Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic | Page 3

of St. Brandan
XIII. Kirwan's Search for Hy-Brasail
XIV. The Isle of Satan's Hand
XV. Antillia, the Island of the Seven Cities
XVI. Harald the Viking
XVII. The Search for Norumbega
XVIII. The Guardians of the St. Lawrence
XIX. The Island of Demons
XX. Bimini and the Fountain of Youth
Notes

I
THE STORY OF ATLANTIS
The Greek sage Socrates, when he was but a boy minding his father's
goats, used to lie on the grass under the myrtle trees; and, while the
goats grazed around him, he loved to read over and over the story
which Solon, the law-giver and poet, wrote down for the
great-grandfather of Socrates, and which Solon had always meant to
make into a poem, though he died without doing it. But this was briefly
what he wrote in prose:--
"I, Solon, was never in my life so surprised as when I went to Egypt for
instruction in my youth, and there, in the temple of Sais, saw an aged
priest who told me of the island of Atlantis, which was sunk in the sea
thousands of years ago. He said that in the division of the earth the
gods agreed that the god Poseidon, or Neptune, should have, as his
share, this great island which then lay in the ocean west of the
Mediterranean Sea, and was larger than all Asia. There was a mortal
maiden there whom Poseidon wished to marry, and to secure her he
surrounded the valley where she dwelt with three rings of sea and two
of land so that no one could enter; and he made underground springs,
with water hot or cold, and supplied all things needful to the life of man.
Here he lived with her for many years, and they had ten sons; and these

sons divided the island among them and had many children, who dwelt
there for more than a thousand years. They had mines of gold and silver,
and pastures for elephants, and many fragrant plants. They erected
palaces and dug canals; and they built their temples of white, red, and
black stone, and covered them with gold and silver. In these were
statues of gold, especially one of the god Poseidon driving six winged
horses. He was so large as to touch the roof with his head, and had a
hundred water-nymphs around him, riding on dolphins. The islanders
had also baths and gardens and sea-walls, and they had twelve hundred
ships and ten thousand chariots. All this was in the royal city alone, and
the people were friendly and good and well-affectioned towards all. But
as time went on they grew less so, and they did not obey the laws, so
that they offended heaven. In a single day and night the island
disappeared and sank beneath the sea; and this is why the sea in that
region grew so impassable and impenetrable, because there is a
quantity of shallow mud in the way, and this was caused by the sinking
of a single vast island."
"This is the tale," said Solon, "which the old Egyptian priest told to
me." And Solon's tale was read by Socrates, the boy, as he lay in the
grass; and he told it to his friends after he grew up, as is written in his
dialogues recorded by his disciple, Plato. And though this great island
of Atlantis has never been seen again, yet a great many smaller islands
have been found in the Atlantic Ocean, and they have sometimes been
lost to sight and found again.
There is, also, in this ocean a vast tract of floating seaweed, called by
sailors the Sargasso Sea,--covering a region as large as France,--and
this has been thought by many to mark the place of a sunken island.
There are also many islands, such as the Azores, which have been
supposed at different times to be fragments of Atlantis; and besides all
this, the remains of the vanished island have been looked for in all parts
of the world. Some writers have thought it was in Sweden, others in
Spitzbergen, others in Africa, in Palestine, in America. Since the depth
of the Atlantic has been more thoroughly sounded, a few writers have
maintained that the inequalities of its floor show some traces of the
submerged Atlantis, but the general opinion of men of science is quite
the other way. The visible Atlantic islands are all, or almost all, they
say, of volcanic origin; and though there are ridges in the bottom of the

ocean, they do not connect the continents.
At any rate, this was the original story of Atlantis, and the legends
which follow in these pages have doubtless all grown, more or less, out
of this first tale which Socrates told.

II
TALIESSIN OF THE RADIANT