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I accordingly proceed to a description of the country.
Aleister Crowley
.PA
I.
OF THE PLAINS BENEATH ATLAS,
AND ITS SERVILE RACE*.
Atlas is the true name of this archipelago--continent is an
altogether false term, for every 'house' or mountain peak was cut
from its fellows by natural, though often very narrow waterways.
The African Atlas is a mere offshoot of the range. It was the
true Atlas that supported the ancient world by its moral and
magical strength, and hence the name of the fabled globe-bearer.
The root is the Lemurian 'Tla' or 'Tlas', black, for reasons
which will appear in due course. 'A' is the feminine prefix,
derived from the shape of the mouth when uttering the sound.
'Black woman' is therefore as near a translation as one can give
in English; the Latin has a closer equivalent.
The mountains are cut off, not only from each other by the
channels of the sea, but from the plains at their feet by cliffs
naturally or artificially smoothed and undercut for at least
thirty feet on every side in order to make access impossible.
These plains had been made flat by generations of labour.
Vines and fruit-trees growing only on the upper slopes, they were
devoted principally to corn, and to grass pastures for the
amphibian herds of Atlas. This corn was of a kind now unknown,
flourishing in sea-water, and the periodical flood-tides served
the same purpose as the Nile in Egypt. Enormous floating stages
of spongy rock--no trees of any kind grew anywhere on the plains
so wood was unknown--supported the villages. These were inhabited
by a type of man similar to the modern Caucasian race. They were
not permitted to use any of the food of their masters, neither
the corn, nor the amphibians, nor the vast supplies of shellfish,
but were fed by what they called "bread from heaven", which
indeed came down from the mountains, being the whole of their
refuse of every kind. The whole population was put to perpetual
hard labour. The young and active tended the amphibians, grew the
corn, collected the shell-fish, gathered the "bread from heaven"
for their elders, and were compelled to reproduce their kind. At
twenty they were considered strong enough for the factory, where
they worked in gangs on a machine combining the features of our
pump and treadmill for sixteen hours of the twentyfour. This
machine supplied Atlas with its 'ZRO'* or 'power', of which I
shall speak presently. Any worker showing even temporary weakness
was transferred to the phosphorus works, where he was sure to die
within a few months. Phosphorus was a prime necessity of Atlas;
however, it was not used in its red or yellow forms, but in a
third allotrope, a blue-black or rather violet-black substance,
only known in powder finer than precipitated gold, harder than
diamond, eleven times heavier than yellow phosphorus, quite
incombustible, and so shockingly poisonous that, in spite of
every precaution, an ounce of it cost the lives (on an average)
of some two hundred and fifty men. Of its properties I shall
speak later.
The people were left in utmost slavery and ignorance by the
wise counsel of the first of the philosophers of Atlas, who had
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