"All these islets, Walter, are squared, and their shores are frowning
seawalls of gigantic basalt blocks hewn and put in place by the hands
of ancient man. Each inner water-front is faced with a terrace of
those basalt blocks which stand out six feet above the shallow canals
that meander between them. On the islets behind these walls are
time-shattered fortresses, palaces, terraces, pyramids; immense
courtyards strewn with ruins--and all so old that they seem to wither
the eyes of those who look on them.
"There has been a great subsidence. You can stand out of Metalanim
harbour for three miles and look down upon the tops of similar
monolithic structures and walls twenty feet below you in the water.
"And all about, strung on their canals, are the bulwarked islets with
their enigmatic walls peering through the dense growths of
mangroves--dead, deserted for incalculable ages; shunned by those who
live near.
"You as a botanist are familiar with the evidence that a vast shadowy
continent existed in the Pacific--a continent that was not rent
asunder by volcanic forces as was that legendary one of Atlantis in
the Eastern Ocean.
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