the serpent and bull, as well as other reptiles and beasts consecrated to the service of Isis and their higher divinities, were daily fed; and upon certain festivals were eaten with extraordinary ceremony by the people and their priests.  ‘The cross-cake,’ says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, ’was their hieroglyph for civilized land;’ obviously a land superior to their own, as it was, indeed, to all other mundane territories; for it was that distant, traditional country of sempiternal contentment and repose, of exquisite delight and serenity, where Nature, unassisted by man, produces all that is necessary for his sustentation.”

And this land was the Garden of Eden of our race.  This was the Olympus of the Greeks, where

     “This same mild season gives the blooms to blow,
     The buds to harden and the fruits to grow.”

In the midst of it was a sacred and glorious eminence—­the umbilicus orbis terrarum—­“toward which the heathen in all parts of the world, and in all ages, turned a wistful gaze in every act of devotion, and to which they hoped to be admitted, or, rather, to be restored, at the close of this transitory scene.”

In this “glorious eminence” do we not see Plato’s mountain in the middle of Atlantis, as he describes it: 

“Near the plain and in the centre of the island there was a mountain, not very high on any side.  In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter, who was named Cleito.  Poseidon married her.  He enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all around, making alternate zones of sea and land, larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water . . . so that no man could get to the island. . . .  He brought streams of water under the earth to this mountain-island, and made all manner of food to grow upon it.  This island became the seat of Atlas, the over-king of the whole island; upon it they built the great temple of their nation; they continued to ornament it in successive generations, every king surpassing the one who came before him to the utmost of his power, until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and beauty. . . .  And they had such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and potentates—­as is not likely ever to be again.”

The gardens of Alcinous and Laertes, of which we read in Homeric song, and those of Babylon, were probably transcripts of Atlantis.  “The sacred eminence in the midst of a ’superabundant, happy region figures more or less distinctly in almost every mythology, ancient or modern.  It was the Mesomphalos of the earlier Greeks, and the Omphalium of the Cretans, dominating the Elysian fields, upon whose tops, bathed in pure, brilliant, incomparable light, the gods passed their days in ceaseless joys.”