sisted nevertheless, "that you said you were
going to explore the ocean floor under the Sargasso Sea?"

"And so I did." Professor Stevens admitted, a smile moving that gray
beard now and his blue eyes twinkling merrily. "But the Sargasso, an
area almost equal to Europe, covers other land as well--land of far
more recent submergence than Atlantis, which foundered in 9564 B. C.,
according to Plato. What I am going to look for is this newer lost
continent, or island rather--namely, the great island of Antillia, of
which the West Indies remain above water to-day."

"Antillia?" queried Larry Hunter, wonderingly. "I never heard of it."

Again the professor regarded his interviewer sternly.

"There are many things you have never heard of, young man," he told
him. "Antillia may be termed the missing link between Atlantis and
America. It was there that Atlantean culture survived after the
appalling catastrophe that wiped out the Atlantean homeland, with its
seventy million inhabitants, and it was in the colonies the Antillians
established in Mexico and Peru, that their own culture in turn
survived, after Antillia too had sunk."

"My Lord! You don't mean to say the Mayas and Incas originated on that
island of Antillia?"

"No, I mean to say they originated on the continent of Atlantis, and
that Antillia was the stepping stone to the New World, where they
built the strange pyramids we find smothered in the jungle--even as
thousands of years before the Atlanteans established colonies in Egypt
and founded the earliest dynasties of pyramid-building Pharaohs."

* * * * *

Larry was pushing his pencil furiously.

"Whew!" he gasped. "Some story, Professor!"

"To the general public, perhaps," was the reply. "But to scholars of
antiquity, these postulates are pretty well known and pretty well
accepted. It remains but to get concrete evidence, in order to prove
them to the world at large--and that is the object of my expedition."

More hurried scribbling, then:

"But, say--why don't you go direct to Atlantis and get the real dope?"

"Because that continent foundered so long ago that it is doubtful if
any evidence would have withstood the ravages of time," Professor
Stevens explained, "whereas Antillia went down no earlier than 200 B.
C., archaeologists agree."

"That answers my question," declared Larry, his admiration for this
doughty graybeard rising momentarily. "And now, Professor, I wonder