



Produced by Judith Boss





THE LOST CONTINENT

C. J. Cutliffe Hyne



CONTENTS

          PREFATORY: THE LEGATEES OF DEUCALION
           1  MY RECALL
           2  BACK TO ATLANTIS
           3  A RIVAL NAVY
           4  THE WELCOME OF PHORENICE
           5  ZAEMON'S CURSE
           6  THE BITERS OF THE CITY WALLS
           7  THE BITERS OF THE WALLS
              (FURTHER ACCOUNT)
           8  THE PREACHER FROM THE MOUNTAINS
           9  PHORENICE, GODDESS
          10  A WOOING
          11  AN AFFAIR WITH THE BARBAROUS FISHERS
          12  THE DRUG OF OUR LADY THE MOON
          13  THE BURYING ALIVE OF NAIS
          14  AGAIN THE GODS MAKE CHANGE
          15  ZAEMON'S SUMMONS
          16  SIEGE OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN
          17  NAIS THE REGAINED
          18  STORM OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN
          19  DESTRUCTION OF THE ATLANTIS
          20  ON THE BOSOM OF THE DEEP






PREFATORY:

THE LEGATEES OF DEUCALION


We were both of us not a little stiff as the result of sleeping out in
the open all that night, for even in Grand Canary the dew-fall and the
comparative chill of darkness are not to be trifled with. For myself on
these occasions I like a bit of a run as an early refresher. But here on
this rough ground in the middle of the island there were not three yards
of level to be found, and so as Coppinger proceeded to go through some
sort of dumb-bell exercises with a couple of lumps of bristly lava, I
followed his example. Coppinger has done a good deal of roughing it in
his time, but being a doctor of medicine amongst other things--he takes
out a new degree of some sort on an average every other year--he is
great on health theories, and practises them like a religion.

There had been rain two days before, and as there was still a bit of
stream trickling along at the bottom of the barranca, we went down there
and had a wash, and brushed our teeth. Greatest luxury imaginable, a
toothbrush, on this sort of expedition.

"Now," said Coppinger when we had emptied our pockets, "there's precious
little grub left, and it's none the better for being carried in a local
Spanish newspaper."

"Yours is mostly tobacco ashes."

"It'll get worse if we leave it. We've a lot more bad scrambling ahead
of us."

That was obvious. So we sat down beside the stream there at the bottom
of the barranca, and ate up all of what was left. It was a ten-mile
tramp to the fonda at Santa Brigida, where we had set down our traps;
and as Coppinger wanted to take a lot more photographs and measurements
before we left this particular group of caves, it was likely we should
be pretty sharp set before we got our next meal, and our next taste of
the PATRON'S splendid old country wine. My faith! If only they knew down
in the English hotels in Las Palmas what magnificent wines one could
get--with diplomacy--up in some of the mountain villages, the old
vintage would become a thing of the past in a week.

Now to tell the truth, the two mummies he had gathered already quite
satisfied my small ambition. The goatskins in which they were sewn up
were as brittle as paper, and the poor old things themselves gave out
dust like a puffball whenever they were touched. But you know what
Coppinger is. He thought he'd come upon traces of an old Guanche
university, or sacred college, or something of that kind, like the one
there is on the other side of the island, and he wouldn't be satisfied
till he'd ransacked every cave in the whole face of the cliff. He'd
plenty of stuff left for the flashlight thing, and twenty-eight more
films in his kodak, and said we might as well get through with the job
then as make a return journey all on purpose. So he took the crowbar,
and I shouldered the rope, and away we went up to the ridge of the
cliff, where we had got such a baking from the sun the day before.

Of course these caves were not easy to come at, or else they would have
been raided years before. Coppinger, who on principle makes out he
knows all about these things, says that in the old Guanche days they
had ladders of goatskin rope which they could pull up when they were at
home, and so keep out undesirable callers; and as no other plan occurs
to me, perhaps he may be right. Anyway the mouths of the caves were in
a more or less level row thirty feet below the ridge of the cliff, and
fifty feet above the bottom; and Spanish curiosity doesn't go in much
where it cannot walk.

Now laddering such caves from below would have been cumbersome, but a
light knotted rope is easily carried, and though it would have been hard
to climb up this, our plan was to descend on each cave mouth from above,
and then slip down to the foot of the cliffs, and start again AB INITIO
for the next.

Coppinger is plucky enough, and he has a good head on a height, but
there is no getting over the fact that he is portly and nearer fifty
than forty-five. So you can see he must have been pretty keen. Of course
I went first each time, and got into the cave mouth, and did what I
could to help him in; but when you have to walk down a vertical cliff
face fly-fashion, with only a thin bootlace of a rope for support, it
is not much real help the man below can give, except offer you his best
wishes.

I wanted to save him as much as I could, and as the first three caves
I climbed to were small and empty, seeming to be merely store-places,
I asked him to take them for granted, and save himself the rest. But
he insisted on clambering down to each one in person, and as he decided
that one of my granaries was a prison, and another a pot-making factory,
and another a schoolroom for young priests, he naturally said he hadn't
much reliance on my judgment, and would have to go through the whole
lot himself. You know what these thorough-going archaeologists are for
imagination.

But as the day went on, and the sun rose higher, Coppinger began clearly
to have had enough of it, though he was very game, and insisted on going
on much longer than was safe. I must say I didn't like it. You see
the drop was seldom less than eighty feet from the top of the cliffs.
However, at last he was forced to give it up. I suggested marching off
to Santa Brigida forthwith, but he wouldn't do that. There were three
more cave-openings to be looked into, and if I wouldn't do them for him,
he would have to make another effort to get there himself. He tried to
make out he was conferring a very great favour on me by offering to take
a report solely from my untrained observation, but I flatly refused to
look at it in that light. I was pretty tired also; I was soaked with
perspiration from the heat; my head ached from the violence of the sun;
and my hands were cut raw with the rope.

Coppinger might be tired, but he was still enthusiastic. He tried to
make me enthusiastic also. "Look here," he said, "there's no knowing
what you may find up there, and if you do lay hands on anything,
remember it's your own. I shall have no claim whatever."

"Very kind of you, but I've got no use for any more mummies done up in
goatskin bags."

"Bah! That's not a burial cave up there. Don't you know the difference
yet in the openings? Now, be a good fellow. It doesn't follow that
because we have drawn all the rest blank, you won't stumble across a
good find for yourself up there."

"Oh, very well," I said, as he seemed so set on it; and away I stumbled
over the fallen rocks, and along the ledge, and then scrambled up by
that fissure in the cliff which saved us the two-mile round which we had
had to take at first. I wrenched out the crowbar, and jammed it down
in a new place, and then away I went over the side, with hands smarting
worse at every new grip of the rope. It was an awkward job swinging into
the cave mouth because the rock above overhung, or else (what came to
the same thing) it had broken away below; but I managed it somehow,
although I landed with an awkward thump on my back, and at the same time
I didn't let go the rope. It wouldn't do to have lost the rope then:
Coppinger couldn't have flicked it into me from where he was below.

Now from the first glance I could see that this cave was of different
structure to the others. They were for the most part mere dens, rounded
out anyhow; this had been faced up with cutting tools, so that all the
angles were clean, and the sides smooth and flat. The walls inclined
inwards to the roof, reminding me of an architecture I had seen before
but could not recollect where, and moreover there were several rooms
connected up with passages. I was pleased to find that the other
cave-openings which Coppinger wanted me to explore were merely the
windows or the doorways of two of these other rooms.

Of inscriptions or markings on the walls there was not a trace, though I
looked carefully, and except for bats the place was entirely bare. I
lit a cigarette and smoked it through--Coppinger always thinks one is
slurring over work if it is got through too quickly--and then I went
to the entrance where the rope was, and leaned out, and shouted down my
news.

He turned up a very anxious face. "Have you searched it thoroughly?" he
bawled back.

"Of course I have. What do you think I've been doing all this time?"

"No, don't come down yet. Wait a minute. I say, old man, do wait a
minute. I'm making fast the kodak and the flashlight apparatus on the
end of the rope. Pull them up, and just make me half a dozen exposures,
there's a good fellow."

"Oh, all right," I said, and hauled the things up, and got them inside.
The photographs would be absolutely dull and uninteresting, but that
wouldn't matter to Coppinger. He rather preferred them that way. One has
to be careful about halation in photographing these dark interiors, but
there was a sort of ledge like a seat by the side of each doorway, and
so I lodged the camera on that to get a steady stand, and snapped off
the flashlight from behind and above.

I got pictures of four of the chambers this way, and then came to one
where the ledge was higher and wider. I put down the camera, wedged it
level with scraps of stone, and then sat down myself to recharge the
flashlight machine. But the moment my weight got on that ledge, there
was a sharp crackle, and down I went half a dozen inches.

Of course I was up again pretty sharply, and snapped up the kodak just
as it was going to slide off to the ground. I will confess, too, I was
feeling pleased. Here at any rate was a Guanche cupboard of sorts, and
as they had taken the trouble to hermetically seal it with cement, the
odds were that it had something inside worth hiding. At first there
was nothing to be seen but a lot of dust and rubble, so I lit a bit of
candle and cleared this away. Presently, however, I began to find that
I was shelling out something that was not cement. It chipped away, in
regular layers, and when I took it to the daylight I found that each
layer was made up of two parts. One side was shiny stuff that looked
like talc, and on this was smeared a coating of dark toffee-
material, that might have been wax. The toffee- surface was
worked over with some kind of pattern.

Now I do not profess to any knowledge on these matters, and