I admit that I forgot my dignity and I forgot the affectation he had steadily assumed of talking only to Morhange.

“You will pardon me, sir, if your discourse interests me more than I had anticipated.  But you know very well that I lack the fundamental instruction necessary to understand you.  You speak of the dynasty of Neptune.  What is this dynasty, from which, I believe, you trace the descent of Antinea?  What is her role in the story of Atlantis?”

M. Le Mesge smiled with condescension, meantime winking at Morhange with the eye nearest to him.  Morhange was listening without expression, without a word, chin in hand, elbow on knee.

“Plato will answer for me, sir,” said the Professor.

And he added, with an accent of inexpressible pity: 

“Is it really possible that you have never made the acquaintance of the introduction to the Critias?”

He placed on the table the book by which Morhange had been so strangely moved.  He adjusted his spectacles and began to read.  It seemed as if the magic of Plato vibrated through and transfigured this ridiculous little old man.

“’Having drawn by lot the different parts of the earth, the gods obtained, some a larger, and some, a smaller share.  It was thus that Neptune, having received in the division the isle of Atlantis, came to place the children he had had by a mortal in one part of that isle.  It was not far from the sea, a plain situated in the midst of the isle, the most beautiful, and, they say, the most fertile of plains.  About fifty stades from that plain, in the middle of the isle, was a mountain.  There dwelt one of those men who, in the very beginning, was born of the Earth, Evenor, with his wife, Leucippe.  They had only one daughter, Clito.  She was marriageable when her mother and father died, and Neptune, being enamored of her, married her.  Neptune fortified the mountain where she dwelt by isolating it.  He made alternate girdles of sea and land, the one smaller, the others greater, two of earth and three of water, and centered them round the isle in such a manner that they were at all parts equally distant!...”

M. Le Mesge broke off his reading.

“Does this arrangement recall nothing to you?” he queried.

“Morhange, Morhange!” I stammered.  “You remember—­our route yesterday, our abduction, the two corridors that we had to cross before arriving at this mountain?...  The girdles of earth and of water?...  Two tunnels, two enclosures of earth?”

“Ha!  Ha!” chuckled M. Le Mesge.

He smiled as he looked at me.  I understood that this smile meant:  “Can he be less obtuse than I had supposed?”

As if with a mighty effort, Morhange broke the silence.

“I understand well enough, I understand....  The three girdles of water....  But then, you are supposing, sir,—­an explanation the ingeniousness of which I do not contest—­you are supposing the exact hypothesis of the Saharan sea!”