With the exception of the Sunken World itself it was the largest enclosure I had ever entered; indeed, it occupied the entire interior of the hill. Along the full length of a half-mile gallery the white-lanterned ceiling arched to a height of two hundred feet; and on each side of a broad passageway, rising almost to meet the ceiling, was a series of what I took to be gigantic boilers. All of these were connected with innumerable wires and with pipes thicker than a man’s body, while at the further end of the gallery the tubes were interwoven in intricate loops, coils and convolutions like the exposed entrails of a Titan. As I stepped through the doorway, a warm breeze swept my face, bearing to my nostrils the odor of oil, and at the same time bringing me reminders of the furnace-dry air of steam-heated apartments. “What place is this?” I could not forebear to ask; but almost instantly I was sorry that I had spoken, for four or five pairs of eyes were turned upon me in surprise at so obvious a question. “This is a distillery, of course,” answered one of my young companions. “A distillery?” I echoed, scarcely less astonished at his words than at the extraordinary appearance of the place. And although the Atlanteans had seemed to me to be a sober people, I had visions of the manufacture of intoxicants on a scale inconceivable to the most bibulous of my own countrymen. “Yes, this is where we prepare our distilled water,” continued my friend, surprised at my surprise. * * * * * For a moment I merely stared at him without comprehension. “But why so much distilled water?” was all that I could gasp. “That’s easily explained,” said the young man, with a smile. “The water piped from our deep wells, which serves us for drinking purposes, couldn’t begin to take care of our irrigation problems--and without irrigation Atlantis would be a desert. The Salty River, of course, contains enough for all our needs; but it is ocean water, and the brine would kill all land vegetation. And so the only possibility was to distill the water. This was arranged for long ago by Agripides, when he built this distillery and eleven others, which together keep the irrigation system of Atlantis supplied, and incidentally provide us with all the salt required for domestic and chemical purposes.” “That may be all very well,” I remarked, “but the amount of heat necessary to evaporate so much water must be tremendous ...” “That is no problem at all,” my companion assured me. “By means of intra-atomic energy, we could generate power enough to distill the entire ocean.”