Lord of Atlantis. John Russell Fearn
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smiled a trifle cynically to herself. “It wouldn’t be a great surprise, either. He never did strike me as being the kind of man to take a beating lying down.”
“I think you did wrongly toward Abna, Vi,” Chris Wilson said. “After all, he had much to give—vast science derived from Atlantis—and all he wanted in return was for you to marry him. Instead of that, you palmed a synthetic image of yourself onto him and let him go back home!”
“He deceived me, so I deceived him.” The Amazon raised and lowered her graceful shoulders. “He only wanted marriage with me for one purpose—because not a single woman exists in his race, inhabiting the domed city under the Red Spot of Jupiter. His idea was to marry me, our offspring to form the basis of a new race. Coldly scientific and biological. It had nothing to do with his professed love for me.”
“I can’t quite believe that, Vi,” Commander Kerrigan said, smiling in his wealth of grey beard. “I could not imagine a better matched pair than you and Abna. He’s every bit as scientific as you are and, surprisingly enough, every bit as strong. You are sure it isn’t jealousy of his power and intelligence that makes you pretend to hate him?”
“I don’t hate him, and I never said I did. He deserved teaching a lesson for hoodwinking me. If it should be he who has returned, I’m afraid he’ll have to learn yet another lesson. As I told him in my concluding words, it will have to be his science against mine.”
She glanced about her at a gradually deepening vibration. The sensation increased until the room, for a moment, seemed to sway and then became steady again.
“That,” Chris said, “was a mighty big earth shock somewhere!”
The Amazon nodded, undisturbed. “Not that it’s anything unusual these days. Earthquakes following the collapse of the great glacier are inevitable.”
* * * *
At that moment, two transatlantic pilots were viewing the cause of the earthquake from a height of 10,000 feet. Their job was flying the four-a-day rocket plane freight flights across the Atlantic from London to New York. This was the third trip of the day. One moment they were streaking through the pale blue spring sky with nothing disturbing the peace of the rolling Atlantic far beneath; the next they beheld the most incredible thing they had never known.
The grey rollers of the ocean parted mysteriously ahead of them, and Pilot Carson suddenly cut down speed as he saw the phenomenon commencing. “Balls of fire!” he breathed, stunned. “Just take a look at that, Jeff!”
Jeff Baxley, his navigator, did not need to be told. Pop-eyed, he was gazing at the waters, agitated by some invisible and inconceivably powerful force, as they rolled upward and outward before the arrival of something from the ocean’s depths. At the same moment, violent air disturbances and a sense of tremendous magnetic strain hit the flier.
It swayed and reeled out of control, spun about in a vast electrical vortex.
Dazed, but still unhurt, unable to control the craft, the two men watched land, buried for centuries under the ocean, start rising from the water, thrusting algae-covered pinnacles into the sunlight, water pouring from every cranny as though from the conning tower of a surfacing submarine.
The pinnacles became large, pointed rocks—then rose higher and became hills. Higher still until they were revealed as actual mountains. Land at their bases came next, thrust out of the ocean’s depths and stretching in a colossal plateau as far as the pilots could see in either direction.
Then the electrical vortex was gone and they gazed at mighty tidal waves receding from them, one in each direction, which must finally crash on the shores of Britain, Federated Europe, the United States, and perhaps eastern South America.
With difficulty Pilot Carson got the flier under control again. “Dry land!” he cried. “Just look at it, Jeff! Dry land where there was ocean—a huge plateau of it! I’ll bet it goes all the way from Britain to America across the Atlantic.”
Jeff switched on recording cameras, and changing direction, Carson set the machine flying over the dripping rock landscape where formerly the Atlantic had rolled in majesty. Everywhere the two men looked there were lakes, still draining off into the depths of the plateau. Where the water had already vanished there were endless acres of green algae and sea fungi. The most incredible things of all were the mountains towering into the sky.
Carson said, “The tops of those mountains were originally the islands of the Azores. Now they’re sticking nearly 3,000 feet into the air.”
The navigator said, staring ahead intently, “Looks to me like a city or something, under a glass cover.”
As the flier swept onward there loomed up a mighty gleaming hemisphere, entirely devoid of algae and catching the light of the sun in a myriad reflections. It rose perhaps 300 feet at the highest point—a perfect dome.
Carson swung the flier so that they swept over it in a circle, the cameras recording steadily. There certainly was some kind of city inside the dome, but of people or life of any kind there was no trace. In fact, there was more than a city under the dome. There seemed to be quite a lot of forest as well.
“That’s the biggest saucepan lid I ever saw,” Carson said. “Must be all of thirty miles across at its base. We’ll finish our hop and then tip them off with the information in London. Good job we have a camera record, otherwise they’d think us crazy.” The machine darted westward to continue its course toward the United States. It appeared that a link had been born uniting Britain and Federated Europe with the American continent.
The havoc caused by the initial earthquake itself, followed by the vast tidal waves that crashed in on the shores of the United States and Britain, was sufficient to cause inquiry in all directions. To the Golden Amazon it became a matter of paramount importance to discover what had happened. Though central London had survived the full fury of the tidal wave which had come up the Thames, a great deal of it was under water, and the new building projects had been destroyed to the accompaniment of a heavy death toll.
It was an hour after the initial earthquake that the tidal wave arrived, and for another two hours after that, well into the afternoon, the Amazon was busy at her communications desk, asking for details of the disaster. In the office with her there still remained Chris Wilson, his wife, and Ethel. The Kerrigans had departed to their own executive offices.
“As far as I can make out,” the Amazon said finally, “there is something abnormal out in the Atlantic—some kind of land-rise about which the facts are not clear. That, of course, would create a tremendous water displacement that would account for the tidal waves. I suppose I ought to go and look, but with things in their present state I don’t see how I can spare the time.”
“I can,” Ethel offered. “There’s a New York air liner leaving in an hour. I could go and see what’s taken place, then radio the information back to you. Save a lot of secondhand reports. I could fly my own plane of course, but there are so many climatic upheavals at present I’d prefer the safety of a liner.”
“Good enough,” the Amazon agreed promptly. “You do that.”
Ethel nodded and hurried from the office, and the Amazon said: “A landrise in the Atlantic, coming on top of the report of that globular spacecraft seems remarkably coincidental. If, as I have suspected, it is Abna who has returned, the first thing he would perhaps do would be to try to resurrect the land where his ancestors were born—the continent of Mu, the mountains of which are believed to be the present Azores.”
“But Vi, what on earth are you getting at?” Beatrice Wilson demanded blankly. “You don’t mean to say that this man, Abna, has deliberately created all this havoc? He wouldn’t! He’s not that kind.”
The Amazon smiled. “It still takes you a long time to realise the lengths to which some men will go to achieve an object, Bee, doesn’t it? Believe me, if Abna was resolved on restoring Mu, and perhaps the lost city of Atlantis itself, he’d not for a moment consider the upheaval caused thereby. Anyway,” she added, shrugging, “it’s all assumption until