'If you are right we should be well advised to exclude him from our councils.'
'Certainly. Except in the case of some plan which necessitates an open united attack I think it would be wise if we all kept our own counsel for the moment.' Count Axel also had a germ of a scheme already in his mind which was too vague for him to wish to share until he had had further time to deliberate upon it.
'However,' he added blandly, 'I believe the Doctor to be more sinned against than sinning. He could not possibly have suspected their intention of shipping us, and him, down to the Falklands. Consequently he is probably almost as much at his wit's end as we are now and would do anything he possibly could to help us. You see if my theory is right they've tricked him too and he would commit murder rather than be robbed of his great chance to rediscover Atlantis.'
'You really do believe in Atlantis then? Surely if the Doctor is in with Slinger's gang that adds enormously to the supposition that it's only a myth and that they've utilised the old story to bait in an exceedingly clever job.'
'No, my dear Captain. There you are wrong. That is just where these people have been so diabolically cunning. The Doctor is in dead earnest regarding his Atlantis theory so they made use of his fanatical conviction about it to induce Camilla and her friends to come on board this ship. Believe me, so certain am I that the Doctor is right, that if I had a million, and we had some unquestionable manner in which we could prove our bet, 1 would wager you nine-tenths of it that the land once trodden by living Atlanteans now lies beneath our feet.
'You know where we are then?'
'Yes. I was so perturbed by what had taken place that I hardly realised the ship had left Horta until we had been under steam for the best part of an hour but I looked out of my porthole then and saw from the stars that we were moving East South East. Unless I am completely astray, that smudge of land which we can still see to the north-west now must be the south-east point of Pico Island.'
'That's it,' agreed the McKay. 'I took a look at the stars myself immediately the ship got under way and I'm able to verify the outline of Pico because, although it's years ago now, I've sailed before in these waters. You heard that the bathysphere had been sent down to the bottom?'
'Yes, they are reeling it in now. It took one hour and forty-four minutes going down. 5,168 feet the Doctor told me. I can hardly contain my impatience to learn if it reaches the surface again intact. So much depends on that.'
'Getting on for nine-hundred fathoms, eh? The pressure must be something tremendous at that depth. Do you mean to chance going down there if the test has proved satisfactory?'
'Certainly. I would not forgo the possibility of being among the first to behold these remains which have been under water for over eleven thousand years for anything in the world—not even to be free of this ghastly threat of being marooned on the Falkland Islands afterwards.'
The McKay shrugged his square shoulders. 'Well, each man has his particular kind of fun, but I can't see how you really believe in this old wives' tale. How could such tremendous destruction have taken place in one upheaval? It isn't reasonable.'
'My dear Captain, the site of Atlantis is the very centre of an earthquake region. The nearest coast to it is that of Portugal and it was there that the greatest earthquake of modern times occurred. In Lisbon on the first of November 1775 the sound of thunder was heard underground and immediately afterwards a violent shock threw down the greater part of the city. In six minutes 60,000 persons perished. The entire harbour, built of solid marble, sank down with hundreds of people on it and not one of their bodies ever floated to the surface. A score of great vessels were instantaneously engulfed and disappeared with all their crews as though they had never existed. No trace of them has ever been found since and the water in the place where the fine quay once stood is now five-hundred feet deep.'
'That's terrible enough I grant you, but it was a local calamity.*
'How about the frightful eruptions which devastated the island of Sumbawa, east of Java, in 1815 then? The sound of the explosion was heard for nearly a thousand miles and, in one province, out of a population of 12,000, only twenty-six people escaped with their lives. Whirlwinds carried up men, horses and cattle into the air, tore up the largest trees by the roots and covered the whole sea with ashes and floating timber. The darkness in daytime was as profound as the blackest night and the area covered by the convulsion was 1,000 English miles in circumference. I tell you the accounts of the Flood in our Bible and the Mexicans' sacred book—the Popul Vuh—which are almost identical, are not myths at all but actual records of an historical occurrence; and every indication of the locality in which it took place points to Atlantis. Take the island of Dominica in the Leeward group of the West Indies—the nearest land to the south-west of where the lost continent is believed to have been. That too is full of hot springs and in 1880 there was an eruption there of such magnitude that it rained mud in the streets of Roseau, miles from the centre of the disturbance, and simultaneously there was a cloudburst out of which great gouts of water came streaming from the sky. To read the description of it is to picture an exact replica, upon a minor scale, of the Flood described in Genesis where on the same day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened...'
'All right Count—all right. That's quite enough!' The McKay put up his hands in mock surrender. 'I only wish to God that they were sending us to Dominica instead of to the Falklands. It's a charming climate and I had a friend there once—but that's another story.'
Count Axel smiled. 'Well, believe me or not I am absolutely convinced that Atlantis once existed and that we are now floating above the site it occupied. We may find nothing. Thousands of tons of ashes and volcanic lava may have buried its great buildings before they sank. The ocear bed changes and shifts through submarine eruptions from time to time but if the Atlanteans had pyramids as large and solid as those of Egypt or Mexico the remains of such mighty structures can hardly have disappeared like the flimsy hutments of a native village or even Lisbon's docks, so there is at least a fair chance of our finding them. In any case the search will serve to distract my mind from the damnable fate which appears to have been allotted to us for our very near future.'
'You're right, and the descents will help to take Camilla's thoughts off this devilish business of losing all her money too, 1 hope. However, I prefer to relieve my anxieties by an occasional swim with Sally.'
By half-past twelve, after a submergence of nearly three and a half hours, during nearly the whole of which period it had been travelling either down or up at the rate of a hundred feet every two minutes, the bathysphere reached the surface again.
To Doctor Tisch's overwhelming joy it had withstood the gigantic pressure at 5,000 feet and showed no trace of the strain which must have been placed upon it. Round, solid, its fused quartz portholes projected from its sides like a row of stumpy cannons, uncracked, unscarred, it appeared above the waterline exactly as it had been sent down. As soon as its weighty door had been lifted off a rapid survey of its interior revealed that all was well, and no more water had collected in its sump than was to be expected from the condensation natural during three and a half hours submergence.