The Sunken Empire

Concerning the strange adventures of Professor Stevens with the Antillians on the floors of the mysterious Sargasso Sea. Excerpt"THEN you really expect to find the lost continent of Atlantis, Professor?"Martin Stevens lifted his bearded face sternly to the reporter who was interviewing him in his study aboard the torpedo-submarine Nereid, a craft of his own invention, as she lay moored at her Brooklyn wharf, on an afternoon in October."My dear young man," he said, "I am not even going to look for it."The aspiring journalist-Larry Hunter by name-was properly abashed."But I thought," he insisted nevertheless, "that you said you were going to explore the ocean floor under the Sargasso Sea?""And so I did." Professor Stevens admitted, a smile moving that gray beard now and his blue eyes twinkling merrily. "But the Sargasso, an area almost equal to Europe, covers other land as well-land of far more recent submergence than Atlantis, which foundered in 9564 B. C., according to Plato. What I am going to look for is this newer lost continent, or island rather-namely, the great island of Antillia, of which the West Indies remain above water to-day.""Antillia?" queried Larry Hunter, wonderingly. "I never heard of it."Again the professor regarded his interviewer sternly."There are many things you have never heard of, young man," he told him. "Antillia may be termed the missing link between Atlantis and America. It was there that Atlantean culture survived after the appalling catastrophe that wiped out the Atlantean homeland, with its seventy million inhabitants, and it was in the colonies the Antillians established in Mexico and Peru, that their own culture in turn survived, after Antillia too had sunk.""My Lord! You don't mean to say the Mayas and Incas originated on that island of Antillia?""No, I mean to say they originated on the continent of Atlantis, and that Antillia was the stepping stone to the New World, where they built the strange pyramids we find smothered in the jungle-even as thousands of years before the Atlanteans established colonies in Egypt and founded the earliest dynasties of pyramid-building Pharaohs."LARRY was pushing his pencil furiously."Whew!" he gasped. "Some story, Professor!""To the general public, perhaps," was the reply. "But to scholars of antiquity, these postulates are pretty well known and pretty well accepted. It remains but to get concrete evidence, in order to prove them to the world at large-and that is the object of my expedition."More hurried scribbling, then: "But, say-why don't you go direct to Atlantis and get the real dope?"