For Lady Statham believed apparently in some Egypt of her dreams.  Her interest was neither historical, archaeological, nor political.  It was religious—­yet hardly of this earth at all.  The conversation turned upon the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians from an unearthly point of view, and even while he talked he was vaguely aware that it was her mind talking through his own.  She drew out his ideas and made him say them.  But this he was properly aware of only afterwards—­that she had cleverly, mercilessly pumped him of all he had ever known or read upon the subject.  Moreover, what Vance watched so intently was himself, and the reactions in himself this remarkable woman produced.  That also he realised later.

His first impression that these two belonged to what may be called the “crank” order was justified by the conversation.  But, at least, it was interesting crankiness, and the belief behind it made it even fascinating.  Long before the end he surprised in her a more vital form of his own attitude that anything may be true, since knowledge has never yet found final answers to any of the biggest questions.

He understood, from sentences dropped early in the talk, that she was among those few “superstitious” folk who think that the old Egyptians came closer to reading the eternal riddles of the world than any others, and that their knowledge was a remnant of that ancient Wisdom Religion which existed in the superb, dark civilization of the sunken Atlantis, lost continent that once joined Africa to Mexico.  Eighty thousand years ago the dim sands of Poseidonis, great island adjoining the main continent which itself had vanished a vast period before, sank down beneath the waves, and the entire known world to-day was descended from its survivors.

Hence the significant fact that all religions and “mythological” systems begin with a story of a flood—­some cataclysmic upheaval that destroyed the world.  Egypt itself was colonised by a group of Atlantean priests who brought their curious, deep knowledge with them.  They had foreseen the cataclysm.

Lady Statham talked well, bringing into her great dream this strong, insistent quality of belief and fact.  She knew, from Plato to Donelly, all that the minds of men have ever speculated upon the gorgeous legend.  The evidence for such a sunken continent—­Henriot had skimmed it too in years gone by—­she made bewilderingly complete.  He had heard Baconians demolish Shakespeare with an array of evidence equally overwhelming.  It catches the imagination though not the mind.  Yet out of her facts, as she presented them, grew a strange likelihood.  The force of this woman’s personality, and her calm and quiet way of believing all she talked about, took her listener to some extent—­further than ever before, certainly—­into the great dream after her.  And the dream, to say the least, was a picturesque one, laden with wonderful possibilities.  For as