Again she paused, as if uncertain how to proceed, while I was forced to join Stranahan in a bewildered silence. “In order to make things clear,” she continued at length, with upper lip still fluttering and eyes that smiled with kindly good will, “I suppose I will have to describe Atlantis as it was in the old days, the days before the flood. Thirty-one hundred years ago, or at the time when the Submergence was first proposed, we were in possession of secrets which the upper world has perhaps not rediscovered even today. I will not speak of our art, literature and philosophy, which, though advanced for their day, were incomparably inferior to what we have since produced; it was in scientific spheres that our progress was most pronounced. From the beginning, our science was a strangely lopsided growth; it was most developed on the purely material side; and while it could tell us how to compute a comet’s weight and enabled us to communicate with the people of Mars, still on the whole it was concerned with such practical questions as how to produce food artificially or how to utilize new sources of energy. And in these directions it was amazingly efficient. We had long passed the stage, for example, when we needed to rely upon steam, gasoline or electricity to run our motors or to carry us over the ground or through the air; we had mastered the life-secret of matter itself, and by means of the energy within the atoms could produce power equal to that of a tornado or of a volcanic eruption.” “Marvelous!” I exclaimed, enthusiastically. “Marvelous! What magnificent opportunities that gave you!”