“I suppose it, and I can prove it,” replied the irascible little old chap, banging his fist on the table.  “I know well enough what Schirmer and the rest have advanced against it.  I know it better than you do.  I know all about it, sir.  I can present all the proofs for your consideration.  And in the meantime, this evening at dinner, you will no doubt enjoy some excellent fish.  And you will tell me if these fish, caught in the lake that you can see from this window, seem to you fresh water fish.

“You must realize,” he continued, “the mistake of those who, believing in Atlantis, have sought to explain the cataclysm in which they suppose the island to have sunk.  Without exception, they have thought that it was swallowed up.  Actually, there has not been an immersion.  There has been an emersion.  New lands have emerged from the Atlantic wave.  The desert has replaced the sea, the sebkhas, the salt lakes, the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the desolate vestiges of the free sea water over which, in former days, the fleets swept with a fair wind towards the conquest of Attica.  Sand swallows up civilization better than water.  To-day there remains nothing of the beautiful isle that the sea and winds kept gay and verdant but this chalky mass.  Nothing has endured in this rocky basin, cut off forever from the living world, but the marvelous oasis that you have at your feet, these red fruits, this cascade, this blue lake, sacred witnesses to the golden age that is gone.  Last evening, in coming here, you had to cross the five enclosures:  the three belts of water, dry forever; the two girdles of earth through which are hollowed the passages you traversed on camel back, where, formerly, the triremes floated.  The only thing that, in this immense catastrophe, has preserved its likeness to its former state, is this mountain, the mountain where Neptune shut up his well-beloved Clito, the daughter of Evenor and Leucippe, the mother of Atlas, and the ancestress of Antinea, the sovereign under whose dominion you are about to enter forever.”

“Sir,” Morhange with the most exquisite courtesy, “it would be only a natural anxiety which would urge us to inquire the reasons and the end of this dominion.  But behold to what extent your revelation interests me; I defer this question of private interest.  Of late, in two caverns, it has been my fortune to discover Tifinar inscriptions of this name, Antinea.  My comrade is witness that I took it for a Greek name.  I understand now, thanks to you and the divine Plato, that I need no longer feel surprised to hear a barbarian called by a Greek name.  But I am no less perplexed as to the etymology of the word.  Can you enlighten me?”