Menes sank into silence again, the horror of this colossal destruction of a mighty race, which he had conjured up and which they now knew to be true history, strong upon him.
It was only after what seemed a long while that Axel plucked up courage to ask: “Would you tell us, Sir, how your own ancestors managed to escape this terrible calamity?”
“Surely, my son” Menes’ gentle smile lit his face once more. “You have traversed some portion of these big chambers and their connecting galleries. They were our mines. The chambers were concentration points where stores were kept and the slave gangs mustered. In certain of them Atlanteans resided permanently or almost so, for as I have said the Gods move slowly and a hundred years or more had elapsed between the introduction of the beast men and the great destruction.
“The earthshine had already been tapped to light the workings several thousand years before and this enabled the mine superintendents to live in some comfort. On this island site of ours there lived then an Atlantean named Petru. He had a house here with offices from which he administered his section of the mines—also, for our eternal blessing—a small garden.
“When the cataclysm came huge sections of the earth’s crust were torn away and slid southward. All the upper galleries of the mines were, naturally, destroyed, but the lower workings remained unharmed and the sideways movement of the earth above sealed certain of the shafts, thus mercifully preventing these regions from being flooded.”
“You are the descendants of Petru then?” the McKay enquired as Menes paused for a drink from his goblet.
“Partly, but not altogether. As Petru’s employment kept him underground for many months of the year his wife and sister lived here with him, also his family consisting of one son and three daughters. But, it chanced that when the calamity occurred they had several visitors. Petru’s cousin was a learned priest named Zakar. All teaching whether civil or religious was given by the priests in those times and Zakar, who was a wise and upright man held a high appointment in the College of Mines. In order to give certain of his more advanced students practical instruction he had brought four of them to stay for a few days with his cousin Petru, so that when the chastisement of the Gods occurred there were twelve Atlanteans—men, women and children—imprisoned here.
“Petru’s sister, and his three daughters when they grew up, bore children to Zakar’s students and that is the fount from which we spring.”
Axel nodded. “We saw many females among the brute race which of course accounts for its survival, when they were imprisoned, too.”
“Yes. Females may not be as strong as males but their work on mechanical tasks in fields and mines is more consistent. Immediately it was discovered that these brute men could reproduce themselves the Black Scientists gave them their own women to labour with them. By so doing the complicated preparations and immense concentration of thought necessary to produce Homunculii in the laboratories were no longer required after a time. You tell me that these creatures are now blind. They were not so originally but many generations, having lived in total darkness from birth to death, would naturally lose the faculty of sight by evolution.”
“You’ve made it wonderfully clear so far Sir,” said the McKay, “but what I don’t understand is how we got here?”
“That I think I can explain” Menes answered. “From the earliest times it was necessary to bring air into the mines and my forefathers devised a very efficient system. You will be aware that water has, mainly, the same constituents as air and that the gills of a fish are only a cleverly constructed piece of mechanism which enables it to extract what you call oxygen from this medium. A gigantic shaft was made down which, when it was opened, many thousand tons of water would descend from the sea—distant only sixty miles from the Atlantean capital. This water was filtered through many layers of rock and mineral deposits then evaporated by currents of the earthshine until the oxygen was extracted and renewed the air even in the deepest workings of our mines.”
“But wasn’t the whole plant smashed up in the earthquake?” asked Nicky.
“No, a large portion of the upper tunnel was shorn away but the essential part of this great filter—forty miles in extent—was ten thousand feet below the surface of the earth and so remained unimpaired. It works to this day, just as a mighty dam would still check the course of a river although the nation which had made it were long since dead. Your sphere was swept from the ocean bed and carried to these subterranean regions by the inrush of the waters.”
“But they can’t keep rushing in” objected the McKay “once this deep shaft was filled with water there would only be gentle percolation at the bottom and therefore very little downward current from the top.”
Menes shook his head. “I fear you underestimate the wonderful scientific achievements of my ancestors. The shaft is comparatively narrow at the sea bed and when it is filled the pressure of the water, striking its bottom with tremendous force, sets a series of immense lever stones in motion which close its top. They are released in turn, every twelve hours, when the tunnel has emptied, by the action of the tide. The whole process is automatic therefore and operates without the aid of man.”
“A truly wonderful arrangement,” Axel commented, “but surely, without attention or replacement any such mechanism would have worn out by now?”
Menes smiled again and the slightly superior note in his voice was softened by its gentleness; “My son, you are but as little children striving in the dark compared with that great people who were swept away. The Pyramids of Egypt, which far surpass any monuments you have yet erected, are small by comparison with the great works which my nation undertook. They only represent a feeble effort made by a few survivors from the cataclysm to copy a state which it is not possible for your minds, as yet, to conceive. Those little pyramids have lasted for five thousand years, virtually unimpaired, and you still have no true knowledge of the reason for their building. In another ten thousand years they will still be there, neither man or nature—short of another vast upheaval—has power to destroy them. How then can you even suggest that similar works upon a far greater scale, operated by natural causes, the turning of the tides and the bi-diurnal releasing of cataracts greater than any waterfalls you know, should become worn out in the time which has elapsed since their installation.”
For a moment they were silent, all striving to adjust their minds to such a gigantic undertaking accomplished by the puny hands of man. Then the McKay said slowly:
“You’ll forgive me Sir, but I’m still in the dark about how we arrived in the middle of a great haul of fish.”
“That too I can explain,” Menes turned towards him. “When the brute creatures had been created in large numbers it became something of a problem to feed them, for all supplies had to be transported to such a great depth in the mines. In order to save themselves this labour our ancestors conceived the idea of utilising the tunnel by which the water is conveyed to the filter beds giving us air, to trap large quantities of fish.
You doubtless know that oil means death to all sea creatures, so gushers were conducted to points which formed a circle half a mile in diameter round the opening of the tunnel in the ocean bed. When the work was completed the inrush of the first waters at each tide forced up the oil from the lower earth, forming a circular wall of polluted water. The fish could not pass through it and so fled to the centre of the circle and, except for those who escaped by swimming upwards, were caught in the current and drawn down through the narrow opening into harbours especially constructed to take the catch. It was your good fortune to be engulfed in such a haul when the main tunnel was nearly full and thus conveyed safely through the automatic locks, instead of being swept below in the first great spate of waters. If that had happened you would have been carried past the harbour entrance and dashed to pieces, or left submerged in the miles of underground cisterns which feed the filters. Have I now made the reason for your miraculous escape quite clear?”
The McKay smile
d a little wryly. Man-planned construction on such a tremendous scale was at first a little difficult to grasp, but he recalled Doctor Tisch’s statement that the artificial irrigation works of Moeris, in Egypt, were four hundred and fifty miles in circumference and three hundred and fifty feet deep. Yet the Egyptians were considered by these people as only decadent imitators of their race. He thought too of the underground railway systems which serve the teeming millions of the great modern capitals and had to confess to himself that there was nothing at all impossible in a civilisation which had lasted eighteen thousand years before the Flood engineering this wonderful network of subterranean canals.
“Yes, I understand that Sir,” he said at last, “and obviously it must be so. We couldn’t have got here in any other manner but there’s one point I’m not quite clear on yet. Granting the big air-filtering reservoirs and harbour, and the locks, were all safe thousands of feet under the ground, and that your ancestors had harnessed natural forces like the tides and oil-gushers to work the system so that it is still working—surely the earthquake jammed the whole caboodle at the upper end when Atlantis met its Waterloo?”
“You speak in riddles my son, but my mind, now attuned to yours, picks up your meaning. You are right of course. Over fifty miles of the tunnel leading to the original sea bed was shorn away, the oil-gushers—no longer checked—leaked into the ocean, polluting the water for a, hundred miles around instead of spurting only for a few moments each half-day so that the currents could cleanse the area for fresh shoals of fish between catches. But Zakar saved us. Zakar took command and fought death in the darkness for the salvation of his people through forty days and forty nights of terror and confusion.
“By far the greater portion of our mines were flooded and destroyed. Only this comparatively small area was saved through the accidental blockage of shafts and channels. Whole legions of the brute creatures with their Atlantean overseers died almost immediately, others must have been imprisoned in galleries and chambers by falls of rock and compelled to surrender to death a few days later. Yet in the section which remained there were forty thousand of the beast slaves and Zakar had the power to direct their energies through his will.
“The earthshine had burst into a roaring volcano two miles from here, thus plunging this area into total darkness. Ten thousand slaves were burnt to death in the endeavour to restore it to its proper channels, but at last Zakar got it under control again. Then he drove his brute battalions to the task of capping the oil-gushers so that they would throw up their fountains only under pressure. Lastly he cleared the locks of fallen debris, blocked the new tunnel entrance on the ocean floor, drained out the water into now useless chambers, and reconstructed its opening on the original lines. When all was done no more than a few hundred slaves remained alive but their twice-daily supply of fish was assured to them and the twelve Atlanteans settled down to live on this site in Petru’s house.”
“By Jove, Zakar must have been a great fellow,” murmured the McKay. “I wonder though that, knowing there was still land left up in the Azores he did not attempt to dig a tunnel up to them and get out safely after all?”
“He did attempt it, years later, in his old age, but you must remember that none of the survivors had any idea at first that some portion of our land remained above water. Spirit travel was almost unknown then, and nearly as rudimentary as it is with you to-day. Zakar was its first practical exponent. When he was very old he dreamed much and, had it not been for the respect in which he was held he would have been laughed at for his insistence that the Atlantean mountain tops still protruded above the ocean in the form of islands. The direction of each peak was known, of course, to a half point of the compass and one of the larger abandoned mine galleries ran towards the island which you call Pico. He explored it for some miles and then set the slave creatures who had bred and multiplied again after this lapse of fifty years, to the task of clearing the passage. Much of the work was done but Zakar was never able to lead his people out into the sunshine because he was killed by a fall of rock before his last great effort was completed.”
“Why didn’t the others carry on?” asked Sally.
“Because, my child, a great slab of stone barred the way and, with the death of Zakar we lost our power to control the slave creatures who might have moved it. He was a High Priest and what you would call a White Magician of the first order. Mass hypnosis may be known to you and is even practised by some people of the upper world upon a few dozen subjects at a time, but to dominate thousands so that they give their lives to your will requires very exceptional mental endowments. Zakar had those, and, unfortunately, believing that he still had many years to live, he had only just begun to train his successor. At his death the slaves turned hostile and revolted. The Atlanteans were forced to take refuge here. Between them they had just sufficient power to prevent the hordes entering this chamber, but that was all—and none of their descendants since, have ever left it.”
“I see,” the McKay nodded, “then that’s the reason for your defences—the deep ditch and the cactus hedge?”
“Yes, at first there were attacks when the earthshine was dim at night so these barriers were erected. The slaves cannot swim so the fifteen foot canal became a trap for them and the thorn hedge made it impossible for them to land if they did succeed in floundering to the other side. Now they remain as an almost unnecessary precaution from surprise for it is thousands of years since the slaves made any attempt upon us. Like true animals they guzzle the two meals of fish a day which arrive, as far as they know by a natural process, and for the rest they breed and sleep without thought, governed only by their brute instincts.”
Menes paused again and it seemed that the tale was done when Camilla spoke in her most persuasive voice: “Won’t you tell us more about the making of this island?”
He smiled at her. “There is little more to tell my child. The debacle occurred on November the 1st, in your calendar, which is the new year with us. On that date the memory of the great destruction was perpetuated by those who escaped into the Upper World as the Feast of the Dead. Egyptians, Persians, Mexicans, Eskimoes, Celts, all kept that festival during the first days of November long after its origin had been forgotten. When the Christian Church rose to Power they encountered what they considered to be this pagan rite, both in Europe and America. Since they could not suppress it they gave a legal cloak to its celebration by calling it “All Saints Day”. Yet, even then, they found that their converts gave more thought to the Dead than to the Saints, so strongly ingrained is custom in mankind. Very reluctantly, at last, they admitted “All Souls Day” to their calendar as well, making it the 2nd of November since, to go back on their previous decision of giving November 1st to the Saints, was hardly politic. So you see that those little cakes which are baked and eaten, or left for the spirits of the dead, in a million peasant homes on both sides of the Atlantic still are not offered on that one day in all the year by chance, but in unconscious awe on the anniversary of the most terrible calamity which has ever befallen mankind.
“Under the earth here, immediately the remaining Atlanteans found that they were cut off from the upper world, Zakar ordered the strictest supervision of all stores. Then, a few days later, when they realised that they were permanently entombed he directed that nothing should be consumed without a full examination as to its future usefulness. Petru’s garden was enlarged to the full extent of the cavern, pips and fruit stones were saved, dried and planted in it, corn and vegetable roots were likewise husbanded.’ Since then many new varieties have been evolved but all our trees and plants are descendants of his original stock. The lake was dug and suitable species of fish bred in it; the first of course being taken from the subterranean harbour. Very gradually they were acclimatised to fresh water instead of salt to save the labour of carting tanks of sea water through the tunnels. That was accomplished before Zakar’s death. The ancestors of our little herd of deer were originally kept in the mines because they were ve
ry sensitive to poisonous gases, so were stalled in new workings to give warning of such dangers. Later they were concentrated here and carefully tended by Zakar’s orders. After his death the island was fenced about to protect our people from the rebellious slaves as I have told you. The number of its population was fixed and the sexes regulated, so that the number of men and women should be equal. Since then Atlantis has passed into that happy state where it no longer has any history to record.”
“Happy state indeed,” Doctor Tisch nodded solemnly, “for history is only a record of man’s brutality and folly caused by fear. The murder of Kings—the butcheries inspired by religious fanaticism—or senseless slaughters to pile up more possessions or gold—all caused by fear. That is history. But tell please mein Herr how you have managed to regulate the sexes for it seems you have no marriage here and must be all one family.”
“It was not difficult,” Menes assured him. “Of the six women each bears two children only, generation by generation, a boy and a girl. Thus the original strains are perpetually intermingled at their most distant point of relationship—having regard to age.”
“How then are you related to each other mein Herr?”
“Listen and I will tell you for these are the generations of Atlantis in our day.”
“Semiramis is the eldest amongst us and to her uncle, now dead, she bore a daughter, Tzarinska. Then twelve years later to me, her half-brother, she bore a son, Nahou.
“Tzarinska bore to me her uncle a daughter, Laotzii—then twelve years later to her half-brother Nahou, she bore a son, Quet.
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