My fellow members of the Upper World Club meanwhile did not share my liking for Atlantis. As time went by, in fact, they seemed to care less and less for their adopted country. With the exception of Gavison, who had written a brief but popular treatise on “Navigation on Upper World Waters” and a not less popular “Comparison of Upper and Lower World Civilizations,” there was not one of my former shipmates who was adapting himself to life in Atlantis or who was not remiss in his obligations as a citizen. While they had all acquired at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language and were all reasonably successful in performing some prescribed mechanical task for two or three hours a day, yet none of them had accomplished anything in any of those artistic or intellectual pursuits which alone were considered worth while in Atlantis. For how, indeed, could they hope to conform to the standards of a world that had so little in common with their own? Apparently the natives did not even expect them to conform, and tolerated lapses that would have been considered disgraceful in born Atlanteans; but they themselves appeared to feel that they were somehow inferior, somehow out of place; and much of their restlessness, and much of their longing to escape, is to be explained by the desire for a less ideal but more familiar mode of life. * * * * * Considering the eagerness with which my companions would have exchanged the ease of Atlantis for even the most strenuous labors and hardships of the earth, it seems ironic that the man ultimately chosen to emerge, was he whose marriage to an Atlantean had made him more than resigned to the Sunken World. My sole excuse is that the choice, when it fell upon me, was made wholly upon the suggestion of others, and occurred at a time of such acute public peril that the happiness or fate of individuals was as nothing. For the hour was to come--and to come with startling suddenness--when a fateful writing was to glare from the walls of Atlantis. I had been in the Sunken World seven full years when the menace burst forth, and I was not there seven days after it appeared.... But in the interval I was a witness to scenes of such havoc, such horror, confusion and despair as I had never seen before and fervently hope I shall never see again. It torments me now to recall that all that terror and all that irremediable loss might have been avoided, had we but heeded the advice of Peliades, Peliades who insisted that the crack in the wall had not been adequately repaired....