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THE BLACK ART OF ATLANTIS
For some time after Kelson and Curtis had left him, Hamar lolled back in his seat, lost in thought. Thought, as he told himself repeatedly, should be the poor man's chief recreation—it costs nothing: and if one wants a little variety, and the walls of one's rooms are tolerably thick, one can think aloud. Hamar often did, and derived much enjoyment from it.
"I'm convinced of one thing," he suddenly broke out; "I'd rather be hungry than cold. One can, in a measure, cheat one's stomach by chewing leather or sucking pebbles, but I'll be hanged if one can kid one's liver. It's cold that does me! A touch of cold on the liver! I could jog along comfortably on few dollars for food—but it's a fire, a fire I want! The temperature of this room is infernally low after sunset: and half a dozen coats and three pairs of pants don't make up for half a grateful of fuel. Hunger only makes me think of suicide—but cold—cold and a chilled liver—makes me think of crime. Yes, it's cold! Cold that would make me a criminal. I would steal—burgle—housebreak—cut the sweetest lady's throat in Christendom—for a fire!
"There! that little outbreak has relieved me. Now let me have a look at the book."
He dragged the volume towards him, and despite the feeling of antagonism with which it had inspired him, and despite the cynical attitude he had, up to the present, adopted towards the supernatural, he speedily became engrossed. On a few leaves, somewhat clumsily inserted between the cover and first page of the book, Hamar read an account, presumably in the author's own penmanship, of how he, Thomas Maitland, after being shipwrecked, had remained on Inisturk Island for a fortnight before being rescued, and had spent the greater portion of that time in examining the books, etc., in the chest he had found—his only food—shell-fish and a keg of mildewy ship's biscuits.
He was taken, so the account ran, by his rescuers, on the barque Hannah, to London, where he lived for five years. His lodgings were in Cheapside, and it was there that he compiled his work on Atlantis, having obtained his subject matter from the Atlantean books he had managed to bring with him, and which, after an enormous amount of perseverance and labour, he had translated into English. Though these books were subsequently destroyed in a big fire that demolished the entire street, luckily for him, he had sent his MS. to the publishers, Messrs. Bettesworth and Batley, a week or so before the conflagration broke out; so that he was, at any rate, spared the loss of his own arduous and invaluable work.
The publishers did not accept the MS. at once. At that time there were very severe laws in operation against anything savouring of witchcraft and magic, and as the manuscript dealt at length with these subjects, and in a manner that left no doubt whatever that he, Thomas Maitland, had practised sorcery extensively, Messrs. Bettesworth and Batley were forced to consider whether it would be injurious to them to publish it. Mrs. Bettesworth was eventually consulted—as indeed she always was, on extraordinary occasions—and her interest in the MS. being roused, she decided in its favour. Within a week of its publication, however, it was suppressed by law; all the copies saving three presentation ones to the author, which he successfully concealed, were destroyed; Messrs. Bettesworth and Batley were put in the stocks on Ludgate Hill and fined heavily, and he, Thomas Maitland, was ordered to be arrested, flogged and imprisoned.
"But," wrote Maitland, "I was not to be caught napping. My previous adventures and hairbreadth escapes had rendered me unusually wary, and perceiving a number of people, among whom were two or three sheriff's officers, approaching my house, I at once interpreted their mission, and climbing through a trap-door leading on to the roof of the building, nimbly made my way to the end of the row, and slipping down a waterpipe easily eluded my enemies. London, however, being now too hot to hold me, I booked passage on board the Peterkin, a Thames trading vessel of some eighty tons, and sailed for Boston. My flight had been so hasty that I brought very little with me—nothing in fact except the clothes I stood in—a stout winter suit of home-spun brown cloth, a cloak, and a pair of good, strong leather leggings—a purse of fifty sovereigns (all I had), a knife, pistol and two copies of my precious book, the third copy, alas! I had left behind in my hurry."
After giving a few unimportant details as to his life on board ship, Maitland went on to say:—
"Owing to a succession of storms the Peterkin was driven out of her course, and after narrowly escaping being dashed to pieces on the Florida reefs, Lat. 24½° N., Long. 82° W., we ran ashore with the loss of only two lives—the second mate and cabin boy—on the Isthmus of Yucatan, close to the estuary of a river.[1] Here we were forced to spend nearly a year, during which time I made several journeys of exploration into the interior of the continent. In the course of one of my rambles amid a dense mass of tropical foliage, I suddenly found myself face to face with a gigantic stone Sphinx, which I at once recognized and identified. It was Tat-Nuada, an Atlantean deity, elaborately described in one of the burned books. Much excited, I set to work, and, after clearing the base of the idol of fungi and other vegetable growth adhering to it, discovered a superscription in Atlantean dialect to the effect that the image had been set up there by one Hullir—to commemorate the destruction of Atlantis, of which catastrophe Hullir believed himself and his family, i.e. his wife Ozilmeave and daughters, Taramoo and Nikétoth, and the crew of his yacht, the Chaac-molré (ten in number), the sole survivors.
"Here, then, to my unutterable joy, was strong corroborative evidence of the great disaster narrated in detail in the manuscripts I had found in Inisturk Island. The existence of Atlantis was now thoroughly substantiated. On all sides of me I stumbled across further evidences of these early settlers. Here, standing in bold outline on a slight eminence, was a stone edifice adorned with symbolical carvings of eggs, harps, mastodons, triangles, and numerous other objects, all of which were capable of interpretation, and indicated that the building was a temple to some god.
"I was much struck by the extraordinary similarity in many of the things I saw—notably in the sphinx, idols and symbols—to many I had seen in Egypt, and to some extent in Ireland, and I at once set to work to draw up a careful analogy between the languages of those countries.
"The word Banchicheisi[2] I found to contain the Celtic ban, a barrow; and Coptic isi, plenty; whilst I recognized in the words Coulmenes,[3] the Celtic Coul, a man's name, i.e. Finn, son of Coul; in Thottirnanoge, the Coptic Thoth, i.e. name of ancient Egyptian deity, and Erse Tirnanoge, the name of the wife of Oisin, the last of the Feni; in Chaac-molrée[4] the Coptic deity, ré; in Ozilmeave,[5] the Celtic Meave, a girl's name; in Taramoo,[6] the Celtic Tara, a girl's name; and in Nikétoth,[7] toth, the Erse technical form of feminine gender; and comparing the alphabets I traced a very striking likeness between the Atlantean—
" |
(a) |
and the Gaelic or Erse  |
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(B) |
and the Coptic  |