Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  “Run,” I said, “run and fetch me that book. You ought to have told me about it to begin with. If you happen to encounter a historian on the way, don’t send him to me, I beg you, for I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of him.”

  Constantin soon brought me the twelve volumes of the Annals of Atlantis by Eudoxus. It is a book written in good, clear and passionate Greek. As soon as I started reading I was seized by interest and emotion. In less than a week I had finished the study. Today, I repent of not having spent more time on it. Many events and names have slipped my mind. I shall, however, attempt to indicate to the reader the principal features of the history of Atlantis.

  IV. In which is found a brief history of Atlantis,

  according to Eudoxus

  When Atlantis sank entirely beneath the waves, the people who inhabited it had attained a civilization and a singular power long before. That island, as extensive as North America, to the east of which it was located, was originally colonized by the Greeks and was absolutely subject to their domination. The invaders mingled with the autochthons, who were Gaels. A new race was born, worthy of those which emerged from it, vigorous, literate and warlike.

  Of the epoch anterior to the cataclysm, history knows almost nothing, and allows legend to speak. The latter tells a thousand fine tales, names heroes similar to Achilles and describes wars in which the gods fought. It adds that after a time of felicity exactly similar to our Golden Age, the nations began to be corrupted, and obliged Zeus to annihilate them. Plato himself tells us what happened that night when the order of the elements was subverted and Atlantis was erased from the earth. Plato, understandably, did not know that a number of lesser isles remained, either by chance or because the divinities, as they usually do on the occasion of deluges, having considered the virtue of certain men, had saved them deliberately.

  The difficulties of the new life and the loss of all wealth, particularly the destruction of ancient writings and monuments, reduced the survivors to savagery.

  Kingdoms were founded; the earliest was that of Atlantopolis, where the despicable dynasty of the Argides reigned to begin with, somnolent princes incapable of command, who allowed their servants to share in their power.

  After eight centuries a man of great genius undertook to restore the traditions. That was the Emperor Megalopodas. He united the various islands under his laws. The hordes of the Mainomenes, newly formed, were already ravaging the Archipelago. Megalopodas made war on them victoriously and reduced them to slavery. He created the government and was able to administer it. Letters and arts were reborn and he spared no effort to encourage them.

  After his reign of sixty years, everything fell back into chaos. The tribal chiefs cut up the imperial robe into the mantles of kings and took hereditary command of minuscule states. One of those chiefs, by the name of Kephalos, had himself elected the sovereign of the entire region of Atlantopolis. A courageous prince, he set out to pacify the land, so he perished in battle.

  His descendants, the illustrious race of Kephalides, gradually augmented the dependencies of their crown. For fourteen centuries they labored on the establishment of the royal power and the preeminence of their fatherland. It was then that the valor and strength of the people of Atlantopolis was felt. Weak in origin but of a character superior to all others, it ended up subjugating and absorbing the populations of the entire island, forming them into an invincible nation superior to all its neighbors.

  Many interruptions, from century to century, halted its progress, but, the sun seems brighter after the darkness of an eclipse, every time the periods of malediction came to an end, the kingdom of Atlantis emerged more powerful and more glorious. For there are peoples marked in advance to reign, which misfortunes can afflict, but cannot annihilate. As the flame of a torch vacillates at first, having difficulty igniting the resin, and is enveloped by smoke, just as one thinks it extinct, it is reborn, rises up in triumph and illuminates the spectators; and, just as the light pales under the wind that torments it and seems vanquished by darkness, in the same way, the predestined people whose mission is to enlighten, sometimes seems to fail and go out. Then the rapacious tribes approach, growling; for they do not know that there are fires that do not go out, the fuel of which is inexhaustible, which remain to enlighten the word, and which it is necessary to reignite if they come to perish.

  Six hundred years after Kephalos, his descendant Eudoxus destroyed forever the power of the dissident princes. The territories of Atlantis then began to fuse, and continued so well that in the end, they no longer formed anything but a well ordered whole, each part of which was distinguished by particular qualities. In the other islands, on the contrary, that unity was only superficial, and several races opposed throughout the ages continued to make war under the same flag.

  A mild religion had been established a long time ago. The belief in a forgiving God had replaced the ancient myths. Memories of the gods, demigods and heroes were mingled with the new rite. Zeus, Poseidon and all their associates had conserved their emblems and specialties. Each believer worshiped one or other in particular but all of them placed above the Great God, the living God. That worship, abolished since, has been replaced by bizarre superstitions that conceal political deceptions ineptly. It is not for me to judge that persecuted church, but I can see that it was the operator of national grandeur; it made the scepter of kings a sacred scepter, whose force was irresistible. It wanted the crown to be regarded as a divine charge, and its enemies as sacrilegious. Without that power, which was regarded as the power of God himself, nothing great could be accomplished, and the thousand anarchic cantons of Atlantis tore one another apart again, or carried the yoke.

  The clergy, meanwhile, often struggled against the prince, sometimes resisting him and sometimes striking him with anathema. There were continual wars. Finally, the alliance collapsed forever.

  The kingdom increased from century to century and was elevated above all the states of the Archipelago. Closer to us, King Helios the Victorious brought the illustriousness of his fatherland to its peak. Helios was great, invincible in battle; he crushed three coalitions fomented by the Mainomenes, which invaded his realm. He was surrounded all his life by the greatest geniuses that had been seen in the arts, letters, sciences and warfare. He shone at the center of all that glory, and his radiance caused a thousand immortal flowers to bloom. He gave his name to his century and I swear to you that the century in question can be inscribed in history alongside those of Pericles and the Medicis.

  The successors of Helios were incapable. Vanquished, inert, abandoning the country to the intrigue of ministers, the last four Kephalides were unable to conserve the glorious heritage of the Victorious, and allowed the decisive causes of catastrophe to accumulate.

  When the unfortunate Adunatos the Second was elevated to the throne, the hurricane was ripe. The finances dilapidated, the armies deflected from their duty, the people crushed by taxes, poverty and hatred, the preaching of philosophers and the insouciance of the nobility prepared a terrible funeral for the race of kings.

  Rebellion was suddenly unleashed. Its first gesture was to cut off the head of the Kephalide. Then commenced the flow of the scarlet river into which Atlantis was to pour all its best blood. Insensate masters of the populace lowered the foreheads that surpassed the rest. The massacre lasted for three years. Then the people repented, and realized that they had decapitated the nation itself. The leaders of the revolt continued, however; they abolished the primordial institutions of the State, broke the traditions, ruined the ancestral monuments and drove the entire country into extreme peril. But the rage they had unleashed turned against them and they perished in their turn on the scaffold they had erected, a scaffold of which they were unworthy, since they had ennobled it with so many fine victims.

  Foreigners had invaded Atlantis, it seemed bound to succumb, but the revolution had Phoberos at the head of its armies. That great warrior annihilated the Mainomenes, drove the other enemies into
the sea, and returned to Atlantopolis to be crowned Emperor.

  He departed again, and for ten years he went from one end of the Archipelago to the other. He conquered entirely and restored the empire of Megalopodas. Having grown old, betrayed by his own people, he fell in an epic battle in which the victors believed themselves vanquished for a long time.

  At this point the illustrious pages of the history concluded. As much as those shone with glory, those that followed were tarnished and humiliated.

  On the death of Phoberos a certain caste took possession of power; I am referring to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie out there are cowardly, ferocious, uneducated merchants, stupid, proud and corrupted by all vices and mercantile habits. The old regimes had been able to scorn them and contain them, so they proclaimed themselves the grateful sons of the revolution. It was for them, alas, that the rabble of the streets had shed blood.

  They put on the throne an elective phantom, a parade king, chosen from their ranks. That sad sovereign made a semblance of reigning for seven years, and was then replaced. That still endures, to the public shame, in spite of uprisings. The nobility was regretted thereafter by all people of benevolence and common sense, especially when they contemplated the ridiculous faces of their potentates.

  Letters and sciences paled; decadence commenced. The masters of the nation only encouraged works that resembled them. And that country, which the entire Archipelago admired as we admire Greece, only offered an uncertain reflection of its grandeur.

  In the domain of exterior power there were grave checks. Twenty-five years before my arrival the Atlantideans fought a war against the Mainomenes, and no war was ever as strange. Their generals had only studied strategy in the beds of prostitutes. Several turned traitor, the rest were vanquished, defeated by the barbarians. The latter, astonished by their victory, abused it like highway bandits, and tore away from the land the fertile Edeia peninsula.

  Since then, in spite of the anger of the people, the leaders of Atlantis no longer dare contest with the Mainomenes. During my sojourn they abandoned under threat a colony that had cost them a great deal of money and soldiers.

  That is what I read, with details in the Annals of Eudoxus. I owe contemporary notions to Constantin. I apologize for having narrated such great things briefly and having omitted many. My memory forbids me to extend myself further, and I have even passed over in silence a thousand events that I remember. I have suppressed the names of ministers, kings and captains sufficient for the illustriousness of twenty peoples, so fertile was Atlantis in heroes and geniuses of every species.

  V. In which the traveler is taken to two theaters

  and describes the spectacles he saw there.

  Fatigued by such long reading I wanted a little recreation. I appealed to Constantin.

  “Inform me,” I said, of some agreeable pastime. “I have a mind fully laden with heavy thoughts. I want to distract myself this evening.”

  “Truly,” he said, “I have what you need. Let’s go to the Theater Royal. I know that they’re performing a very fine play there. The author is the celebrated Limnathson. As for the title, I don’t remember it.”

  The play was being performed in the afternoon. We only just had time to get ready.

  As we were about to leave, Constantin informed me that my attire was not suitable.

  “Change your costume,” he said “or you’ll be mistaken for a pauper. The public with which we’re going to mingle is composed of merchants and bourgeois of every species; those people only go to the theater in their Sunday garments. Do as they do or you won’t be allowed in.

  I obeyed. We finally set forth. The theater hall resembled ours. The elegance of the audience amused me greatly. The men were dressed, with few exceptions, like provincial undertakers, and the women draped in garish fabrics. It was the only place in Atlantis where I observed so much bad taste.

  The action commenced on the stage. I can’t recount it in detail. It was nothing but one long and flat obscenity. The first act passed entirely in a bed, in which a lover and a husband alternated with the same woman. The actress who had that role played it marvelously, to the extent, at moment, of showing herself almost naked. Then all the spectators stood up in order to get a better view. At every coarse word and every obscene situation, bravos burst forth, and the audience praised to the skies the genius of the author and the talent of the performers.

  The second act cannot be recounted, firstly because it presents the densest intrigue I have ever seen in the theater, and secondly because it is too dirty. The husband searches his wife’s dressing room, for evidence of her treason and proceeds from deduction to deduction and discovery to discovery to the knowledge that he is a cuckold. He vomits filthy imprecations and the curtain falls.

  The end surpassed all the rest. The husband, dagger in hand, pursues his wife and her accomplice. He inflicts a slight wound on the former; by means of a marvelous artifice, real blood falls on to the stage. The audience howls with joy, applauds, and wants to see it again.

  At the moment when the husband sets about cutting throats, he learns that the shady speculations in which his fortune is engaged had failed. He is ruined. He changes color. The knife falls from his hand. A contract intervenes. The lover will lend the husband money. The wife will remain the indivisible property of the two men. Everyone embraces.

  “Let’s get out,” I said, “out of this evil place. Constantin, my friend, where have you brought me?”

  “Is it possible,” cried my servant, “That you are so severe? That is entirely in the taste of the day and infinitely distracting. The public has proved that to you. You can see that it has made that play a success worthy of the work and itself.”

  “It’s necessary,” I said, “to see a better work. Take me to another hall, if possible. But if I only see a play like that one, let’s not talk about returning to the theater. I’d rather visit taverns with large lanterns, where comedies like that one are played for real.”

  “In that case,” proposed Constantin, “let’s go to the Old Theater this evening, on the other side of the river. The doors open in two hours.”

  “Good,” I said, “But let’s go to dinner first.

  That was what we did. I was conducted to a distant quarter. The Old Theater stood next to a large garden. We went in. In the hall I counted forty spectators.

  However, the actors performed an admirable tragedy admirably. It attained the grandeur of Euripides, with more purity, delicacy and harmony. The noblest sentiments that the human heart and soul can experience were depicted therein. In that play everything was noble and everything was divine.

  I went away enchanted, but very surprised.

  “Why,” I asked, “is such a poor welcome given to that great poet? Nowhere have I seen or read anything comparable.”

  “Know,” replied Constantin, “that the author in question has been dead for three hundred years. Since his death, a thousand memorable events have occurred: the overturning of established beliefs, new inventions in all the arts, and a marvelous flourishing of literary theories. We’ve made great discoveries. One, above all, has modified the theater and the whole art of writing. It’s a method known as ‘Naturalism,’ I don’t know why. It consists of only reproducing the most commonplace acts and the mot vulgar lives, but studying them precisely. The spectator and the reader want to encounter themselves on the stage and in the novel. They don’t only want to see heroes, emperors or gods there. The thoughts of great souls bore them. The sublime seems ridiculous to them. The new authors follow the public taste, and they display in the theater, instead of characters of great breadth, all kinds of vicious and paltry individuals, who are found to be more alive and have more resemblance to those of the century. Then again, people don’t want to go to sleep at the theater. Scabrous scenes and spicy words, and the pretty things that actresses show, all please the multitude more than the most sublime verses.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Your people want to be amused.
That’s legitimate. But those who are taking charge of distancing them are serving them very coarse fare. Tell me, then, why it is that the Old Theater, putting on such a fine play, only has forty spectators?”

  “By all the gods!” said my friend. “You think that’s very few! What, there are forty people with good taste in the city, and you’re protesting! How many do you have in your country? Forty people have disturbed themselves in order to hear beautiful verses, have appeared to understand them, to like them, and you’re not content?”

  Constantin fell silent. We walked silently for a while. Then we talked about the present literature of Atlantis. My companion claimed that there was decadence there, as well as in all the other nations of the archipelago. And, suddenly becoming animated, he cried: “All the evil stems from this: too many people know how to read. The vulgar are the sovereign judge of mental labors. Don’t think, Monsieur, that they are a good judge.”

  VI. Of art in Atlantis, and painting in particular.

  In the days that followed we visited the museums in which ancient works of art are preserved, and the exhibitions in which new ones are shown.

  First we saw the palace of the kings, the galleries of which contain all the masterpieces that the painting and sculpture of the Archipelago have accomplished.

  In the first rooms we found the debris of ancient statuary—debris that dated from before the cataclysm, and which recent excavations had returned to the light of day. It was exactly the art of Ancient Greece, I found metopes there similar to those of Selinunte and smiling Apollos like those of Orchomenos.