"Does this arrangement recall nothing to you?" he queried.
"Morhange, Morhange!" I stammered. "You remember--our route yesterday,
our abduction, the two corridors that we had to cross before arriving
at this mountain?... The girdles of earth and of water?... Two
tunnels, two enclosures of earth?"
"Ha! Ha!" chuckled M. Le Mesge.
He smiled as he looked at me. I understood that this smile meant: "Can
he be less obtuse than I had supposed?"
As if with a mighty effort, Morhange broke the silence.
"I understand well enough, I understand.... The three girdles of
water.... But then, you are supposing, sir,--an explanation the
ingeniousness of which I do not contest--you are supposing the exact
hypothesis of the Saharan sea!"
"I suppose it, and I can prove it," replied the irascible little old
chap, banging his fist on the table. "I know well enough what Schirmer
and the rest have advanced against it. I know it better than you do. I
know all about it, sir. I can present all the proofs for your
consideration. And in the meantime, this evening at dinner, you will
no doubt enjoy some excellent fish. And you will tell me if these
fish, caught in the lake that you can see from this window, seem to
you fresh water fish.
"You must realize," he continued, "the mistake of those who, believing
in Atlantis, have sought to explain the cataclysm in which they
suppose the island to have sunk. Without exception, they have thought
that it was swallowed up. Actually, there has not been an immersion.
There has been an emersion. New lands have emerged from the Atlantic
wave. The desert has replaced the sea, the _sebkhas_, the salt lakes,
the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the desolate vestiges of the
free sea water over which, in former days, the fleets swept with a
fair wind towards the conquest of Attica. Sand swallows up
civilization better than water. To-day there remains nothing of the
beautiful isle that the sea and winds kept gay and verdant but this
chalky mass. Nothing has endured in this rocky basin, cut off forever
from the living world, but the marvelous oasis that you have at your
feet, these red fruits, this cascade, this blue lake, sacred witnesses
to the golden age that is gone. Last evening, in coming here, you had
to cross the five enclosures: the three belts of water, dry forever;
the two girdles of earth through which are hollowed the passages you
traversed on camel back, where, formerly, the triremes floated. The
only thing that, in this immense catastrophe, has preserved its
likeness to its former state, is this mountain, the mountain where
Neptune shut up his well-beloved Clito, the daughter of Evenor and
Leucippe, the mother of Atlas, and the ancestress of Antinea, the
sovereign under whose dominion you are about to enter forever."
"Sir," Morhange with the most exquisite courtesy, "it would be only a
natural anxiety which would urge us to inquire the reasons and the end
of this dominion. But behold to what extent your revelation interests
me; I defer this question of private interest. Of late, in two
caverns, it has been my fortune to discover Tifinar inscriptions of
this name, Antinea. My comrade is witness that I took it for a Greek
name. I understand now, thanks to you and the divine Plato, that I
need no longer feel surprised to hear a barbarian called by a Greek
name. But I am no less perplexed as to the etymology of the word. Can
you enlighten me?"
"I shall certainly not fail you there, sir," said M. Le Mesge. "I may
tell you, too, that you are not the first to put to me that question.
Most of the explorers that I have seen enter here in the past ten
years have been attracted in the same way, intrigued by this Greek
work reproduced in Tifinar. I have even arranged a fairly exact
catalogue of these inscriptions and the caverns where they are to be
met with. All, or almost all, are accompanied by this legend:
_Antinea. Here commences her domain_. I myself have had repainted with
ochre such as were beginning to be effaced. But, to return to what I
was telling you before, none of the Europeans who have followed this
epigraphic mystery here, have kept their anxiety to solve this
etymology once they found themselves in Antinea's palace. They all
become otherwise preoccupied. I might make many disclosures as to the
little real importance which purely scientific interests possess even
for scholars, and the quickness with which they sacrifice them to the
most mundane considerations--their own lives, for instance."
"Let us take that up another time, sir, if it is satisfactory to you,"
said Morhange, always admirably polite.
"This digression had only one point, sir: to show you that I do not
count you among these unworthy scholars. You are really eager to know
the origin of this name, _Antinea_, and that before knowing what kind
of woman it belongs to and her motives for holding you and this
gentleman as her prisoners."
I stared hard at the little old man. But he spoke with profound
seriousness.
"So much the better for you, my boy," I thought. "Otherwise it
wouldn't have taken me long to send you through the window to air your
ironies at your ease. The law of gravity ought not to be topsy-turvy
here at Ahaggar."
"You, no doubt, formulated several hypotheses when you first
encountered the name, Antinea," continued M. Le Mesge, imperturbable
under my fixed gaze, addressing himself to Morhange. "Would you object
to repeating them to me?"
"Not at all, sir," said Morhange.
And, very composedly, he enumerated the etymological suggestions I
have given previously.
The little man with the cherry-colored shirt front rubbed his hands.
"Very good," he admitted with an accent of intense jubilation.
"Amazingly good, at least for one with only the modicum of Greek that
you possess. But it is all none the less false, super-false."
"It is because I suspected as much that I put my question to you,"
said Morhange blandly.
"I will not keep you longer in suspense," said M. Le Mesge. "The word,
Antinea, is composed as follows: _ti_ is nothing but a Tifinar
addition to an essentially Greek name. _Ti_ is the Berber feminine
article. We have several examples of this combination. Take _Tipasa_,
the North African town. The name means the whole, from _ti_ and from
[Greek: nap]. So, _tinea_ signifies the new, from _ti_ and from
[Greek: ea]."
"And the prefix, _an_?" queried Morhang.
"Is it possible, sir, that I have put myself to the trouble of talking
to you for a solid hour about the Critias with such trifling effect?
It is certain that the prefix _an_, alone, has no meaning. You will
understand that it has one, when I tell you that we have here a very
curious case of apocope. You must not read _an_; you must read _atlan_.
_Atl_ has been lost, by apocope; _an_ has survived. To sum up, Antinea
is composed in the following manner: [Greek: ti-nea--atl'An]. And its
meaning, _the new Atlantis_, is dazzlingly apparent from this
demonstration."
I looked at Morhange. His astonishment was without bounds. The Berber
prefix _ti_ had literally stunned him.
"Have you had occasion, sir, to verify this very ingenious etymology?"
he was finally able to gasp out.
"You have only to glance over these few books," said M. Le Mesge
disdainfully.
He opened successively five, ten, twenty cupboards. An enormous
library was spread out to our view.
"Everything, everything--it is all here," murmured Morhange, with an
astonishing inflection of terror and admiration.
"Everything that is worth consulting, at any rate," said M. Le Mesge.
"All the great books, whose loss the so-called learned world deplores
to-day."
"And how has it happened?"
"Sir, you distress me. I thought you familiar with certain events. You
are forgetting, then, the passage where Pliny the Elder speaks of the
library of Carthage and the treasures which were accumulated there? In
146, when that city fell under the blows of the knave, Scipio, the
incredible collection of illiterates who bore the name of the Roman
Senate had only the profoundest contempt for these riches. They
presented them to the native kings. This is how Mantabal received this
priceless heritage; it was transmitted to his son and grandson,
Hiempsal, Juba I, Juba II, the husband of the admirable Cleopatra
Selene, the daughter of the great Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Cleopatra
Selene had a daughter who married an Atlantide king. This is how
Antinea, the daughter of Neptune, counts among her ancestors the
immortal queen of Egypt. That is how, by following the laws of
inheritance, the remains of the library of Carthage, enriched by the
remnants of the library of Alexandria, are actually before your eyes.
"Science fled from man. While he was building those monstrous Babels
of pseudo-science in Berlin, London, Paris, Science was taking refuge
in this desert corner of Ahaggar. They may well forge their hypotheses
back there, based on the loss of the mysterious works of antiquity:
these works are not lost. They are here. They are here: the Hebrew,
the Chaldean, the Assyrian books. Here, the great Egyptian traditions
which inspired Solon, Herodotus and Plato. Here, the Greek
mythologists, the magicians of Roman Africa, the Indian mystics, all
the treasures, in a word, for the lack of which contemporary
dissertations are poor laughable things. Believe me, he is well
avenged, the little universitarian whom they took for a madman, whom
they defied. I have lived, I live, I shall live in a perpetual burst
of laughter at their false and garbled erudition. And when I shall be
dead, Error,--thanks to the jealous precaution of Neptune taken to
isolate his well-beloved Clito from the rest of the world,--Error, I
say, will continue to reign as sovereign mistress over their pitiful
compositions."
"Sir," said Morhange in grave voice, "you have just affirmed the
influence of Egypt on the civilizations of the people here. For
reasons which some day, perhaps, I shall have occasion to explain to
you, I would like to have proof of that relationship."
"We need not wait for that, sir," said M. Le Mesge. Then, in my turn,
I advanced.
"Two words, if you please, sir," I said brutally. "I will not hide
from you that these historical discussions seem to me absolutely out
of place. It is not my fault if you have had trouble with the
University, and if you are not to-day at the College of France or
elsewhere. For the moment, just one thing concerns me: to know just
what this lady, Antinea, wants with us. My comrade would like to know
her relation with ancient Egypt: very well. For my part, I desire
above everything to know her relations with the government of Algeria
and the Arabian Bureau."