Matters now began to move more quickly--in fact, with a rapidity that was bewildering. Almost overnight my story was flashed from end to end of the land, and I found myself a public figure. Newspaper headlines flaunted my name, and the word Atlantis was on every one’s lips; interviewers came swarming to see me, scientists with their demands for information, the heads of lecture bureaus and of motion picture corporations with their golden offers. But all that really interested me were the offers of assistance for the Sunken World. Several men of means became interested, and placed large funds at our disposal, so making possible the Harkness Institute for Marine Research; half a dozen engineers volunteered to accompany me back to Atlantis, and with their aid we secured implements and chemicals capable of sealing wide breaches in a glass wall. But we could produce no vessel other than that in which we had left Atlantis, for the naval submarines were not equipped for the deep waters of the Sunken World; and so when finally the rescuing party set off down the Potomac from Washington, its members numbered only six in addition to Aelios and myself and the original crew. * * * * * The small size of this expedition and its limited equipment would alone have made us doubtful of success; but we remembered with acute misgivings that two full months had passed since we left Archeon, and that during all this time the flood waters must have been rising. We were particularly uneasy because of the failure of Gavison to appear in a second submarine, as the High Chief Adviser had promised; and, brooding upon his absence, we would recall how we had bidden farewell to Atlantis, and would think with a shudder of the bleak confusion of the people and the swelling torrents swishing through the darkness. To make matters worse (if they could possibly be worse) our voyage back to Atlantis was beset with unforeseen difficulties. Owing to the absence of definite charts and our uncertainty as to the latitude and longitude of the Sunken World, we were lost for several days amid the wildest wastes of the Atlantic. At times we would dive to the sea bottom, or to such depths that Atlantis could not conceivably be beneath us, and would go cruising for hours amid that black infinity or along the shell-strewn or bouldery floor of the ocean, staring through the portholes at the luminous-eyed creatures that flitted ghost-like about us, and here and there gaping horror-stricken at some contorted but strangely eloquent rusty iron mass. But of Atlantis itself there was no sign, and we had the queer impression that it had dissolved bubble-like amid the watery immensity.