“And the prefix, an?” queried Morhang.

“Is it possible, sir, that I have put myself to the trouble of talking to you for a solid hour about the Critias with such trifling effect?  It is certain that the prefix an, alone, has no meaning.  You will understand that it has one, when I tell you that we have here a very curious case of apocope.  You must not read an; you must read atlan. Atl has been lost, by apocope; an has survived.  To sum up, Antinea is composed in the following manner:  [Greek:  ti-nea—­atl’An].  And its meaning, the new Atlantis, is dazzlingly apparent from this demonstration.”

I looked at Morhange.  His astonishment was without bounds.  The Berber prefix ti had literally stunned him.

“Have you had occasion, sir, to verify this very ingenious etymology?” he was finally able to gasp out.

“You have only to glance over these few books,” said M. Le Mesge disdainfully.

He opened successively five, ten, twenty cupboards.  An enormous library was spread out to our view.

“Everything, everything—­it is all here,” murmured Morhange, with an astonishing inflection of terror and admiration.

“Everything that is worth consulting, at any rate,” said M. Le Mesge.  “All the great books, whose loss the so-called learned world deplores to-day.”

“And how has it happened?”

“Sir, you distress me.  I thought you familiar with certain events.  You are forgetting, then, the passage where Pliny the Elder speaks of the library of Carthage and the treasures which were accumulated there?  In 146, when that city fell under the blows of the knave, Scipio, the incredible collection of illiterates who bore the name of the Roman Senate had only the profoundest contempt for these riches.  They presented them to the native kings.  This is how Mantabal received this priceless heritage; it was transmitted to his son and grandson, Hiempsal, Juba I, Juba II, the husband of the admirable Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of the great Cleopatra and Mark Antony.  Cleopatra Selene had a daughter who married an Atlantide king.  This is how Antinea, the daughter of Neptune, counts among her ancestors the immortal queen of Egypt.  That is how, by following the laws of inheritance, the remains of the library of Carthage, enriched by the remnants of the library of Alexandria, are actually before your eyes.

“Science fled from man.  While he was building those monstrous Babels of pseudo-science in Berlin, London, Paris, Science was taking refuge in this desert corner of Ahaggar.  They may well forge their hypotheses back there, based on the loss of the mysterious works of antiquity:  these works are not lost.  They are here.  They are here:  the Hebrew, the Chaldean, the Assyrian books.  Here, the great Egyptian traditions which inspired Solon, Herodotus and Plato.  Here, the Greek mythologists, the magicians of Roman Africa, the Indian mystics, all