Not priests secure in mind and proud of their trust, but priests hunted and fearful, who had seen their hierarchy totter. There were such priests on both sides-and they unchained forces compared with which the previous fighting had been gentle.
The forces disturbed the isostatic balance of the earth’s crust.
Mu shuddered and sank some two thousand feet. Tidal waves met at her middle, broke back, surged twice around the globe, climbed the Chinese plains, lapped the feet of Alta Himalaya.
Atlantis shook and rumbled and split for three days before the water covered it.
A few escaped by air, to land on ground still wet with the ooze of exposed seabottom, or on peaks high enough to fend off the tidal waves. There they had still to wring a living from the bare soil, with minds unused to primitive art-but some survived.
Of Mu there was not a trace. As for Atlantis, a few islands, mountaintops short days before, marked the spot. Waters rolled over the twin Towers of the Sun and fish swam through the gardens of the viceroy.
The woebegone feeling which had pursued Huxley now overwhelmed him. He seemed to hear a voice in his head: “Woe! Cursed be Loki! Cursed be Venus! Cursed be Vulcan! Thrice cursed am I, their apostate servant, Orab, Archpriest of the Isles of the Blessed. Woe is me! Even as I curse I long for Mu, mighty and sinful. Twenty-one years ago, seeking a place to die, on this mountaintop I stumbled on this record of the mighty ones who were before us. Twenty-one years I have.labored to make the record complete, searching the dim recesses of my mind for knowledge long unused, roaming the other planes for knowledge I never had. Now in the eight hundred and ninety-second year of my life, and of the destruction of Mu the three hundred and fifth, I, Orab, return to my fathers.”
Huxley was very happy to wake up.
Chapter Seven “The Fathers Have Eaten Sour Grapes, and the Children’s Teeth Are Set on Edge”
Ben was in the living room when Phil came in to breakfast. Joan arrived almost on Phil’s heels. There were shadows under her eyes and she looked unhappy. Ben spoke in a tone that was almost surly, “What’s troubling you, Joan? You look like the wrath to come.”
“Please, Ben,” she answered, in a tired voice, “don’t heckle me. I’ve had bad dreams all night,”
“That so? Sorry-but if you think you had bad dreams all night, you should have seen the cute little nightmares I’ve been riding.”
Phil looked at the two of them. “Listen-have you both had odd dreams all night?”
“Wasn’t that what we were just saying?” Ben sounded exasperated.
“What did you dream about?”
Neither one answered him.
“Wait a minute. I had some very strange dreams myself.” He pulled his notebook out of a pocket and tore out three sheets. “I want to find out something. Will you each write down what your dreams were about, before anyone says anything more? Here’s a pencil, Joan.”
They balked a little, but complied.
“Read them aloud, Joan.”
She picked up Ben’s slip and read, ” ‘I dreamed that your theory about the degeneracy of the human race was perfectly correct.’ ”
She put it down and picked up Phil’s slip. ” ‘dreamt that I was present at the Twilight of the Gods, and that I saw the destruction of Mu and Atlantis.’ ”
There was dead silence as she took the last slip, her own.
“My dream was about how the people destroyed themselves by rebelling against Odin.”
Ben was first to commit himself. “Anyone of those slips could have applied to my dreams.”
Joan nodded. Phil got up again, went out, and returned at once with his diary.
He opened it and handed it to Joan.
“Kid, will you read that aloud-starting with ‘June sixteenth’?”
She read it through slowly, without looking up from the pages. Phil waited until she had finished and closed the book before speaking. “Well,” he said, “well?”
Ben crushed out a cigaret which had burned down to his fingers. “It’s a remarkably accurate description of my dream, except that the elder you call Jove, I thought of as Ahuramazda.”