The Treasure of Atlantis, J. Allan Dunn [read aloud .TXT] 📗
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- Author: J. Allan Dunn
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Book online «The Treasure of Atlantis, J. Allan Dunn [read aloud .TXT] 📗». Author J. Allan Dunn
THE TREASURE OF ATLANTIS
by J. ALLAN DUNN
Source edition: New York: Centaur Press, October 1970. Originally published in All Around, December 1916.
Scanned, Proofed and Formatted at sacred-texts.com, December 2009, by John Bruno Hare. This text is in the public domain in the US because it was published prior to 1923. The additional material from the Centaur Press edition is included because of a lack of copyright notice in this edition.
INTRODUCTIONAll Around …
All Around … The New Magazine … New Story … half-fabled, near-legendary magazine of the ‘teens.
It began in November 1910 as The New Magazine, became New Story in August 1911, and experienced one more title change—to All Around—in December 1915, before combining with another Street & Smith pulp, People’s Magazine, in April 1917.
New Story was an exciting and robust magazine. In 1913 it succeeded in obtaining the second novel of the immensely popular Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs—in direct competition with The All-Story (the Munsey magazine that had published “Tarzan of the Apes” in October 1912). “The Return of Tarzan” was published as a seven-part serial beginning in June 1913. A month after it had ended, another Burroughs’ serial, historical and heroic, “The Outlaw of Torn,” began in the January 1914 issue. It was in good company, for the popular English novelist H. Rider Haggard was represented with “Allan and the Holy Flower” at the same time.
By the time the title had changed to All Around in December of 1915, the magazine was basically one of fantastic and swashbuckling adventure, and it is easy to believe that the and startling success by Edgar Rice Burroughs beginning in 1912 was influential in the pattern of stories adopted by the magazine. Indeed, Burroughs was represented in the February 1916 issue with “Beyond Thirty,” a fantastic which loomed as near-unobtainable for a period approaching fifty years.
Other inclusions were in the same vein. Robert Ames Bennet who had written the popular THYRA at the turn of the century was represented
with a fine serial, “The Bowl of Baal.” This is set in the far reaches of Arabia during World War I, and it involves a lost race, some fearsome creatures, and enough high adventure to satisfy the most avid reader. “The Buddha’s Elephant” appeared in the August 1916 issue from the pen of prolific H. Bedford-Jones writing under the name of Allan Hawkwood. It is a tale of an ancient Greek city surviving in the Gobi. George B. Rodney’s fantastic, “The Underground Trail,” appeared in the last (March 1917) issue of All Around. It was good enough to be published in book form as BEYOND THE RANGE, and, even in 1970, it remains an attractive book to the science-fantasy collector.
“The Treasure of Atlantis” appeared complete in one issue in December 1916. It reflected some of the news and theories of the day with its Crete/Atlantis theme, and in many ways allies itself with the 1970 thinking which holds that Cretan civilization was destroyed by volcanic eruption. As early as 1909, Atlantis had been identified with Crete in some archeological circles, and the belief was popular in the ‘teens. But the fact, the theory behind “The Treasure of Atlantis” is unimportant. It is enough to say that this story was written to entertain—to quench the interest and appetite of the armchair adventurer.
There is little doubt that “The Treasure of Atlantis” was written for the same audience that had made the Burroughs’ stories popular. Morse, its hero, is strong and silent, and despite his position of wealth and influence in a world of more than fifty years ago, he is unhappy with civilization. His partner in exploration, the great archeologist, is a character that is part-Burroughs, part-Haggard, with more than a little of Conan Doyle’s famous Professor Challenger about him.
“The Treasure of Atlantis” combines the lure of the unknown, the grandeur of the fabled past, and savage, swashbuckling action. As such, it is’ a fitting novel for the “Time-Lost” series.
CONTENTS
I The Flowing Road
II The Vase of Minos
III Laidlaw’s Theory
IV Caxoeira Canyon
V Kiron
VI The Gates of Dor
VII The Queen Advances
VIII Aulus the Gladiator
IX The Initiation
X The Isle of Sele
XI The Judgment of Ru
XII The Hall of Sacrifice
XIII The End of Atlantis
THE TREASURE OF ATLANTIS
“It’s good to be back again, Morse, back to civilization, and it’s mighty good of you to take me in this way.”
Stanley Morse looked at the orchid hunter as the latter leaned forward from the cozy depth of the saddlebag chair and stretched his lean hands to the blaze. The fingers were more like claws than human attributes; the whole man seemed little more than a well-preserved mummy, a strangely different person from the vigorous naturalist Morse remembered meeting three years before on the higher reaches of the Amazon—the “Flowing Road.” The man’s clothes hung in ludicrous folds about his gaunt frame, and he shivered despite the heat of the blazing logs that almost scorched his chair.
“Nonsense, Murdock!” he said. “I’m only trying to repay your own hospitality. Do you suppose I have forgotten the time you took me into camp on the Huallagos River, when my raft had gone to pieces in the Chapaja Rapids with all my equipment? You’ve got the malaria in your system yet. Let me get you something to offset that ague.”
“It’s more than malaria, Morse. There’s nothing in your medicine chest, or anyone else’s, that can help me,
He laughed a little hysterically and stripped back the sleeve from one arm. The limb, save for its power of movement, seemed atrophied, flesh and muscle and skin had shrunk about the bones until they looked like two sticks held together with twisted cords.
“That’s emblematic of the rest of me,” he said, as the loose cloth slid back over his knobby wrist. “I’ve done my last league on the Flowing Road or any other road, for that matter. I’ve found my last orchid.”
“You’ll be all right with a few weeks’ rest,” replied Morse, with forced optimism. “As for the financial end of it, we can build a bridge across that stream.”
“I need no man’s charity,” said Murdock, with a flash of fierce resentment. “If you’ll put me up for a while—it won’t be long—as you have offered to, I’ll accept it gladly; but I can pay my way, Morse.”
“That’s all right,” answered Morse, sensing the excitement of his guest; “we’ll not talk of payment. Tell me about your trip, if you feel up to it. And join me in a hot toddy.”
He touched a bell, and a deft man-servant answered, retiring to bring in the necessary concomitants.
“This beats chacta,” said Murdock, as he sipped the steaming liquid. “And this”—his eyes roved round the big room, the walls set with well-filled bookcases that reached half their height, the spaces above covered with curios and trophies of the chase, mostly South American—“this is a long way from Ucali’s hut on the headwaters of the Xingu.”
He lapsed into a reverie, staring into the fire, his skull-like head sunk between his hands, as if he could see in the glowing coals the seething cataracts of a torrent racing between rugged sandstone palisades clothed with dense forests, where the lianas writhed between the trees and bound them together in an almost impenetrable jungle.
Stanley Morse, gentleman adventurer, who spent his bountiful income in the exploration of unknown lands for the sheer love of sport and the thrill of danger, watched his guest pityingly. There were hardly ten years between them, he reflected, remembering the man of three years ago, bronzed and lusty, barely entering the prime of life. Now he seemed sixty, twice Morse’s own age, and prematurely old at that. Presently he relapsed with a long sigh, finished his toddy, and settled back amid the cushions luxuriantly.
“The headwaters of the Xingu. That was where you came out?” Morse queried. “Don’t talk if you are too tired. Let it go until tomorrow, and turn in.”
“There may be no tomorrow,” answered the orchid hunter. There was nothing morbid in his tone. He spoke cheerfully, as one who recognizes overpowering odds
and accepts them bravely. “So I shall talk tonight. Yes, that is where I came out of the carrasco (brush)—alone. But the story I want to tell you begins back of that, on the chapadao (plateau) between the Xingu and the Manoel, south of Para, in Matto Grosso State.”
He turned his head, with its dark eyes glowing in deep hollows sunk in the skin that looked like brown parchment, and spoke in a low tone fraught with impressiveness.
“Did you know, Morse,” he queried, “that there was a great city on the southern part of the Amazonian plateau?”
“It hardly surprises me,” said Morse. “I’ve never seen any evidences in Brazil myself, but I made a trip to Chan Chan, in Peru, near Trujillo. Pre-Inca they call it. Not much left but a honeycomb of mud walls now, though.”
“Mud walls! Pish! I’m not talking of ruins, man! I mean a living city. Temples cut from the living rock, great buildings of stone set along the shore of a mighty lake amid tropical foliage and cultivated fields. Paved roadways, and people thronging them clad in brilliant garments. Boats on the lake, with banks of oars and striped sails. A city set in a bowl of gray cliffs in the shadow of a snow-capped peak with a plume of smoke coming from it like the curl of a lazy fire!”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Twice!”
He spoke with conviction, and Morse for a moment shared the vision. The next sentence shattered it:
“Twice in the air. Don’t think I’m crazy, Morse. It was a mirage, but even a fata Morgana has to be projected from an actual object. And there’s tangible proof to back it up. They were not air castles I saw, not the ‘airy segments of a dream.’”
Morse tried to veil his growing skepticism. The orchid hunter was Scotch, and the Gaels, he reflected, were apt to be “fey” and see visions. The man was physically and probably mentally sick. But he humored him. “A mirage is an optical effect rather than an optical illusion, I believe,” he said. “Undoubtedly there was some solid basis for the reflection. Are you sure about the smoke above the peak? It was my impression that
Brazil was free from disturbances. It’s a long time since I read up anything about it, but I seem to remember that there were no eruptive features since the Devonian period, according to the scientists.”
“A fig for the scientists! Let the scientists travel a country instead of theorizing about it. Show me the scientist who has hacked his way through twelve miles of carrasco and charted the lower Amazonian chapadaos. I lay no claim to being a scientist. I know one branch of botany, but I know it well, and I know enough of geology in that connection to tell a crystalline formation from an amorphous. The valleys of the Madeira, Tapajos, Manoel, and Xingu are floored with crystalline. And the rest of the formations are tilted and faulty. In fifteen years I’ve known a third as many temblors (earthquakes), and I know a volcano when I see one. Twice I saw it, across the canyon—the temples by the lake, the snow-capped cone, and the plume of vapor.
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