The Masters of Atlantis (6 page)

It was a long day, full of disappointments, and in later years Mr. Jimmerson's memory mercifully failed him as to the sequence of events. His congressman was kind enough to pose with him on the Capitol steps for a photograph but after that he met with nothing but indignities.

For all his telephoning, Popper had come up with nothing more than a brief note from the congressman, which asked in guarded language that courtesy be shown to his two constituents, Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Popper. There were no appointments. The note availed them nothing at the White House gates. There they were stopped by guards, suspicious of the Master's unusual attire, and were not even permitted to enter the grounds with the tourists, much less see the President. One guard said, “Is the circus in town? I didn't know the circus was in town.” Another kept saying, “So solly, no can do,” as Popper protested the treatment.

Next they were turned away from the State Department. Then on to the War Department, where the note did get them past the duty officer in the lobby. They wandered about in that labyrinth for hours. The Battle of Midway was taking place at this time and anxious military men were racing up and down the corridors shouting bulletins at one another. The two Gnomons were bounced from office to office. No one had time to hear them out or look at the victory plan or even allow them to sit down for a moment. Mr. Jimmerson's gown became soaked with sweat. The peak of his Poma wilted and toppled over. Popper finally cornered a young army captain who agreed to give them a few minutes of his time. But he seemed to think they were astrologers and that their plan had to do with the stars and he sent them on to the Naval Observatory.

It was there, on Observatory Hill, that the two became separated. Mr. Jimmerson found a bench under a big tree and stopped there to rest while Popper went inside the main building to reconnoiter and to confer with such pipe-smoking men of science as he might find there. They would be receptive to new ideas, unlike the military blockheads downtown.

Mr. Jimmerson dozed off. When he woke, with a start, he was hungry and thirsty. There was no sign of Popper, no sign of life at the Observatory. He heard a bell. It was the bell that had wakened him. He looked about and saw a man pedaling along on an ice-cream cart down on the broad avenue. He called out to the man and stumbled down the hill after him, only to realize on arrival that he had no money. His gown was pocketless. He asked the man where the nearest water fountain and public toilet might be. Probably at the zoo, said the ice-cream man, over that way. Over yonder. Out over in there.

At the zoo a bum called Mr. Jimmerson a “schmo.” The bum was reclining on the grass with a friend and said, “I wonder who that schmo is.” The other bum ventured no guess. Mr. Jimmerson passed the rest of the day there admiring the great cats and looking into the queer dark eyes of the higher apes. There was reckoning behind those eyes but the elegance of the triangle would forever escape them. In the lion house he found a dime. His corset would not allow him to bend over far enough to pick it up. He pushed it along with his foot while trying to form a recovery plan, and then a boy came along and grabbed it.

By the most direct route it was about three miles from the zoo to the Borger Hotel, but Mr. Jimmerson, confused by the radial street pattern, hiked the better part of five miles before he reached his room that evening, gasping and barefooted, his golden sandals having disintegrated along the way.

“Here he is now,” said Popper, jumping up from the bed. There was another man in the room. “Come in, sir, you're just in time. Were your ears burning? We were just talking about you. I was telling Cezar all about you. Here, I want you to meet Cezar. I want you to meet the most interesting man in Washington, D.C.”

He made no reference to the aborted mission. He said nothing about compressed air or the victory plan or the bedraggled appearance of the Master, whose bloody feet, if nothing else, certainly invited comment. The stranger was a neat little package of a man, well finished, in a belted European suit. He had a spade beard and curly black hair. Popper introduced him as Professor Cezar Golescu, assistant custodian of almanacs and star catalogues at the Naval Observatory.

“Cezar is like you, sir, a great seeker of truth. I've been telling him a bit about Pletho Pappus. He wants very much to read the
Codex
and have a look at our archives. And let me tell you something. This fellow has some very exciting ideas about the reclamation of gold. Some ideas that have made me sit up.”

Mr. Jimmerson said, “I think I'd like something to eat, Austin, if you don't mind. And some cold tomato juice.”

“Of course you do. I should have thought of that. Any civilized person would have thought of it, but no, not me. I was too busy talking. Me and my big mouth!”

He called room service and had some food sent up on a rolling table. The professor wasn't hungry, and in any case, he said, he always dined alone. He spoke with sleepyeyed hauteur.

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 pie. 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.