The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis

Some ideas that have made me sit up.”
    Mr. Jimmerson said, “I think I’d like something to eat, Austin, if you don’t mind. And some cold tomato juice.”
    â€œOf course you do. I should have thought of that. Any civilized person would have thought of it, but no, not me. I was too busy talking. Me and my big mouth!”
    He called room service and had some food sent up on a rolling table. The professor wasn’t hungry, and in any case, he said, he always dined alone. He spoke with sleepyeyed hauteur.
    It came out that Golescu was a Scottish Rite Freemason, which is to say, oddly enough, a Mason of the French school. He was also a Rosicrucian, an Illuminate, a Brother of Luxor, a Cabalist, a Theosophist, a Knight of Corfu and many other things too, some of them seemingly incompatible. He showed his membership cards with some pride. It came out too that he was a student of alchemy, and not the symbolic kind with its concern for the redemption of man’s corrupt nature, but the real thing, the bubbling, smoking alchemy of the crucible that transforms base metal into dense yellow gold. He had academic credentials. He held degrees from the Institute of Oil and Gases and the Institute of Nonferrous Metals in Bucharest, had taught “science” at the Female Normal College in Dobro and had been librarian at the Royal Wallachian Observatory, with its three-inch reflecting telescope, limited mostly to moon studies, atop Mount Grobny. But his abiding interests were alchemy and a lost continent called Mu, a once great land 6,000 miles long and 3,000 miles wide that was now at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
    The food came, Mr. Jimmerson dug in. Popper and Golescu resumed their discussion of alchemy, with Popper stating forcefully that while the Gnomon Society was in fact privy to this ancient secret (though the practice was under ban in the New Cycle), the Rosicrucians, otherwise very decent fellows, had been running a stupendous bluff in the matter, ever since their first shadowy appearance in Europe some three hundred years ago. They knew nothing. Golescu put questions to him. Popper’s answers were ready if equivocal. Mr. Jimmerson ate his supper and said little.
    Out of courtesy rather than any real curiosity, he asked the professor how he had happened to leave his homeland—was it not called the breadbasket of Europe?—and come to America.
    Golescu considered the question. “Romanian peoples are restless peoples,” he said. “Our first thought is to fly, to get away from other Romanians. Here, there, Australia, Washington, Patagonia. Impatient peoples, you see. Always the jumping around. Very nervous. In all Romanian literature there is not a single novel with a coherent plot.”
    Mr. Jimmerson had difficulty following this kind of thing but Popper encouraged the little man and drew him out.
    Golescu became louder and more assertive, revealing himself as an independent thinker. Charles Darwin, he said, had bungled his research and gotten everything wrong. Organisms were changing, it was true enough, but instead of becoming more complex and, as it were, ascending, they were steadily degenerating into lower and lower forms, ultimately back to mud. In support of this he cited the poetic testimony of Hesiod, and gave the example of savages with complex languages, a vestige of better days. He had dubbed the process “bio-entropy” and said that it could clearly be seen at work in everyday life. One’s father was invariably a better man than one’s self, and one’s grandfather better still. And what a falling off there had been since the Golden Days of Mu, when man was indeed a noble creature.
    He was an authority on history and literature and boasted of having solved mysteries in these fields that had baffled the greatest scholars of Europe. Through Golescuvian analysis he had been able to make positive identification of the Third Murderer in Macbeth and