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rare occasions male children were sent over to the Atla to be
devoured. The parents of so fortunate a child were advanced in
rank on the spot, and had special privileges conferred on them,
sometimes even being transferred to a 'House of Houses'. All
those who dwelt in the High House were veiled whenever they
appeared, in order to prevent it being known that they were of
the same appearance in all respects as their inferiors. This
ordinance had been made after the Great Conspiracy, with which I
shall deal in the chapter on History.
.pa
VI.
OF THE UNDERGROUND GARDENS
OF ATLAS, AND OF THE ALLEGED
COMMERCE OF THE ATLANTEANS
WITH INCUBI, SUCCUBI, AND THE
DEMONS OF DARKNESS.
I have referred to the contempt with which the Atlanteans were
prone to regard the vegetable kingdom. Animals, including man,
shared their scorn. The idea may have been that with their
advantages they ought to have done much better for themselves.
Minerals, however, were regarded as helpless; and hence the
extraordinary attention paid to them. Beneath the houses the rock
had been tunneled out into grottos, some in odd fantastic forms,
but most in immense polyhedra or combinations of curves. Each
'house' had some twenty of such gardens. Three reagents were used
in the cultivation; the 'seed of metals', 'the seed of Light',
and the seed of '', an untranslatable idea approximating to our
mystic's interpretation of 'Alpha and Omega'. The two former
produced simple effects, the first formed jewels, self-luminious,
which yet grew like flowers, the second similar effects with
metals; while the third brought any mineral to flower in the most
extravagant combinations of colour and form. All such conditions
as texture, hardness, elasticity, and physical attributes in
general, were considered worthy of the profoundest attention.
As an instance of these, I may describe particular gardens.
One would have a roof of softly-glowing sapphires, foxglove,
bluebell or gentian, and between these champak stars of ruby. The
walls would be covered with tendrils of vine within whose depths
lurked tiny blossoms of amethyst. The floor would be of
malachite, but alive, growing as a coral does, softer than any
earthly moss and more elastic to the tread. On every darker leaf
might glow dew-drops of self-strung diamond formed from the
carbon dioxide of the air by the action of the 'seed of Light'.
Another grotto would be a monochrome of blue, various copper
salts being 'planted' everywhere, and growing in incrustations
and festoons of every shade of blue from the faintest tinge of
coerulean azure and green and grey, in whose abyss would be seen
shapes of anemonies, perhaps of such hues as iron oxide, silver
chromate, and cupramonium cyanurate. All this floor would in all
respects resemble water but for its greater solidity, and
floating on it would be giant lilies, great green leaves of
emerald with cups of pearl not less than twelve feet in diameter,
with corollae of pure gold, so fine that they glimmered green,
with pistils of platinum on whose tops trembled great pigeon-
blooded rubies. Another might be wholly of metal, a mere bower of
jasmine, with its floor of violets. The law of growth of these
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