I was now quite reconciled to passing my remaining days in Atlantis. Although Xanocles and his colleagues persisted with their agitation, the cause of Emergence was dwindling in my mind to an impossible dream; and, had it not been for the cataclysm which aroused us all to frenzied action, I might have been content to grow gray and wrinkled in the Sunken World. For now that Aelios was mine, I found that life was far richer than ever before; that not only was I steeped in pleasurable activity amid a delightful environment, but that there was an almost charmed absence of strain and hurry, and a leisure and serenity that would once have seemed the attributes only of a Nirvana. It is true, of course, that I could not escape all the ordinary physical ills of life. Once, for example, when my awkwardness betrayed me in an athletic contest and I suffered a broken arm, I was conducted to a State hospital, where a State physician skilfully treated my injury; and once when the incessant golden glare began to tell upon my eyes, I had to visit a State occulist, who relieved the strain by prescribing a pair of wide-rimmed amber-tinged glasses. My appearance was changing, moreover, in other ways than the mere addition of glasses. I was acquiring a long beard, largely owing to the habit formed during my first days in Atlantis; and my complexion was taking on a curious greenish tint, due to some peculiar action of the Atlantean light--an action to which the Atlanteans themselves had inherited immunity. But I was not alone in my queer pistache complexion; there were exactly thirty-eight others who could show the same distinctive pigmentation; and so marked was the coloration that, as the men sometimes declared, our origin was “written on our skins.”