Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/367

picked up a piece of chalky stone, and, advancing towards a black rock, he wrote the single word—

A sudden light flashed through my mind. Atlantis! The ancient Meropis of Theopompus! The Atlantis of Plato! The continent whose existence was denied by Origen, Porphyrus, Jambilicus, D’Anville, Malte-Brun, and Humboldt, who ranked its disappearance amongst the old legends. Admitted by Passidonius, Pliny, Tertullian, Engel, Sherer, Tournefort, Buffon, d’Avezac, there it was now before my eyes, bearing witness to the catastrophe. The region thus engulfed lay astride Europe, Asia, and Africa; beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in which lived a people—the powerful Atlantides—against whom was waged the first battles of ancient Greece.

Plato, himself, is the historian who has recounted the events of the heroic times.

“One day Solon was conversing with some aged sages of Saïs, a town then 800 years old, as its graven annals bear witness. One of the old men was narrating the history of another town more ancient still. This first Athenian city, 800 years old, had been attacked and partly destroyed by the Atlantides. These people occupied an immense continent, greater than Africa and Asia put together, which covered a surface between the 12° to 14° N. lat. Their domination extended even to Egypt, and they wished to conquer Greece also, but were repulsed by the indomitable resistance they met with. Centuries rolled on. A cataclysm occurred—inundations and earthquakes. A night and a day sufficed for the destruction of the Atlantis; the highest summits—Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, and the Cape Verd Islands—only remaining above water.”