Their reunion with their brother was all very formal, with touching of fingertips taking the place of kissing. The Ritual of Greeting lasted right on into mid-afternoon. Then at last they escorted him from the ship, and—by courtesy of my carrier, Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimor Septagimot Stolifax Blayl, Premianor Tisilan of Athilan, I got a chance finally to set foot on the shore of lost Atlantis.
But I didn’t get very far. Off we went to the nearby Temple-of the Dolphins, where a kind of tent had been set up for the Prince just inside the outermost row of perfect marble columns. Here he had to be purified, purged of any taint that he might have picked up while dwelling among the grubby uncivilized people of the mainland.
This Rite of Purification took another day and a night. They bathed him in milk and covered him with the petals of red and yellow flowers and chanted again and again, “May you be free of all uncleanness. May you be free of all uncleanness.” On and on and on. “May the dirt of the mainland no longer cling to your skin,” they chanted. “May you be free of all uncleanness.” Over and over, until I thought I’d lose my mind.
But it taught me something important about this place.There’s real four-star racism here. That’s what the Rite of Purification is all about. The Athilantans have deep contempt for the mainlanders. They are the dirt of the mainland from which the rite is supposed to cleanse the Prince.
The Athilantan name for the mainlanders is “the dirt people.”
My command of Athilantan grammar isn’t yet as strong as I’d like it to be, so I’m not sure whether they mean that the mainlanders live in dirt (that is, their scruffy caves and leantos) or that they actually are dirt. But I think it’s the latter.
So these noble, splendid, magnificently civilized Athilantans regard the people of Stone Age Europe as not much more than animals. Have you noticed that, too, out in Naz Glesim? Maybe it’s different there, where just a handful of Athilantans live in the midst of hundreds of mainlanders. They’d have to be more careful there. But here, where there isn’t a mainland face to be seen, the Athilantans don’t even try to hide their scorn for them.
“We thank you, O Gods, for the return of our beloved Prince to the human realm from the land of the dirt people.”
Get that little distinction, Lora. The Prince has returned to the human realm.
I suppose we can’t really blame the Athilantans for feeling-superior, considering that they live in amazing marble palaces with electric lighting and indoor plumbing while the rest of the world lives in crude Stone Age ways. Still, it’s going too far, I think, to insist that the Stone Age people on the mainland aren’t even human. Backward, yes, by Athilantan standards. But to say that they aren’t human? That’s sheer arrogance.
When you take into account how deeply the Athilantans seem to despise the mainlanders, my earlier notion about why there haven’t been any Athilantan artifacts found in any of the Paleolithic sites our archaeologists have excavated makes even more sense. If you’ve been ruled for thousands of years by a superior race that regards you as dirt, and suddenly the homeland of that superior race gets blown to kingdom come by a volcano, that gives you a good opportunity to rise up and kill all the surviving overlords. And then you might just want to take every last scrap of material belonging to your former masters that reminds you of your subjugation—every jar and dish and sculpture and even their tools, useful though they might be—and dump it all in the ocean while you’re at it. Makes sense to me.
We need to check it out via time-search. Once we’ve begun our studies of the actual destruction epoch of Athilantan history, we ought to try to find out what happened afterward on the mainland, whether there really was the kind of purge of the hated masters that I’m suggesting. I think it stands to reason that there was, considering the ugly racist attitudes I’ve started to uncover in the Athilantan culture.
Anyway: I ought to go on with my story. I’m here to observe, not to judge.
The Ritual of Purification came to a glorious finale, with Prince Ram clambering into an alabaster tub filled with wine and honey and coming forth dripping wet while choirs of priests and priestesses sang hosannas. Servants robed him in a kind of toga of fine-spun white cotton trimmed with blue, which is what everyone wears here. (The white-and-blue color scheme, like the marble buildings with the fine stone columns, helps to reinforce the general Greek atmosphere of Athilan. As does the sunny springlike climate.) And off he went, with me watching goggle-eyed from my vantage point within his mind, down the whole tremendous length of the Concourse of the Sky on foot to pay his formal respects to his mighty father, Harinamur, Grand Darionis of Athilan.
The procession took all day. The Concourse of the Sky is lined on both sides by splendid majestic buildings of classical design—it’s as grand a street as the Champs Elysees, or Fifth Avenue, or Piccadilly—and people looked down from every window as the Prince went by. He was bareheaded and wore nothing but that toga and sandals. The sun was very strong as he set out, but by midday the sky darkened and the usual daily rain came, a terrific downpour. He didn’t seem even to notice. I don’t know how long a walk it was— miles—but he never gave a hint that he might be getting tired.
And eventually he reached the imperial palace, a splendid-many-columned marble building that sits high up on a huge stone platform overlooking a great plaza, at the far end of the Concourse of the Stars.
He paused there, at the foot of a flight of what must have been at least a hundred immense marble steps, and looked up and up and up. At the top of this colossal stone staircase was a broad porch. His father the King was waiting there for him. And Prince Ram, who had just walked something like ten or eleven hours through the streets of the city to reach this place without resting even for a moment, unhesitatingly began to climb those hundred gigantic steps.
“Hail, O One King,” the Prince cried. “Harinamur, Grand Darionis! And then—in a softer voice: “Father.”
“Ram,” the king said. And they embraced.
It was incredibly touching. Mighty father, invincible son: so happy to see each other again, so intensely happy. I was always fairly close with my own father, you know. But I never felt, with him, anything remotely like the powerful force of love that was passing between these two as they hugged, in full view of the Athilantan multitudes, on that gleaming marble porch atop those hundred giant stairs.
It was a little embarrassing, too, eavesdropping on Prince Ram’s feelings in this moment of reunion. But you have to force yourself not to think about things like that. As I’ve said before, and hardly need to point out to you, being a time-traveler involves being a sneak and a snooper and an eavesdropper on somebody else’s most private moments, and there’s simply no way around it. Since we can’t go to the past ourselves, we have to invade the minds of its inhabitants without their knowing it, and you can’t pretend that there’s anything very nice about that. But it’s necessary. That’s the only justification there is. If we’re going to salvage anything out of the vanished past, we have to do it this way, because this is the only way there is.
The King is the most awesome human being I have ever seen. In grandeur and presence and authority he is like a combination of Moses, Abraham Lincoln, and the Emperor Augustus. He’s very tall, particularly for an Athilantan, with long white hair and a thick, full, white beard. He has a look of such nobility and wisdom that you want to drop down before him and kiss his sandals. This day he was dressed in purple robes woven through with thread of gold and silver, and he wore a crown made of laurel leaves set on golden spikes.
With immense solemnity he took Prince Ram in his arms and held him close, and then he stepped back so that they could look in each other’s eyes; and in the King’s dark shining eyes I saw such warmth, such depths of love, that I actually felt sad and envious, thinking that no one else on Earth could ever have been loved by his father the way this prince was.