There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean passages known only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions. Tradition points to many of the majestic ruins of India, Ellora, Elephanta, and the caverns of Ajunta (Chandor range), which belonged once to those colleges, and with which were connected such subterranean ways.[879] Who can tell but the lost Atlantis—which is also mentioned in the Secret Book, but, again, under another name, pronounced in the sacred language—did not exist yet in those days? The great lost continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania?[880] If the hypothesis now so much doubted, and positively denied by some learned authors who regard it as a joke of Plato’s, is ever verified, then, perhaps, will the scientists believe that the description of the god-inhabited continent was not altogether fable. And they may then perceive that Plato’s guarded hints and the fact of his attributing the narrative to Solon and the Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the world and by cleverly combining truth and fiction, to disconnect himself from a story which the obligations imposed at initiation forbade him to divulge.
And how could the name of Atlanta itself originate with Plato at all? Atlante is not a Greek name, and its construction has nothing of the Grecian element in it. Brasseur de Bourbourg tried to demonstrate it years ago, and Baldwin, in his Prehistoric Nations and Ancient America, cites the former, who declares that “the word Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known in Europe. They are not Greek, and cannot be referred to any known language of the Old World. But in the Nahuatl (or Toltec) language we find immediately the radical a, atl, which signifies water, war, and the top of the head. From this comes a series of words, such as atlan, or the border of or amid the water; from which we have the adjective Atlantic. We have also atlaca, to combat.... A city named Atlan existed when the continent was discovered by Columbus, at the entrance of the Gulf of Uraha, in Darien, with a good harbor. It is now reduced to an unimportant pueblo (village) named Aclo.”[881]
Is it not, to say the least, very extraordinary to find in America a city called by a name which contains a purely local element, foreign moreover to every other country, in the alleged fiction of a philosopher of 400 years B.C.? The same may be said of the name of America, which may one day be found more closely related to Meru, the sacred mount in the centre of the seven continents, according to the Hindu tradition, then to Americus Vespucius, whose name by the bye, was never Americus at all, but Albericus, a trifling difference not deemed worth mentioning till very lately by exact history.[882] We adduce the following reasons in favor of our argument:
1st. Americ, Amerrique, or Amerique is the name in Nicaragua for the high land or mountain range that lies between Juigalpa and Libertad, in the province of Chontales, and which reaches on the one side into the country of the Carcas Indians, and on the other side into the country of the Ramas Indians.
Ic or ique, as a terminal, means great, as cazique, etc.
Columbus mentions, in his fourth voyage, the village Cariai, probably Caîcai. The people abounded with sorcerers, or medicine men; and this was the region of the Americ range, 3,000 feet high.
Yet he omits to mention this word.
The name America Provincia, first appeared on a map published at Bâsle, in 1522. Till that time, the region was believed to be part of India. That year Nicaragua was conquered by Gil Gonzales de Avida.[883]
2d. “The Northmen who visited the continent in the tenth century,[884] a low level coast thickly covered with wood,” called it Markland, from mark, a wood. The r had a rolling sound as in marrick. A similar word is found in the country of the Himalayas, and the name of the World-Mountain, Meru, is pronounced in some dialects as MeruAH, the letter h being strongly aspirated. The main idea is, however, to show how two peoples could possibly accept a word of similar sound, each having used it in their own sense, and finding it applied to the same territory.
“It is most plausible,” says Professor Wilder, “that the State of Central America, where we find the name Americ signifying (like the Hindu Meru we may add) great mountain, gave the continent its name. Vespucius would have used his surname if he had designed to give a title to a continent. If the Abbé de Bourbourg’s theory of Atlan as the source of Atlas and Atlantic is verified, the two hypotheses could agree most charmingly. As Plato was not the only writer that treated of a world beyond the pillars of Hercules, and as the ocean is still shallow and grows sea-weed all through the tropical part of the Atlantic, it is not wild to imagine that this continent projected, or that there was an island-world on that coast. The Pacific also shows signs of having been a populous island-empire of Malays or Javanese—if not a continent amid the North and South. We know that Lemuria in the Indian Ocean is a dream of scientists; and that the Sahara and the middle belt of Asia were perhaps once sea-beds.”