Masters of Atlantis

  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 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.

  “So, 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.

  “Go 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 to give a demonstration of his ambidexterity.

  “See, not only is Golescu writing with both hands but he is also looking at you and conversing with you at the same time in a most natural way. Hello, good morning, how are you? Good morning, Captain, how are you today, very fine, thank you. And here is Golescu still writing and at the same time having his joke on the telephone. Hello, yes, good morning, this is the Naval Observatory but no, I am very sorry, I do not know the time. Nine-thirty, ten, who knows? Good morning, that is a beautiful dog, sir, can I know his name, please? Good morning to you, madam, the capital of Delaware is Dover. In America the seat of government is not always the first city. I give you Washington for another. And now if you would like to speak to me a sequence of random numbers, numbers of two digits, I will not only continue to look at you and converse with you in this easy way but I will write the numbers as given with one hand and reversed with the other hand while I am at the same time adding the numbers and giving you running totals of both columns, how do you like that? Faster, please, more numbers, for Golescu this is nothing. ...”

  Popper said, “Oh boy, is he cooking now! How about this fellow?” Mr. Jimmerson tried to cut the performance short by calling room service and asking for another pot of coffee and some more cherry p
ie. Despite the interruptions, the professor went on and on, and again declined the offer of food, his policy of solitary dining extending to cover even such small fare as this.

  His last show of the night had to do with some small pinnate leaves taken from a vine or herb that he refused to identify. “Not at this time, no, I am too sorry. That is for me alone to know.” He had taken five or six of the leaves from his coat pocket and was holding them up for examination. They were still faintly green and glossy on the upper side, though dry and curling.

  “Isn’t he something?” said Popper, pointing with a toothpick. “Look at that, sir, leaves. He had leaves in his pocket. I wonder what kind of leaves they are. In what way are they special, do you think? Well, you can just bet there’s a story behind them, and a good one too. What in the world will this fellow come up with next?”

  Mr. Jimmerson didn’t care to guess. He was ready for bed.

  Popper said, “Wait. I think I’ve got it. I do believe Cezar is going to brew us a pot of tea. Yes, some sort of Romanian health beverage or Rosicrucian Pluto Water.”

  “Not tea, no,” said Golescu. He had cleared a space on the table, pushing back the crockery and napkins and bones and rinds and crusts and other rejected edges of things, and placed there a candle stub and two glass vials of chemicals and a little hand-cranked grinder, with which he began to macerate the leaves. “A demitasse, eh, ha ha, such a funny joke. Perhaps you like this cyanide in your tea. What, you take one gram or two? For me, no, thank you very much. Ha ha. Tea.”

  Mr. Jimmerson retired. He slept through the crushed leaves experiment, waking now and then to note with irritation that the lights were still on and that Austin and the professor were still talking. On his next trip, and God grant it would not be soon, he must remember to bring along his plywood board for a bed stiffener. And tomorrow he must not forget to pick up a box of dark chocolates for Fanny. A mingling of darkness and light. He would have used that, Pletho’s favorite phrase for the world, to good effect in his radio speech. He had never had much confidence in the victory plan, or even fully understood all its many points, but why had the radio address been canceled? Politics? He had never thought much of Roosevelt anyway, or of his party. Rum, Romanism and Rebellion wasn’t the half of it these days.

  HE WENT back to Indiana and took little further interest in the war. He slept through much of it. Let someone else deal with the Central Powers this time. And the Japs. According to the newspapers, the little monkeys couldn’t see very well. They were clever, and quick on their feet too, remarkable jumpers, but their jiujitsu would prove useless against the rapid and sustained fire of our Lewis guns.

  Still, as with many others, Mr. Jimmerson was to suffer loss and misfortune. Even the birth of his son turned out to be a mixed blessing. Coming to motherhood so late, Fanny was much taken with the child, and she lavished all her attention on this tardy arrival, baby Jerome, to the neglect of her husband. “Look, Lamar!” she said. “What a little pig he is for his milk!” Sometimes Mr. Jimmerson held Jerome on his knee and patted his back and said jip jip jip in his face in the way he had seen others do, but he really didn’t know what to make of the drooling little fellow and his curling pink feet, almost prehensile. And he was at a loss to understand the change that had come over his wife. People seemed to be pulling away from him, receding.

  He passed more and more of his time alone, in his wingback chair before the fireplace in the Red Room, a copy of the Codex Pappus in his lap. At the age of forty-six he had become chair-bound. Pharris White’s remarks had set him wondering if there weren’t perhaps some higher secrets he had missed, something implicit, some deeply hidden pattern in the fine tapestry of Pletho’s thought that had escaped him, and so he read and pondered and drifted in and out of sleep while the baby crawled about on the Temple carpets and great armies clashed around the world. At the age of forty-six Mr. Jimmerson was already looking forward to his senescence.

  Meanwhile, Sir Sydney Hen, Bart., had become mobile. Now radiant with health and joined in a kind of marriage to the rich widow Babette, he began to stir. His new book, Approach to Knowing, had just been published, and it was his claim that he had written the entire work, excepting only bits of connective matter, while in a threeday Gnomonic trance, this being an exalted state of consciousness not to be confused with an ordinary hypnotic stupor or any sort of Eastern rapture. It was revealed to him in the trance that he had “completed the triangle” and “scaled the cone” and been granted “the gift of ecstatic utterance,” all of which meant that he had gone beyond Mastery and was no longer bound by law or custom.

  Deep waters, as Hen himself admitted. There was more. Other men—other Gnomons, that is—could aspire to this singular state, and might even achieve it by undergoing a rigorous program of instruction in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Babette owned a house in Cuernavaca, a sprawling, enclosed place with swimming pool and blazing gardens, and it was here that Hen established his New Croton Institute for Advanced Gnomonic Study.

  Candidates for the school were carefully selected. They had to have clear eyes and all their limbs. There was a fee of $1,200, payable in advance, nonrefundable. There was one week of forgetting followed by three weeks of learning. There was a rule of silence. They slept on a cold tile floor and fed on alfalfa sprouts and morning glory seeds. Their reading was restricted to Hen’s books. Hen stood behind a screen as he taught them, in the morning and again in the afternoon, to lute music, or rather to lute strumming. Noel Kinlow could not actually play the lute; he simply trailed his fingers across the strings from time to time, on a signal from Hen, to point up some significant recurring word or phrase. The candidates were bled weekly, by Kinlow, and not of the customary pint but of an imperial quart at each draining. On successful completion of the program, with thin new blood coursing through their emaciated bodies, they were at last permitted to look Hen in the face. He embraced them and presented them with signed copies of Approach to Knowing and with some black gloves of the kind worn by the Templar Masons, and sent them on their way, staggering across Babette’s courtyard. Any lingering, as of graduation day fellowship, was discouraged. Kinlow herded them to the door, saw them clear of it and closed it sharply behind them.

  This Noel Kinlow was Hen’s current male companion, a young Englishman who had been an elevator boy at the apartment house in Toronto when Hen picked him up. Babette did not approve of the arrangement but was comfortably resigned to it. As a woman of the world she knew this was the price she must pay for being Lady Hen, consort to the Master of Gnomons (Amended Order), and she found the price acceptable.

  They made a striking group. Hen, of course, was always distinctive in his black cape and red Poma. Babette, who was buxom to say the least of it, wore bright yellow caftans and other loose garments that trailed the floor, so that one could only guess at the contours of her body, though one could make a pretty good guess. She was also fond of pendulous ear ornaments. The reedy Kinlow, in contrast to Babette, liked tight clothes, the tighter the better, and he usually came forth in a pinch-waist lounge suit made of some mottled, speckled, yellowish-green material. It was a hue not met with in nature and not often seen outside the British Isles, where it has always been a great favorite with tailors. The little yapping terrier, when traveling, sported a starched white ruff.

  All through the war years this colorful family—Sir Sydney, Lady Hen, the little dog and the light-stepping Kinlow—could be found bowling up and down the continent between Toronto and Cuernavaca, sometimes in a Pullman compartment and sometimes in a white Bentley sports saloon, chatting merrily, sipping Madeira and snacking on pâté and Stilton cheese, there being no rule of silence or forbidden food at Hen’s antinomian level.

  Mr. Jimmerson was saddened to see his old friend now so completely estranged and sinking ever deeper into the murk of self.

  He said, “I don’t understand what he means by going beyond Mastery. What’s next, do you think, Austin?”

  “It’s hard to say wi
th Hen, sir. Nothing would surprise me. Astral traveling. Tarot cards. At this moment he may be prancing through the woods playing a flute. The man’s an enigma to me.”

  They were sitting in the Red Room before a fire. Mr. Jimmerson was turning over the pages of Hen’s latest book, Approach to Growing, a sequel to Knowing. Popper was reading an encyclopedia article about California. On the table between them, under the fruitcake and coffee cups, there was a mud-stained letter from Sergeant Mapes in Italy, which neither of them had gotten around to opening. Above the fire-place there was a color portrait of the Master in full regalia, and from the mantel there hung Jerome’s Christmas stocking, lumpy with tangerines and Brazil nuts, though he had no teeth. Jerome was asleep. Fanny was out with church friends distributing Christmas baskets to the poor.

  Popper fed a glazed cherry to Squanto. The jaybird was getting old. One wing drooped and he no longer talked much in an outright way. During the night he muttered. Mr. Jimmerson leaned forward and jostled the burning logs about.

  “But why should Sydney be so bitter?” he said. “All these ugly personal remarks about you and me.”

  “Ah now, that’s something else. That’s quickly explained. First there’s his nasty disposition. Then there’s his envy of your precedence in the Society. Then there’s this. Hen is English. We, happily, are Americans. In the brief space of his lifetime he has seen his country eclipsed by ours as a great power. Hen very naturally resents it.”

  “I never thought of Sydney in that way, as a patriot.”

  “Listen to this, sir. The motto of California is ‘Eureka!’ Isn’t that interesting? Eureka. I have found it. What is our motto here in Indiana? Do you happen to know?”

  “Let’s see. No. Our state bird—”

  “Surely we have a motto.”

  “Yes, but I can’t remember what it is. I’ve been doing some thinking, Austin, and I have an idea that Sydney must be under the influence of some malignant magnetic force. This fat lady he has taken up with. I wonder if—”