The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis Page A

of the Fourth Man in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. He had found the Lost Word of Freemasonry and had uttered it more than once, into the air, the Incommunicable Word of the Cabalists, the Verbum Ineffabile . The enigmatic quatrains of Nostradamus were an open book to him. He had a pretty good idea of what the Oracle of Ammon had told Alexander.
    â€œSo, where are your mysteries now?” he said. “Gone. Poof. For me, child’s play.”
    His favorite books, the ones he never tired of dipping into, were Colonel James Churchward’s The Lost Continent of Mu, The Children of Mu and The Sacred Symbols of Mu, along with Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World— though he could only agree with Donnelly’s theories up to a certain point. He was proud of having introduced these works to southeastern Europe. He had presented many papers on them to learned societies, and had given many popular lectures, illustrated with lantern slides.
    â€œGo to Bucharest or Budapest and say ‘Mu’ to any educated man and he will reply to you, ‘Mu? Ah yes, Golescu.’ In Vienna the same. In Zagreb the same. In Sofia you shouldn’t waste your valuable time. The stinking Bulgars they don’t know nothing about Mu and don’t want to know nothing.”
    With a sudden flourish he brought a small copper cylinder from his vest pocket. “How old do you think this is, my friends? A thousand years? Five thousand? Do you think it came from Egypt? From some filthy mummy? Then I am sorry for your ignorance. This is a royal cylinder seal from Mu, the Empire of the Sun. See? The cross and solar device? It is unmistakable. Golescu can even tell you the name of the artisan who made it. Here, use my glass and be good enough to examine these tiny marks. You see? Those strange characters spell the name Kikku, or perhaps Kakko. I admit to you freely that in the state of our present knowledge Muvian vowels are largely guesswork. But yes, I also tell you that a living, breathing man with the sun shining on his face and with a name something like Kikku fashioned this beautiful object in the land of Mu—hold on to your caps— fifty thousand years ago! I would like it back now. And please, no questions about how it came into my hands. Questions about Kikku the coppersmith of Mu? Fine. I am at your service. Only too pleased. Questions about how did Golescu get his hands on this wonderful seal? I am too sorry, no, not at this time. You will only be wasting your valuable breath.”
    Mr. Jimmerson knew a thing or two about sunken continents himself and he was amazed that a college professor such as Golescu could be taken in by Churchward’s nonsense. For he too had read The Lost Continent of Mu , a book in which he had found almost every statement to be demonstrably false. No small literary achievement, that, in its way, he supposed, but then there were people like Golescu, and innocent people as well, perhaps even children, who were gulled by Churchward’s fantastic theories. Donnelly was sound enough, a genuine scholar, but Churchward would have it that Mu—“the Motherland of Man”—was the original civilization on earth, that it was a going concern 25,000 years before Atlantis crowned its first king! What a hoax! Three hundred pages of sustained lying! How was it that the American government couldn’t put a stop to these misrepresentations and this vicious slander of Atlantis? Or at least put a stop to these cocksure foreigners coming into the country with their irresponsible chatter about Mu?
    But Mr. Jimmerson, his temples pounding with blood, saw that it would be improper for him to engage in a quarrel with such a man and he said nothing.
    It was getting late. Golescu, egged on by Popper, seemed to be just reaching his stride. He called for two pencils and “two shits of pepper.” Popper found pencils and sheets of paper. The professor proceeded