Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/19

Captain Andres Waters of the schooner Brant has asked me to write down the story of the cruise of the Nautilus and of what befell her unfortunate crew and my colleague, Dr. Amos Tyrrel; and since it seems certain now that the Brant is not to suffer the fate of the Nautilus I have agreed to comply with his request.

It is perhaps unnecessary for me to delineate the relationship between Dr. Tyrrel and myself, since we were students of natural science together at the University of Edinburgh, twenty years ago. His accomplishments in the field of natural history, his studies and deductions from his exhaustive researches in the seven seas, his magnificent laboratory at Bournewell—all have given him an international fame which needs no emphasizing here from me. Suffice it to say that I may designate myself merely as an unworthy assistant in his great work, a humble satellite reflecting but a dim gleam from the splendor of his genius.

The world, when it has read this statement, will realize that these are strange words coming now from me, in view of the discord (mild term!) between Dr. Tyrrel and myself, which ended in the horrifying fate of the Nautilus. It was a discord which really had its inception five years ago, when Dr. Tyrrel exhibited the first signs of a divided interest in his lifework—an interest which led him away from his studies of undersea life and eventually found him devoting a large share of his time to archeological research.

He began this course by taking extended trips to Egypt and Central America, where he indulged in a comparative study of prehistoric architectures found on the two continents, professing to find between them a most amazing and wholly unaccountable similarity. Being engrossed with our original labors, I paid little attention to his assertions, until one day he came to me with the astounding announcement that he had evolved a tenable theory for the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis. In support of it he produced a vast number of photographs and other data, which purported to show that the pyramids found in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula were in reality small copies of the mighty piles found in Egypt, and that in other ways he had established an unanswerable argument for there being, in prehistoric times, a bridge of land between the African and American continents. It was his further contention that this land connection was the lost Atlantis, sunk beneath the waves of the south Atlantic ocean by some stupendous cataclysm. Egypt, in the heyday of its power, he asserted, had been naught but a poor outpost of Atlantis, reflecting only a dim glimmer of the splendors of that lost continent.

I must confess that I was bitterly disappointed in my colleague's new activities, for I had always held that the existence of Atlantis was a matter for metaphysical speculation and not one to engage the serious attention of men engrossed in the more objective sciences. I was gravely considering the necessity of voicing this conviction in the form of a gentle reproof to Dr. Tyrrel when he came to me one day in great excitement, brandishing before my eyes a piece of twisted metal.

"I have it, Randolph!" he fairly shouted at me. "This proves my theory. We've found Atlantis!"

Dr. Tyrrel was not given to practical joking, so I accepted the proffered metal, although with a preconceived skepticism. It was, I should say, a bit of framework done in bronze, very like the lintel of a door. There are many similar pieces in the temples of ancient Egypt. Carved on its surface, however, were some peculiar hieroglyphics which on closer ob-