Swan Song.

Dear Mr. Tremaine (and also Miss A. R. Lone):
	Alas and alackaday. Here’s “that man” again! Just as I had about decided to give up trying to make the world Atlantis conscious and leave the controversy I so innocently started in the capable hands of the Ph. D.’s and real scientists, I picked up your current issue and read Miss Long’s diverting little yarn, Reverse Phylogeny. I discovered myself in the story with the name changed from White to Black and my good friends (I hope) and hecklers, the science-fictioners, Dr. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller, transformed into a sort of composite Professor McScribe.
	I don’t know whether to sue Miss Long for libel or pin a medal on her. I only know that I laughed myself silly over the picture of Professor Miller-Clark-McScribe, Ph. D. under the table, making sounds like an anthropoid ape. Also, Miss Long, I thought your description of the inundation was quite graphic and if Theopholis Black was really meant to be me, you were right. I can’t swim, so I probably quite definitely drowned back in 9000 B. C. If your character, Aloyious O’Flannigan, is also based on fact and cares to experiment on me hypnotically, I shall be happy to undertake the ordeal. (Please wire transportation!) But being a landlubber, I strenuously object to the fish! However, sucker or no sucker, I think your story a gem and I sincerely hope that all the Professor McScribes of this enlightened (?) age read it with as much pleasure as I did. Perhaps a few of them may discover in it the handwriting on the wall.
	Seriously, though, the history of Atlantis is to me no myth or fable, but the true tale of a beautiful land that no longer exists upon the earth’s surface, and the story of a highly civilized people who dwelt upon the land, a people so ancient that their very memory is lost, to us in the dim mists of antiquity. Their history is a most wonderful one, and has only descended to us in the form of myths and sagas, so warped and distorted that it is difficult for us to ascertain the kernel of truth that is to be found in them.
	These people came to this beautiful land originally from the far-away part of the world now covered by what we call the Pacific Ocean, where they lived on the mighty continent of Mu, which the late Colonel Churchward affirms sank in 12,000 B. C. We find the remains of their mighty civilization to-day in many of the South Pacific islands. In the Marquesas, on Manga Reva, Easter and Hawaii, there are Cyclopian evidences of their culture. But, alas, the beautiful paradise to which they eventually migrated when Mu, the motherland disappeared, is also gone, sunk beneath the mighty waters that gave it birth and which for thousands of years protected it from savage tribes and enabled it to be the cradle of our present culture and beget the colonies which arose and became mighty millenniums after it was gone.
	This land was called by many names by our own ancients. The Greeks knew it as the Garden of Hesperides. The Egyptians called it the Land of Kui, the Islands of the Blessed. It was heaven to them, the racial memory of the paradise that was, and they believed the souls of their departed migrated to it after death. We know it as the Garden of Eden, and that it was finally destroyed by a mighty flood.
	Its people called themselves the sons of Ad, so we, their descendants, are the sons of Adam. They called their home Adlan, the land of Ad, and the mighty surrounding sea became the Ad-lantic. They traveled from west to east to discover their new home, just as thousands of years later a man named Columbus traveled from east to west to rediscover America. The sons of Ad already knew America. They had established mighty nations in Guatemala and around Lake Titicaca in South America ages before the Incas in Peru and the Aztecs in Mexico had risen from barbarism. They were of many races and tongues, as natives of a large continent are bound to be, but they had two things in common: they worshiped the sun, called Ra-Mu; and they were mighty builders.
	The sons of Ad migrated to Adlan quite gradually, over a period of some hundreds of years. In small boats, equipped with sails and oars, they traveled from island to island. Gradually many of these islands, which were of volcanic origin, disappeared and their migrations stopped. As thousands of years passed their memory was forgotten by their descendants in Central and South America, except in myth and the meager priestly records which, as yet, we are unable to read.
	Adlan was situated some three hundred miles off the east coast of Africa and Spain. It was protected from the chilling blasts of glacial Europe by high mountain ranges. The Sahara Desert was then part of a vast inland sea, the remains of which we now call the Mediterranean. The Atlas mountains were islands in that sea, much as the Azores and Canaries, mountaintops of vanished Adlan, are now islands in the Atlantic. Spain was connected with Africa at the Gibraltar Strait and England waa a part of Europe. Tremendous ice fields covered the greater part of Europe and Asia, and mighty mammoths, bisons and other ferocious animals roamed that part of the land not covered by the glaciers. Preglacial civilizations established as colonies from Mu in the Gobi and parts of Tibet were destroyed by the ice. Great climatic changes had taken place over a large portion of the earth’s surface and mankind lived in caves and fought a bitter struggle for the most primitive of existences.
	But in Adlan all was serene. In Adlan, protected by high mountains and warm ocean streams, man dwelt in beautiful villas and palaces, built mighty pyramids, fought no wars, had no enemies, prospered, became mighty, began sending out colonists to explore this savage, new world about them, and built the mighty empire that was theirs before their fall. Hence we see the birth of Archsean Greece, mighty Crete of the Minos, the Hawk Kings of Egypt and Saturnian Italy. We have the Cro-Magnon remains of France and the ancient Basques of Spain. And by the same token we have a garbled mythology coming down to us from some ten thousands of years before Christ, so full of supernatural monsters, gods and goddesses, dragons, chimeras, heroes, giants, etc., that it is no wonder we throw up our hands in despair and let them all go as the childish imaginings of a primitive people.
	The thing we miss is the indubitable fact that these beautiful myths are impossible of conception in the mind of a savage. Distorted they may be, clothed with the fancy trappings of thousands of years of embellishment and so-called improvements, but deep down through the imaginative outer husks they can be but the racial memories of a people, once civilized, who have descended to the depths of savagery because of the loss of the all-important source of their being; who have arisen again, thousands of years later, after bitter struggles, to rediscover that civilization and knowledge they’d long forgotten. Is it any wonder that their dimly remembered past had become a hazy collection of improbable fairy tales which, when waved before the eyes of modern science like the Gorgon’s head, freezes their minds to stone and atrophies their intelligence?
	Man, the earthling, is earthbound. As Mother Nature treats him, so his growth is recorded. When she is kind he prospers. When she is cruel he perishes, to rise again when once more she smiles upon him. Atlantis arose, became mighty and fell, all at the dictates of great geological changes in the earth’s past. Who can doubt it? The changes are still occurring and will continue to occur until the end of time. Atlantis has left us no actual relic of her existence, but she has left her imprint on every nation and every people, if we but have the patience to look and the eyes to see.
	So, in penning the foregoing eulogy and resume of my Atlantean theory, I write my last letter to your magazine. Others may or may not carry on. I sincerely hope they do. However, I have “shot my bolt,” as the saying goes, and, as my parting swan song, may I leave these words to all the friends and friendly enemies who have written me personally and through the medium of our beloved magazine: Do not sell Atlantis short. It is our past, our Garden of Eden—as sure as God made the apples that Mother Eve ate on its fabulous shores. And that past is more beautiful than any that the mind of man has yet conceived or dreamed of. In Atlantis was paradise. Some day, God and an enlightened science willing, we may find both again.—James A. White, 405 East 3rd—Virginia Apts., Wichita, Kans.