“Where’s that, anyway?”
“In the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s all ruins today, but once it was a very prosperous colony of the Atlanteans.”
“Never heard of them. Oh yes, I have though. They were the people Herodotus wrote about, didn’t he? But I thought they were mythical.”
“They were very real, and so was Atlantis, the continent where they lived, which lay just north of the Canaries here.”
“What’s that crocodile sort of thing with wings drawn in the margin?”
“Some sort of beast that lived in those bygone days. The pages are full of them. That’s a cave-tiger. And that’s some sort of colossal bat. Thank goodness he had the sense to illustrate fully, the man who wrote this, or we should never have been able to reconstruct the tale, or at any rate we could not have understood half of it. Whole species have died out since this was written, just as a whole continent has been swept away and three civilisations quenched. The worst of it is, it was written by a highly-educated man who somewhat naturally writes a very bad fist. I’ve hammered at it all the night through, and have only managed to make out a few sentences here and there”—he rubbed his hands appreciatively. “It will take me a year’s hard work to translate this properly.”
“Every man to his taste. I’m afraid my interest in the thing wouldn’t last as long as that. But how did it get there? Did your ancient Egyptian come to Grand Canary for the good of his lungs, and write it because he felt dull up in that cave?”
“I made a mistake there. The author was not an Egyptian. It was the similarity of the inscribed character which misled me. The book was written by one Deucalion, who seems to have been a priest or general—or perhaps both—and he was an Atlantean. How it got there, I don’t know yet. Probably that was told in the last few pages, which a certain vandal smashed up with his pocketknife, in getting them away from the place where they were stowed.”
“That’s right, abuse me. Deucalion you say? There was a Deucalion in the Greek mythology. He was one of the two who escaped from the Flood: their Noah, in fact.”
“The swamping of the continent of Atlantis might very well correspond to the Flood.”
“Is there a Pyrrha then? She was Deucalion’s wife.”
“I haven’t come across her yet. But there’s a Phorenice, who may be the same. She seems to have been the reigning Empress, as far as I can make out at present.”
I looked with interest at illustrations in the margin. They were quite understandable, although the perspective was all wrong. “Weird beasts they seem to have had knocking about the country in those days. Whacking big size too, if one may judge. By Jove, that’ll be a cave-tiger trying to puff down a mammoth. I shouldn’t care to have lived in those days.”
“Probably they had some way of fighting the creatures. However, that will show itself as I get along with the translation.” He looked at his watch—“I suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself, but I haven’t been to bed. Are you going out?”
“I shall drive back to Las Palmas. I promised a man to have a round at golf this afternoon.”
“Very well, see you at dinner. I hope they’ve sent back my dress shirts from the wash. O, lord! I am sleepy.”
I left him going up to bed, and went outside and ordered a carriage to take me down, and there I may say we parted for a considerable time. A cable was waiting for me in the hotel at Las Palmas to go home for business forthwith, and there was a Liverpool boat in the harbour which I just managed to catch as she was steaming out. It was a close thing, and the boatmen made a small fortune out of my hurry.
Now Coppinger was only an hotel acquaintance, and as I was up to the eyes in work when I got back to England, I’m afraid I didn’t think very much more about him at the time. One doesn’t with people one just meets casually abroad like that. And it must have been at least a year later that I saw by a paragraph in one of the papers, that he had given the lump of sheets to the British Museum, and that the estimated worth of them was ten thousand pounds at the lowest valuation.
Well, this was a bit of revelation, and as he had so repeatedly impressed on me that the things were mine by right of discovery, I wrote rather a pointed note to him mentioning that he seemed to have been making rather free with my property. Promptly came back a stilted letter beginning, “Doctor Coppinger regrets” and so on, and with it the English translation of the wax-upon-talc MSS. He “quite admitted” my claim, and “trusted that the profits of publication would be a sufficient reimbursement for any damage received.”
Now I had no idea that he would take me unpleasantly like this, and wrote back a pretty warm reply to that effect; but the only answer I got to this was through a firm of solicitors, who stated that all further communications with Dr. Coppinger must be made through them.
I will say here publicly that I regret the line he has taken over the matter; but as the affair has gone so far, I am disposed to follow out his proposition. Accordingly the old history is here printed; the credit (and the responsibility) of the translation rests with Dr. Coppinger; and whatever revenue accrues from readers, goes to the finder of the original talc-upon-wax sheets, myself.
If there is a further alteration in this arrangement, it will be announced publicly at a later date. But at present this appears to be most unlikely.
