Handed down through countless ages it had come to her as a heritage and an insignia of her religious office and regal authority from some long-dead progenitor of lost and forgotten Atlantis. The loss of the crown jewels or the Great Seal of England could have brought no greater consternation to a British king than did the pilfering of the sacred knife bring to La, the Oparian, Queen and High Priestess of the degraded remnants of the oldest civilization upon earth.
La knew that she was beautiful--and she was beautiful, not by the standards of prehistoric Atlantis alone, but by those of modern times was La physically a creature of perfection.
Atlantis! the
Atlantis of Plato, that continent denied by Origen and Humbolt, who placed its disappearance amongst the legendary tales.
As for Owen Ford, the "Margaret" of his book, although she had the soft brown hair and elfin face of the real girl who had vanished so long ago, "pillowed where lost
Atlantis sleeps," had the personality of Leslie Moore, as it was revealed to him in those halcyon days at Four Winds Harbor.
This mythical tale, of which the subject was a history of the wars of the Athenians against the Island of
Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have stood in the same relation as the writings of the logographers to the poems of Homer.
And it is much more likely, that the destruction that hath heretofore been there, was not by earthquakes (as the Egyptian priest told Solon concerning the island of
Atlantis, that it was swallowed by an earthquake), but rather that it was desolated by a particular deluge.
And we are of an excellent family and have a pedigree that I challenge any humans to equal, as it extends back about twenty thousand years, to the time of the famous Green Dragon of
Atlantis, who lived in a time when humans had not yet been created.
If you don't think it's lonesome wandering all by yourself through savage, unknown Pellucidar, why, just try it, and you will not wonder that I was glad of the company of this first dog--this living replica of the fierce and now extinct hyaenodon of the outer crust that hunted in savage packs the great elk across the snows of southern France, in the days when the mastodon roamed at will over the broad continent of which the British Isles were then a part, and perchance left his footprints and his bones in the sands of
Atlantis as well.
In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost
Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire.
The essays are best known, but the New
Atlantis is the book that you will best like to read, for it is something of a story, and of it I will tell you a little in the next chapter.
With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of
Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.
The island of
Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry.
Atlantis - according to legend, an island in the Atlantic Ocean that Plato said was swallowed by an earthquake