalogue of these inscriptions and the caverns where they are to be
met with. All, or almost all, are accompanied by this legend:
Antinea. Here commences her domain. I myself have had repainted with
ochre such as were beginning to be effaced. But, to return to what I
was telling you before, none of the Europeans who have followed this
epigraphic mystery here, have kept their anxiety to solve this
etymology once they found themselves in Antinea's palace. They all
become otherwise preoccupied. I might make many disclosures as to the
little real importance which purely scientific interests possess even
for scholars, and the quickness with which they sacrifice them to the
most mundane considerations--their own lives, for instance."