Atlantis?

Last month, the French army transport Loiret was crossing the Bay of Biscay. It was vile weather, but poof ! thought the officers, what of that? They were 160 kilometres off shore and their hydrographic charts showed 4,000 to 5,000 metres of water under keel.

Came an alarmed cry from the crow's-nest : "Breakers, breakers ahead!"

And there were. Not far off, the heavy swells, uprearing to heaven, toppled forward in streaming white tumult and stretched away into a flat boil, as smaller waves will over a jutting reef or sand bar.

The French officers, astounded, took soundings along the line of breakers for 50 nautical miles. Docking at Rochefort, they reported that the depth of that central stretch of the Bay of Biscay no longer averaged several thousands of metres, but between 34 and 70 metres.

At once word sped through the press:

"Atlantis* is returning. ... As the result of recent seismic disturbances in the Pacific [Japan, Santa Barbara], a new plateau is protruding upwards from the bowels of the earth on the opposite side of the globe. . . . Without striking a blow, France will have another province, New Gascony."

Many scientists shared this enthusiasm, holding that, if there had been an error in the hydrographic charts, it was so enormous that it must have been detected long before. Greater skeptics shrugged, pointed out that the charts were indeed old, awaited the findings of a French naval commission to see if a continent was arising or if the discovery. was merely an unknown reef.

* A fabulous continent described by Plato and early historians as lying outside the Pillars of Herculles (Gibralter) extending far westward, well populated and highly civilized as late as 9558 B.C. From the appearance of lava dredged by cable-layers, some scientists hold that Atlantis did exist (TIME, Feb. 25, 1924), that it was split in two volcanically. the eastern half submerging, peaks of the western half (Antilia) remaining today as the Antilles (West Indies). Alleged cranial similarities between natives of Venezuela and Canary Islanders, also between fossil flors and fauna of France and the U.S., constitute other "evidence."