a king also."

"Let me plead with you," I said. "This must not be."
The ship was drifting rapidly away with the current, and they

were hoisting sail. Tob had to shout to make himself heard. "Aye,
but it shall be. For I, too, am a strong man after my kind, and I

have ordered it so. And if you want the name of our Hero that some
day shall be God, you wear it on yourself. Deucalion shall be God

for our children."
"This is blasphemy," I cried. "Have a care, fool, or this

impiety will sink you."
"We will risk it," he bawled back, "and consider the odds

against us are small. Regard! Here is thy last horn of wine in
the ship, and my woman has treasured it against this moment.

Regard, all men, together with Those above and Those below! I pour
this wine as a libation to Deucalion, great lord that is to-day,

Hero that shall be to-morrow, God that will be in time to come!"
And then all those on the ship joined in the acclaim till they were

beyond the reach of my voice, and were battling their way out to
sea through the roaring breakers of the bar.

Solitary I stood at the brink of the forest, looking after
them and musing sadly. Tob, despite his lowly station, was a man

I cared for more than many. Like all seamen, I knew that he paid
his devotions to one of the obscurer Gods, but till then I had

supposed him devout in his worship. His new avowal came to me as
a desolating shock. If a man like Tob could forsake all the older

Gods to set up on high some poor mortal who had momentarily caught
his fancy, what could be expected from the mere thoughtless mob,

when swayed by such a brilliant tongue as Phorenice's? It seemed
I was to begin my exile with a new dreariness added to all the

other adverseprospects of Atlantis.
But then behind me I heard the rustle of some great beast that

had scented me, and was coming to attack through the thicket, and
so I had other matters to think upon. I had to let Tob and his

ship go out over the rim of the horizon unwatched.
15. ZAEMON'S SUMMONS

Since the days when man was first created upon the earth by
Gods who looked down and did their work from another place, there

have always been areas of the land ill-adapted for his maintenance,
but none more so than that part of Atlantis which lies over against

the savagecontinents of Europe and Africa. The common people
avoid it, because of a superstition which says that the spirits of

the evil dead stalk about there in broad daylight, and slay all
those that the more open dangers of the place might otherwise

spare. And so it has happened often that the criminals who might
have fled there from justice, have returned of their own free will,

and voluntarily given themselves up to the tormentors, rather than
face its fabulous terrors.

To the educated, many of these legends are known to be
mythical; but withal there are enough disquietudes remaining to

make life very arduous and stocked with peril. Everywhere the
mountains keep their contents on the boil; earth tremors are every

day's experience; gushes of unseen evil vapours steal upon one with
such cunningness and speed, that it is often hard to flee in time

before one is choked and killed; poisons well up into the rivers,
yet leave their colour unchanged; great cracks split across the

ground reaching down to the fires beneath, and the waters gush into
these, and are shot forth again with devastating explosion; and

always may be expected great outpourings of boiling mud or molten
rock.

Yet with all this, there are great sombre forests in these
lands, with trees whose age is unimaginable, and fires amongst the

herbage are rare. All beneath the trees is water, and the air is
full of warm steam and wetness. For a man to live in that constant

hot damp is very mortifying to the strength. But strength is
wanted, and cunning also beyond the ordinary, for these dangerous

lands are the abode of the lizards, which of all beasts grow to the
most enormous size and are the most fearsome to deal with.

There are countless families and species of these lizards, and
with some of them a man can contend with prospect of success. But

there are others whose hugeness no human force can battle against.
One I saw, as it came up out of a lake after gaining its day's

food, that made the wet land shake and pulse as it trod. It could
have taken Phorenice's mammoth into its belly,* and even a mammoth

in full charge could not have harmed it. Great horny plates
covered its head and body, and on the ridge of its back and tail

and limbs were spines that tore great slivers from the black trees
as it passed amongst them.

* TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Professor Reeder of the Wyoming
State University has recently unearthed the skeleton of a

Brontosaurus, 130 ft. in length, which would have weighed 50 tons
when alive. It was 35 ft. in height at the hips, and 25 ft. at the

shoulder, and 40 people could be seated with comfort within its
ribs. Its thigh bone was 8 ft. long. The fossils of a whole

series of these colossallizards have been found.
Now and again these monsters would get caught in some vast

fissuring of the ground, but not often. Their speed of foot was
great, and their sagacity keen. They seemed to know when the worst

boilings of the mountains might be expected, and then they found
safety in the deeper lakes, or buried themselves in wallows of the

mud. Moreover, they were more kindly constituted than man to
withstand one great danger of these regions, in that the heat of

the water did them no harm. Indeed, they will lie peacefully in
pools where sudden steam-bursts are making the water leap into

boiling fountains, and I have seen one run quickly across a flow of
molten rock which threatened to cut it off, and not be so much as

singed in the transit.
In the midst of such neighbours, then, was my new life thrown,

and existence became perilous and hard to me from the outset. I
came near to knowing what Fear was, and indeed only a fervent trust

in the most High Gods, and a firm belief that my life was always
under Their fostering care, prevented me from gaining that horrid

knowledge. For long enough, till I learned somewhat of the ways of
this steaming, sweltering land, I was in as miserable a case as

even Phorenice could have wished to see me. My clothes rotted from
my back with the constant wetness, till I went as naked as a savage

from Europe; my limbs were racked with agues, and I could find no
herbs to make drugs for their relief; for days together I could

find no better food than tree-grubs and leaves; and often when I
did kill beasts, knowing little of their qualities, I ate those

that gave me pain and sickness.
But as man is born to make himself adaptable to his

surroundings, so as the months dragged on did I learn the
limitation of this new life of mine, and gather some knowledge of

its resources. As example: I found a great black tree, with a
hollow core, and a hole into its middle near the roots. Here I

harboured, till one night some monstrouslizard, whose sheer weight
made the tree rock like a sapling, endeavoured to suck me forth as

a bird picks a worm from a hollow log. I escaped by the will of
the Gods--I could as much have done harm to a mountain as injure

that horny tongue with my weapons--but I gave myself warning that
this chance must not happen again.

So I cut myself a ladder of footholes on the inside of the
trunk till I had reached a point ten man-heights from the ground,

and there cut other notches, and with tree branches made a floor on
which I might rest. Later, for luxury, I carved me arrow-slit

windows in the walls of my chamber, and even carried up sand for a
hearth, so that I might cook my victual up there instead of

lighting a fire in all the dangers of the open below.
By degrees, too, I began to find how the large-scaled fish of

the rivers and the lesser turtles might be more readily captured,
and so my ribs threatened less to start through their proper