CHAPTER XXVI
Curiosities, Freaks and Monstrosities
Even though my companions felt constantly ill at ease in Atlantis, yet as the weeks went by they were becoming more proficient in the use of the native tongue and were taking their places in the life of the Sunken World. One by one they were being summoned, as I had been summoned, before the Committee on Selective Assignments; and each in turn was ordered to perform some specified daily work after taking the usual thirty days’ tour around Atlantis.
Captain Gavison, as one of the most adept of all in mastering the language, was one of the first to be graduated into citizenship. But his advancement brought him no great pleasure, since his prescribed duty was to spend two and a half hours daily in a bureau engaged in compiling statistics of population and industry; and his chosen work for the State, which was to write a comparison of Atlantean and upper world civilization, gave him no end of trouble owing not only to linguistic difficulties but to his lack of training in authorship.
Meanwhile Stranahan and Rawson had also matriculated into citizenship; but their assigned work differed strikingly from the Captain’s. Rawson, as a well formed and brawny youth, was permitted to exercise his muscles for an hour and a half daily in a marble quarry some miles to the north of the city; while Stranahan, who had been given his choice of several occupations, decided that it would suit him best to serve three hours daily as doorman at the Archeon City Museum.
It seemed almost as if this position had been made to order for him; for when he stood at the museum entrance, robed in an official red, and politely directed visitors to the various aisles and departments, he had the dignity of one born to a lofty station. His work was not altogether easy, he assured me, for the exhibits were many and confusing, and he had difficulty in memorizing their names and positions; yet to see him as he swayed commandingly from side to side of the great arched doorway, with chest thrown well out and hands folded sedately behind him, one could scarcely have believed that he was troubled by any doubts, but might have imagined him to be the owner and creator of the building.
Indeed, the interest which he took in the museum seemed to be almost personal. He summoned the whole Upper World Club to inspect it, as though it had been his own handiwork; and he directed us from gallery to gallery and from exhibit to exhibit with the serenity of perfect knowledge. And while there was much about the institution that neither he nor the rest of us could understand, yet we had him to thank for introducing us to some truly extraordinary displays.
Unquestionably, the museum was one of the things best worth seeing in all Atlantis. Not only were the contents vivid and remarkable beyond description, but the building itself was a never-failing source of wonder. The sides and roof were of glass, and on the lower levels the walls were colorless and transparent, so that passers-by could feast their eyes on the more conspicuous displays, just as on earth the passers-by may gaze into the shop windows. But above the first story the glass was no longer crystal-clear, but was frosted and tinted to the semblance of clouds driven across a pale blue sky; and over those clouds and down from the enormous rounded dome a dim rainbow seemed to reach, spreading a web that varied in hue and texture with every step one took and every variation in the luster of the searchlights that shone faintly from above.
To glance at this superb building, one would never have guessed what queer objects it concealed. For my own part, I was simply astounded--astounded at the beauty of some exhibits, at the strangeness and ghastliness of others. The department of science and inventions (to select merely at random) was a source of bewilderment, for it showed the oddest contrivances I had ever beheld--machines for preventing earthquakes, machines for regulating the undersea temperature, machines for detecting and isolating noxious bacteria, machines for transforming iron into copper or tin into lead, machines for boring through the ground as a submarine bores through the water.
But what particularly interested me was the historical department. I shall never forget my first visit to it; it was one of the most surprising experiences of my life. Imagine, for example, a glass case that contained nothing but the fragment of a brick wall, a perfectly commonplace wall of red brick!--and imagine reading that this was a substance employed for building purposes in the days before the Æsthetic Renaissance! Or, again, picture yourself in contact with half a dozen gold coins, larger than silver dollars and each worth several days’ wages, yet left unguarded where any one might seize them!--and fancy reading that these bits of metal had once been considered valuable and had even been contended for and hoarded! Or, to take still another illustration, conceive of one’s surprise at seeing a carefully treasured speck of coal, and being informed that this was used for fuel in the days before intra-atomic energy; or paint for yourself the shock of coming across a case of fine jewelry, of rings, earrings, brooches, bracelets, and the like, only to find them represented as typical of primitive taste!
* * * * *
But while all of the historical department proved most diverting to me, there was one section that interested me more than all the rest. This was known as the “Hall of Horrors.” Once having observed the title, I was eager to explore the department in detail--and I was not to be disappointed. Somehow, there was something about the “Hall of Horrors” that seemed familiar, even though a placard at the entrance assured one that all the exhibits had been preserved from a remote antiquity. Thus, the first thing that I noted was a gas masque said to date from the third century B. S., but looking as if it might have been useful in the present World War. Beside the gas masque was a steel helmet reported to be from the fourth century B. S.; yet, had it not been for the card identifying it, I might have suspected it of being taken from the Germans this very year.
This suspicion, however, would not have applied to the other military implements ranged about the room; most of them were so crude of design as to make me positively smile. Even as I write this, I can re-capture the mood of exultation I felt at the proof of our own superiority: the rifles of the second century B. S. were so puny-looking and feeble as to appear worse than primitive, and the bayonets were fully half a foot shorter than our own; the machine guns of the first century B. S. had obviously not half the killing capacity of ours, and the cannons were not constructed for long distance firing; while the conspicuous absence of the armored “tank,” the hand grenade and “liquid fire,” showed that the ancient Atlanteans would have had much to learn from the sanguinary experts of our own day.
From the “Hall of Horrors” Stranahan conducted us into another and scarcely less interesting department that was apparently nameless, since its miscellany of ancient oddities would have defied classification. “Here’s where you’ll feel at home,” grunted our guide, as with a gesture of welcome he preceded us through the doorway. But his remark had been poorly chosen. We did not feel in the least at home. In fact, I had never had a more distinct reminder of my exile than when I gazed at great brick and iron chimneys towering within glass cases, and catalogued as typical of “The Age of Steel and Fire”; and it made me almost homesick to see pictures of long-vanished cities wrapped in great clouds of smoke and soot, and described succinctly as “Representative of the Tubercular Era in Old Atlantis.” But much more surprising to me were the huge ancient furnaces, resurrected in detail, with puppet stokers in the act of pitching the coal into the giant flames. An explanatory card naïvely declared that “These were once considered necessary evils, not only for industrial reasons, but because the Submergence had not yet made possible the automatic regulation of the weather.”
But an apparently insignificant object in the same department aroused far greater interest among my companions. Carefully guarded under a glass cover, where it had evidently undergone some special process of preservation, was a flat, little rectangle of some shrivelled brownish substance, which upon close scrutiny I took to be tobacco!
That my guess had been correct was demonstrated by a placard that accompanied the exhibit: “This is a fragment of a narcotic imported into old Atlantis from across the western ocean. It found high favor at one time among the women of the country, and to a lesser extent among the men, although its use was considered a mark of effeminacy. There were several common ways of absorbing this drug, the most popular being to ignite it and suck the smoke into the lungs by means of a little twisted tube. Happily, this disgusting habit has long ago disappeared, and the elimination of this plant at the time of the Good Destruction is not the least of the benefits conferred by Agripides.”
I am afraid that few of my companions agreed with the latter statement. They cast longing glances in the direction of the tobacco; and, had it not been safely guarded beneath glass, its career would surely have ended then and there.
With the memory of the tobacco still rankling in our minds, we were escorted into what was known as the “Department of Human Evolution.” Here was depicted the rise of man from the lowest savage state to the height of present-day Atlantis. A series of skeletons indicated the gradual transformation from a broad-boned, ape-like thing to a big-skulled modern--and, to my great surprise, the large cranial capacity was represented as belonging almost exclusively to the aboriginal and Post-Submergence eras!
* * * * *
While I was wondering why this should be, I chanced to overhear the words of a sagacious-looking bearded man, who accompanied a party of smooth-faced youths, evidently as their tutor. “Before the Submergence,” he was saying, “we were civilized in a rude sort of way, and yet were not intelligent. That is to say, we were not intelligent as a people, for only one man in a hundred possessed any understanding of civilization; and it was that one in a hundred, or perhaps one in a thousand, who accomplished all the changes in science, art and culture. Today, however, every normal man is intelligent enough to be more than the dead lumber of civilization. You will observe this skull here”--the speaker paused, and pointed to one of the most ancient of the group--“this is the fossil of a paleolithic pre-Atlantean, who inhabited our island forty-five or fifty thousands years ago. You can see for yourselves how much higher and ampler the skull is than that of your own ancestor of thirty-two hundred years ago, although of course the latter represented the world’s most advanced civilization. Fortunately, our intellectual decline was counteracted by the vigorous measures of Agripides and his successors, and we can now boast of being on the same high mental plane as the men of fifty thousand years ago....”
The speaker withdrew with his students toward a further exhibit, and I could catch no more of what he said. But I had heard quite enough, for it seemed to me that his words were not to be taken seriously. And I was more interested in browsing about the gallery than in listening to his pointless remarks--particularly since I had chanced to set eyes on some arresting tables of statistics. These figures, which dated back more than three thousand years, showed how the rise in the appreciation of beauty had been almost simultaneous with the growth of intellect; how the mental advance and the decline of crime seemed likewise to be related phenomena; how the general measure of happiness, as indicated by the absence of nervous disorders, mental aberrations and suicides, had been incalculably increased since the intellectual revival.
Having read to the end of the statistics, I passed with my companions down several long corridors to the art departments, where some of the more notable contemporary paintings and statues were placed on exhibition along with a multitude of classic works. But if I were to dwell upon the contents of these galleries, beyond saying that its art was in that same exquisite and original style I had already observed, I should have to add chapters to my story; and, likewise, I should find my narrative interminable if I were to describe the other exhibits: the natural history department, with specimens of the flora and fauna of old Atlantis, the paleo-botanical department with lifelike restorations of long-extinct tree-ferns and gigantic palms, the sociological-historical departments, with representations of scenes in prisons, poorhouses, orphanages, and insane asylums, all of which were declared to have been “herding places of the days when unfortunates were so plentiful that they had to be dealt with by the pack, instead of, as at present, being consigned individually to the care of those sympathetic men and women who make social work their service for the State.”
But while the sheer abundance of the exhibits makes it impossible to describe them all, there is one that I must not fail to mention, since in some ways it was the most remarkable in the museum. We had just entered the section ambiguously known as “Curiosities, Freaks and Monstrosities,” when Stranahan, with an odd twinkling expression, warned us to be ready for a surprise. And, certainly, he warned us with good reason! As we glanced toward the further wall, we were shocked by sight of something dazzlingly familiar--so very familiar, indeed, that several of us uttered little cries of amazement. Neatly arranged behind a glass case, flattened against the rear panels so as to afford a better view, were dozens of well known blue uniforms! Among them, from the Ensign’s stripes, I recognized my own; and among them, also, was the decorated uniform of the Captain! And above them, on a large-lettered placard, appeared the statement that these were the clothes worn by the only aliens to enter Atlantis since the Submergence, and that they were interesting as showing what grotesque and unsightly garments were fashionable in the upper world!
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