But it was long before we could make up our minds to array ourselves in the native garb. And while we stood hesitating, casting occasional disdainful glances at the colored garments before making the decision which we knew we ultimately must make, our attention was distracted by the paintings that adorned the walls. Although all were executed with the deft and flawless hand of a master, they were in a sense different from any paintings I had ever seen before; and what struck me in particular was not so much their peculiar style of art, which combined a minute realism with an almost cosmic suggestiveness, as their arresting and unparalleled subject-matter. Half of them were of a marine type, and depicted ocean caves where the giant squid or octopus wavered through the gray depths, or gardens of the ocean floor where the many-branching coral was the playground for shimmering blue and yellow fishes; the other half, and the most remarkable by far, portrayed scenes of ruin and destruction on a scale that might have staggered the most daring imagination. One of them, for example, pictured a city with slender skyscrapers not unlike those of modern New York, but all the skyscrapers were crumpled and toppling as though from some titanic blast; another, which likewise represented a many-spired city, showed the ocean rolling up in one colossal wave and battering and washing away the buildings as a rain storm may wash away a child’s sand castles; while a third, and by all odds the most ghastly of the group, depicted a sea bottom strewn with the wreckage of great stone edifices, in whose vacant towers and windows and among whose shattered courts the sword-fish and the eel sported and slunk and the fanged shark pursued its prey. “Strange!” I remarked to Rawson. “What peculiarly morbid people is this that its artists should delight in scenes of flood and ruin? Or is it that its painters are striving to represent some actual disaster, some overwhelming ancient catastrophe unheard of on earth?” Hoping to find an answer to these questions, I strained my eyes over the inscriptions that marked each picture--inscriptions in the near-Greek characters I had already tried to decipher. As before, I had at first no success in translation; but, having nothing else to do, I persevered; and once again I ended by construing two or three words--words that left me only more deeply mystified. “After the Submergence,” was the legend that explained the picture of the ruined town at the sea bottom; and, noting how closely this phrase resembled those I had previously interpreted, I was forced to conclude that “The Submergence” was indeed some definite historical event. But when it had occurred or how was still a question as unanswerable as though it had concerned the planet Mars.