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adventure, and yet I believe in it- That which convinces me is not, as with Stephen, my confidence in your good faith, the conviction of your clearheadedness, or even the proof of the ring. No, it is ‘the eye of faith’ voilà tout. It seems to me that it must be; because when one is a born explorer, one goes straight at the discovery; because you have been called to see that which others could not see. In short, I believe, because I believe!”
    Nothing could be more satisfactory than a confidant of this sort, and René was not less anxious to tell than she to listen. Away with the false conclusions of Madame Caoudal, of Dr. Patrice and of other friends! Hélène and René, like accomplices, continually felt the need of some mysterious confabulation. Either René had omitted to give in detail some one perfection of his goddess, or else Hélène had some new hypothesis to suggest, or wished to be told over again some forgotten circumstance. And, above all, there was the increasing importance of the question:
    How to find the enchanting abode of these august personages again? How to find the time, the means, of attempting it? How to do all without awakening any suspicion on the part of Madame Caoudal? Hélène was firmly resolved on two points: to spare René’s mother all uneasiness, all useless anxiety; and to encourage, as far as lay in her power, that which she considered to be the fulfilment of a duty, a chosen mission.

CHAPTER V
THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN.

    R ENÉ was too clear-headed, and had been too long accustomed to weigh things in his mind with mathematical accuracy, not to have endeavoured to account for his immersion and subsequent adventure by simple and natural causes. He started with the following premises: First, I am not the sport of a hallucination, since I have in my possession a priceless and unique ring. Second, The old man and the young girl whom I saw in the wonderful grotto were not phantoms, because there are no such things as phantoms. Third, They are living beings, placed, by some combination of circumstances of which I am ignorant, in extraordinarily peculiar conditions of existence, at some hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the ocean, since the marine charts show in this region of the Atlantic a depth of not more than one thousand feet. And the habitation of these real and living, but abnormal beings? Clearly a grotto, or series of grottoes, extending under the sea, and borrowing the necessary respirable air from air-holes on the top of some rocks on a neighbouring island.
    Such was the only reasonable conclusion he could arrive at. And it brought him by an easy transition to the question as to whether chance had not put him in the track of a great discovery, or at least of a great historical verification,—that of the ancient continent, now lost sight of under the ocean, which the tradition of the earliest times locates between Africa and South America; a sort of huge island, formerly analogous to Australia, long since submerged, and of which Madeira, Teneriffe, the Azores, and the Antilles are the only remains or landmarks now visible. As to the existence of this Atlantic continent, on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules (that is to say the Straits of Gibraltar), and of its disappearance during some great cataclysm, the historians, geographers, and philosophers of antiquity are all agreed. Plato speaks of it often in his writings. He gives us the source of the tradition which he hands down, and which is assuredly not without authority: it was his granduncle Solon, the Athenian legislator, who received from the Egyptian priests of Saïs a description of Atlantide, as they called this mysterious land.
    To what branch of the human race did the Atlantes belong? On this point, tradition is less clear. Some have thought that they were an indigenous race which probably invaded Europe (that is to say Greece), and were opposed by the feeble resistance of the Pelasgi, the ancestors of the