two enclosures of earth?"

"Ha! Ha!" chuckled M. Le Mesge.

He smiled as he looked at me. I understood that this smile meant: "Can
he be less obtuse than I had supposed?"

As if with a mighty effort, Morhange broke the silence.

"I understand well enough, I understand.... The three girdles of
water.... But then, you are supposing, sir,--an explanation the
ingeniousness of which I do not contest--you are supposing the exact
hypothesis of the Saharan sea!"

"I suppose it, and I can prove it," replied the irascible little old
chap, banging his fist on the table. "I know well enough what Schirmer
and the rest have advanced against it. I know it better than you do. I
know all about it, sir. I can present all the proofs for your
consideration. And in the meantime, this evening at dinner, you will
no doubt enjoy some excellent fish. And you will tell me if these
fish, caught in the lake that you can see from this window, seem to
you fresh water fish.

"You must realize," he continued, "the mistake of those who, believing
in Atlantis, have sought to explain the cataclysm in which they
suppose the island to have sunk. Without exception, they have thought
that it was swallowed up. Actually, there has not been an immersion.
There has been an emersion. New lands have emerged from the Atlantic
wave. The desert has replaced the sea, the _sebkhas_, the salt lakes,
the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the desolate vestiges of the
free sea water over which, in former days, the fleets swept with a
fair wind towards the conquest of Attica. Sand swallows up
civilization better than water. To-day there remains nothing of the
beautiful isle that the sea and winds kept gay and verdant but this
chalky mass. Nothing has endured in this rocky basin, cut off forever
from the living world, but the marvelous oasis that you have at your
feet, these red fruits, this cascade, this blue lake, sacred witnesses
to the golden age that is gone. Last evening, in coming here, you had
to cross the five enclosures: the three belts of water, dry forever;
the two girdles of earth through which are hollowed the passages you
traversed on camel back, where, formerly, the triremes floated. The
only thing that, in this immense catastrophe, has preserved its
likeness to its former state, is this mountain, the mountain where
Neptune shut up his well-beloved Clito, the daughter of Evenor and
Leucippe, the mother of Atlas, and the ancestress of Antinea, the
so