“Never heard of them. Oh yes, I have though. They were the people Herodotus wrote about, didn’t he? But I thought they were mythical.”
“They were very real, and so was Atlantis, the continent where they lived, which lay just north of the Canaries here.”
“What’s that crocodile sort of thing with wings drawn in the margin?”
“Some sort of beast that lived in those bygone days. The pages are full of them. That’s a cave-tiger. And that’s some sort of colossal bat. Thank goodness he had the sense to illustrate fully, the man who wrote this, or we should never have been able to reconstruct the tale, or at any rate we could not have understood half of it. Whole species have died out since this was written, just as a whole continent has been swept away and three civilisations quenched. The worst of it is, it was written by a highly-educated man who somewhat naturally writes a very bad fist. I’ve hammered at it all the night through, and have only managed to make out a few sentences here and there”—he rubbed his hands appreciatively. “It will take me a year’s hard work to translate this properly.”
“Every man to his taste. I’m afraid my interest in the thing wouldn’t last as long as that. But how did it get there? Did your ancient Egyptian come to Grand Canary for the good of his lungs, and write it because he felt dull up in that cave?”
“I made a mistake there. The author was not an Egyptian. It was the similarity of the inscribed character which misled me. The book was written by one Deucalion, who seems to have been a priest or general—or perhaps both—and he was an Atlantean. How it got there, I don’t know yet. Probably that was told in the last few pages, which a certain vandal smashed up with his pocketknife, in getting them away from the place where they were stowed.”
“That’s right, abuse me. Deucalion you say? There was a Deucalion in the Greek mythology. He was one of the two who escaped from the Flood: their Noah, in fact.”
“The swamping of the continent of Atlantis might very well correspond to the Flood.”
“Is there a Pyrrha then? She was Deucalion’s wife.”
“I haven’t come across her yet. But there’s a Phorenice, who may be the same. She seems to have been the reigning Empress, as far as I can make out at present.”