OF THE AIM OF THE MAGICIANS OF
ATLAS: OF ZRO; AND ITS PROPERTIES
AND USES: OF THAT WHICH
COMBINED WITH IT: AND OF
BLACK PHOSPHORUS.

It was the most ancient tradition of the Atlantean magicians
that they were the survivors of a race inhabiting a country
called Lemuria, of which the South Pacific archipelago may be the
remains. These Lemurians had, they held, built up a civilization
equal, if not superior to their own; but through a
misunderstanding of magical law–some said the 2nd, some the 8th,
some the 23rd–had involved themselves and their land in ruin.
Others thought that the Lemurians had succeeded in their magical
task, and broken their temple. In any case, it was the secret
Lemurian tradition that they themselves represented the survivals
of a yet earlier race who lived on ice, and they of yet another
who lived in fire, and they again of earlier colonists from Mars.
The theory, in fine, was that the aim of man is to attain the
Sun, whence, according to one school of cosmology, he was exiled
in the cosmic catastrophe which resulted in the formation of
Neptune. His task on any given planet was therefore to overturn
the laws of Nature on that planet, thus mastering it sufficiently
to enable him to make the leap to the next planet inward. Exactly
how and in what sense the leap was made remains obscure, even to
the heirs of Atlantis.*
The men of Atlas could fly, it is true, and that by a method
so simple that men will laugh outright when it is rediscovered;
but they needed air to support them; they could not confront the
cold and emptiness of space. Was it in some subtler body that
they conveyed the Palladium? Or, content to die, could they
project some vehicle across so great a distance? The answer to
such questions probably lies in the recovery by mankind of the
knowledge of Zro and its properties.
Beneath the labour mills* run troughs* in which the sweat of
the workers collects and drains off into an open basin without
the mill. In this basin churns with immense rapidity–through
multiple bevel gearing–a sort of paddle with knife edges. The
sweat is thus churned into froth, and gradually disappears, and
is as continually replaced. The workers toil in shifts–eight
hours work, four hours repose, eight hours work, four hours rest
and recreation. The mills never cease day or night.
The basin is of polished silver and agate, and is set at an
angle, facing two enormous spheres of crystal, encased in a sort
of trellis made of a certain greenish metal, its optical focus at
a point midway between the two.
The only sign of activity is that out of this focus a spark
crackles unless the air be dry, a condition difficult to secure
in this part of the world, although fans blow air, dried over
chloride of calcium and sulphuric acid, over the globes and their
focus. These fans are worked by tidal power, human labour being
appropriated solely to the one use.
In the temple of the ‘house’ are two globes similar to those
upon the plains, and the mysterious force generated below is
transferred to those above, collecting within them. Now the name
of this substance is always Zro, but in its first state the
gesture is a twiddling of the thumbs. In its second, it is a
rapid twittering of the fingers, and in its third state of
distillation it is a screwing of the hands together. Within the
spheres it sublimes suddenly in the air as a snaky powder (4) of
silver, which immediately turns to an iridescent fluid (5) that
is forced up, by its own need of expansion, through a fountain
into the temple, on whose floor it lies (6) in a semi-solid
condition. Expert priests gather this in their hands, and rapidly
shape it into its seventh state, when it is a knife of diamond,
but alive. An instrument like a Mexican machete is used to carve
rocks. The edge shears them, the back smooths them. The rock
behaves exactly like wax, responsive to the lightest touch. What
is not used for weapons is then gathered up swiftly and kneaded
by women of the rank of high priestess. It is not known even to
the high priests with what they knead it, but in its eighth stage
it is a substance solid enough to support great weight, but
eternally heaving of its own force. Of this they make beds, so
that the sleeping Atlantean is (as it were) continually massaged.
To this they attribute the fact that Atlanteans sleep never more
than half an hour, though they do so four times daily. These beds
remain active only for a few days, and they are then thrown into
the ninth stage by being taken into a room where is a cauldron of
great size. They are thrown into this and sprinkled with black
phosphorus.* The Zro then divides into two parts, one liquid, one
solid. Neither of these has any ascertainable properties, for it
is absolutely passive to the will of the user, who may taste
therein his utmost desire, whether for food or drink. Among
adults there is no other food or drink than this. The children
are not allowed to taste it.
The black phosphorus is always added by a high priestess, and
it is not known in what manner she does this. The Zro that may
remain is the subject of eternal experiments by the Magicians. It
is generally thought by the greatest of them that an error was
committed in bringing it to a ninth stage of division into two,
and many openly deplored the discovery of black phosphorus. All
however strive in harmony to produce a tenth stage that shall
surpass the virtues of the ninth. Theoretically it is possible to
reach an eleventh stage wherein the Zro takes human form, and
lives! Opinion is divided as to whether this was not actually
done by a certain magician at the time of the passing of Atlas.
In any case, I beg the reader to remember that I have only
described one seventh of the virtues of Zro, and I have even
omitted this, that in its ninth stage it is not only food and
drink, but universal medicine, if properly understood. For Zro is
also a vision and a voice!
Now the muscles of the people of Atlas are the muscles of
giants, and yet they do one thing only. And this thing is
combined by the wisdom of the magicians, so that it is at the
same time work, exercise, sport, game, pleasure, and all else
that may fulfill life.
This work never ceases. It has these parts:

1. Working at Zro, i.e. bringing it from the first stage to
the ninth.
2. Working with Zro, i.e. for one’s own particular purpose.
3. Working for Zro. This is the common and most honourable
task, the Zro eaten and drunken being worked into a quintessence
of higher power, though identical in property with the common
Zro. This new Zro (Atlas Zro) goes through the same stages as the
common Zro of the serviles. But it is the result of free and
joyful labour, and so serves the magicians in their experiments,
and the Governor of all for his sustenance. None by the way is
ever wasted. For example, a tunnel was drilled completely through
the earth and filled with Zro, and it is said that by this tunnel
the Atlanteans escaped.
This working, whether with or for Zro, requires two persons at
least at any one time and place. Great heat is generated in the
working, and the bodies of the workers are therefore sprinkled
heavily with the black phosphorus, which is incombustible. This
black phosphorus, poisonous to the servile race, becomes
innocuous to anyone who has been in any way impregnated with Zro.
This itself, in its first stage, is as dangerous as electricity
of high voltage.
The reverence attached to Zro is unbounded. At one time it was
hymned as the father of the gods, and till the end all children
were thought to be “begotten of Zro”, though everyone might know
who was the father.* All such conception was however held
indignity. Its official name was ‘the old experiment’. It was
carried on simply because the new methods of continuing the race
were not perfected. Childbirth was therefore in one way accident;
although a duty, everyone shrank from it. For though no pain or
discomfort attached to the process, it was a sort of second-best
achievement from which proud women turned contemptuously. This
was in part the reason why the father’s name was never mentioned.
On several occasions in the history of Atlas the Zro ‘failed’.
Although not changed in appearance, its properties were lost or
diminished. In such a case young men and maidens in great numbers
were captured on the plains, brought into Atlas, and offered in
sacrifice to the Gods. Their blood was mingled with Zro in its
third stage, and the latter recovered its potency. Their flesh
was eaten by the high priests and priestesses in penance for the
unknown wrong. It was subject to other and terrible scourges,
being the most sensitive as well as the strongest thing on Earth.
On one occasion it had to be treated with a fox-like perfume
prepared by the chief magician; on another it was subjected to
streams of moonlight from parabolic mirrors.
The most serious crisis was some two thousand years before the
destruction of Atlas. One of the serviles, riding his
‘hippopotamus’ to the ploughing, fell off and was instantly
bitten by the poisonous fish previously described. Through an
accident of boyhood he had, however, for a reason too obscure to
describe here, no such vulnerable spot as suited the Zhee-Zhou.
He survived and went to work, as it chanced, the next day. The
Zro was poisoned; a third of Atlas died within the hour; the
plants on the affected island had to be destroyed, and all its
people. It was only repopulated some three hundred and eighty
years later, and then for particular reasons of magical economy
impossible to dwell upon in this account.
Marriage was compulsory on all those whose passion had been so
exclusive and enduring as to produce two children. Further
intercourse between the pair was barred. The Magicians thought it
was inimical to variation for a woman to have more than one child
(a fortiori two) by the same father; and the custom further
prevented those stupid sporadic outbursts of burnt-out lust which
make so many modern marriages intolerable.
Closely connected with marriage, the close of the reproductive
life, is that of death, the close of the little that remains.
Death hardly threatened the Atlantean; he would decide to “go and
see”, as the old phrase ran, and take an overdose of a particular
preparation of black phosphorus mixed with a very little Zro in
the ninth stage, which ensured a painless death. That none ever
returned was taken as proof of the supreme attractiveness of
death.
The ghoulish and necromantic practices with which Atlanteans
have been unjustly reproached never occurred. A little vampirism,
perhaps, in the early days before the perfecting of Zro; but no
Atlantean was ever so stupid or so ignorant as to confuse death
with life.
Beside this voluntary death only one danger existed. As the
use of Zro guaranteed life and health and youth–a centenarian
high priest was no better than a kitten!–so did its abuse spell
instant corruption of those qualities. As mentioned above, now
and then the Zro itself was at fault, and caused epidemics; but
from time to time there were deaths in a particularly loathsome
form caused by what they called ‘misunderstanding’ the Zro.* Such
mistakes were particularly common in the early days of its
discovery, and before its use had become well nigh a worship. The
first symptom was a crack in the skin of the temple, or sometimes
of the bridge of the nose, more rarely of an eyelid or cheek.
Within a few minutes this crack became one open sore, of horrid
foetor, and within twenty-four hours, the patient was completely
rotted away, bone and marrow. A circumstance of singular atrocity
was that death never occurred until the spinal column collapsed.
No treatment could be found even to prolong the agony by an hour.
This being recognised, sufferers were thrown from the cliffs at
the first sign of the malady. In this way too were all other
corpses disposed. It was the most honourable death possible, for
becoming ‘bread from heaven’ for the serviles, they were again
worked up into Zro itself, a transmutation which in their view
would be well worth all the “resurrections of the body” and
“immortalities of the soul” of the theoretical, dogmatic, hearsay
religions. So much then concerning Zro, and the matters
immediately connected with it.

.pa
IV.

OF THE SO CALLED
MAGIC OF THE ATLANTEANS.

Magic in Atlas was a ‘Science of Sciences’. It was the final
integration of all knowledge. In method its theory was
differentiation, and in theory its method was integration. For
example, the fifth of the great philosophers indicated
“Everything is Zro” to the Keeper of the Speech at the annual
sacrifice. This in spite of the fact that in that very year two
new forms of Zro had been discovered by that same philosopher. It
was the third of the galaxy who announced “The ultimate analysis
of sensation is pain; that of thought, madness; that of super-
consciousness (a state of trance induced by Zro and valued above
all things) annihilation.”
His successor had retorted that in this was implicit a
postulate that pain, madness and annihilation were undesirable.
The third admitted that he had so meant his phrase, but
destroying the postulate, still stuck to it. All this was the
foundation of much magical theory, and on these purely
psychological researches was based the whole magical practice.
‘There is no God’ was a commonplace. It only implied that
the mind was wrong to try to conceive within it what was by
definition without it. To set limits to anything whatever seemed
to them the greatest of crimes, the exact opposite of the true
path to the Sun.
The practical side of magic was for the most part a mere
utilization of known forces, such as are employed by modern
science. But the resources of Atlas were as great, and the
advantages incomparably greater. The whole archipelago was a
laboratory. There was no question of the ‘cost of research’;
every man was devoted to it. Every man thought only of the main
problem ‘How to reach Venus’ and its sub-issues. Further, the
main laws of magic had always been found to govern and include
chemical and physical laws.
In the early days of colonization Zro was only known in its
crude state; it was the genius of a single man that obtained the
third state in its purity. From this state to the seventh it
moved almost of itself, very much as radium does. The genius,
having sufficient in this seventh state, made a sword, and
completed in three days the subjugation of the servile races. It
was a stroke of fortune, this quickness, for on the fourth day
the Zro began to disintegrate. The magicians then began to seek a
means of making this state permanent. But in this they failed,*
so that knives had always to be replaced twice weekly; but in the
course of their failures they discovered the infinitely more
valuable eighth and ninth stages of Zro. Tradition has preserved
a hint of their efforts in Alchemy with its problems of the
fixation of the Universal Mercury, the secret of perpetual
motion, and ‘potable gold–the Universal Medicine’. It has been
theoretically determined towards the end of the tenth state, that
Zro should be a solid, but whether this was confirmed is beyond
my knowledge.
To return to the main magical theory, the Quintessence, said
they, or Universal Substance (which some strove to identify with
Hyle, others with the Luminiferous Aether) is the two-in-one,
liquid and solid, the former part being also twofold, fluid and
gaseous, and the latter earthy and fiery. The combination of
these four phases of Zro accounted for the universe. This
quintessence is Zro in some state unknown and incalculable. Some
expected to find it in its twelth state, some in a seventeenth,
others in a thirty-seventh: all this was pure guesswork. Some
tradition to this effect appears to have reached Plato; and the
neo-Platonists combined with those Jews who had preserved
fragments of the Egyptian tradition to form a new initiated
hierarchy, the echo of whose teaching is found in Paracelsus. At
one period, too, missionaries (not colonists, as has been
ignorantly asserted; there was no trouble of over-population in
Atlantis) were sent to the four quarters and parties landed in
Mexico, Ireland and Egypt. The adventures of the party who
travelled South form an astounding chapter in the history of
Atlas. It was they who discovered the Magnetic South, and whose
observations rendered possible the theory which resulted in the
piercing of the Earth by Zro.*
There were also preparations of Zro which increased the size
of the user, and others which diminished it. In general use among
the lower classes, until the very end, was that composition which
made the body light. Careful adjustment would equalize its weight
with that of the displaced air, and movements of the limbs would
then permit flying. In this way the overseers visited the plains
and returned. The other and earlier art of flying needed no
apparatus, but I am forbidden to disclose the method, except to
hint that it is connected closely with the art of ‘dreaming
true’.
These are but a few of the magic powers so-called of the
compounds of Zro; but they will indicate the power of Atlas by
shewing what it could afford to neglect. Yet all these powers
were implicit in the process of ‘working’.
The art of prediction was in the same unsatisfactory state as
it is in England today. Nor was its practice encouraged. A
magician makes the future, and does not seek to divine it. All
true prediction was therefore necessarily catastrophe. The
greatest good fortune seemed worthless to an Atlantean, since it
was accident, and if accidents are to happen, one of them may be
fatal. They believed themselves to be equal to the whole tendency
of things, and proudly gazed on Nature as a man might upon a
virgin captive to his spear. Everything that was being was Zro;
everything that was Energy was ‘working for Zro’. Outside this
was but by-product and waste-heap.
The arrangement of the houses was in accordance with the
magical theory. There was first the High House, then four (later
six, last ten) ‘Houses of Houses’; and to each of these was
attached a varying number of ordinary houses. The High House was
the central shrine of the whole archipelago, and must be
separately described.

.pa
V.

OF THE HIGH HOUSE OF ATLAS,
OF ITS INHABITANTS, AND OF THEIR
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS,
AND OF THE LIVING ATLA.

The High House was separated from its nearest neighbor by over
twenty miles of sea. Its diameter was about an half-mile and its
height four miles. It had no plains at the base, and its cliffs
went absolutely sheer and smooth into the water. It was in shape
a flattish cylinder, but the top broadened into a pointed knob,
somewhat in the style of St. Basil’s at Moscow. There was not a
trace of vegetation, which by the way was despised by the
Atlanteans. A child would pick a flower contemptuously thinking
“You cannot even move about”, or pet it as an English degenerate
woman does a dog. The only entrance was by an orifice at the top.
But the base was tunneled so that from every house was a channel
for the Zro which having been brought to the highest perfection
was thus transferred to headquarters. The receptacle at the base
being far below the earth, and the Zro further heated by
friction, it seethed continually into a bluish or purplish smoke.
This was the sole sustenance of the inhabitants of the High
House. In early days the old High House, in an island since
destroyed by order of the Atla, had been called the House of
Blood, the inhabitants subsisting only on blood sucked from the
living. The improvements in Zro had changed all that; but the
idea was the same, to live on the Quintessence of Life. Hence
while the ‘houses’ ate and drank Zro, the High House drank its
vapour. No children were born in it, and none below the rank of
High Priest dwelt there.
Except for one matter which was never thought of, though
constantly spoken, the inmost mystery of the High House was the
‘Living Atla’. This had many names, ‘Wordeater’, ‘Unshaven’
(because the razors of Zro were turned on its hair), ‘Fireheart’,
‘Beginning and End’ and so on: but especially a word I can only
translate as ‘To Her’, a defective pronoun existing only in the
dative. What the Living Atla really was, is a secret of secrets.*
We know it only from its epithets, its veils. Thus it was ‘That
Black which makes black white’. It was ‘twenty-six feet high and
fifteen feet across–Oh my Lords, it is the essence of the
Incommensurable!’ It was ‘the wife of Zro’, ‘the heart of Zro’,
‘desire of Zro’, ‘the Atla that eats Atlas’, ‘the swallower up of
her own house’, ‘the pelican’, ‘the fire-nest of the Phoenix’,
according to the greatest of the poets. And the burden of his
hymns of worship was that it must be destroyed.
It was impossible to approach the Atla without being instantly
sucked up and devoured by it. This was the greatest death, and
ardently desired by all. The favour was accorded only to those
who discovered improvements in Zro, or otherwise merited signal
and supreme recognition from the state. Hidden men listened to
the cries of the victim, and thus learned the nature of the
death. It appears that the black suddenly broke into a fiery
rose, ‘the only* luminous thing in Atlas’, and a shooting forward
enclosed him. For some reason which was never even guessed the
Atla refused women. Those who had seen Atla were however useless
to instruct. They came forth from the Presence smiling, and even
under the most fearful tortures that the magicians could devise,
continued to smile. This smile never left them during life, and
the conscious superiority of it was so irritating, and so
contrary to the harmony of life in Atlas that the women were
killed, and their companions for the future forbidden to approach
the Atla.
Whatever theories as to its nature may have been formed by the
magicians were upset by a famous experiment. A most holy high
priest, a man who at puberty had insisted on immediate marriage
with all the women of his house, a magician who had formed four
new compounds of Zro, and discovered how to pass matter through
matter, was honoured by the great death. On reaching the last
corridor, where the concentrated spirals of Zro vapour whirled up
into the Presence of Atla, he bade farewell to the appointed
listeners in the manner suitable to his dignity, and then, taking
a last deep draught of Zro into his lungs, rushed into the
antrum. They heard him cry aloud “O!” with surprise, and then
with inexpressible rapture the words “Behind Atla, Otla!” which
were, and still are, completely unintelligible. Their surprise
was greater, when, seven days later he came striding past them
without greeting. He went to his ‘house’ and shut himself up, was
never seen or heard again, but was assuredly living at the time
of the ‘catastrophe’. This man founded a school of philosophy, or
rather, it founded itself on what it supposed him to have
discovered; and this school disputes with the orthodox the credit
of the final success.
The lesser mysteries of the High House were concerned almost
entirely with the creation of life, and the bridging of the gulf
between Earth and Venus. These were connected intimately; the
theory was that if Atlantean brains could exist in bodies
sufficiently subtle to traverse aether, the task was done. Some
of the experiments were crude enough, and, to our minds,
horrible. They attempted to breed a new race by crossing with
snakes, swans, horses and other animals.* The Greek legends of
such monsters as Chimaera, Medusa, Lamia, Minotaur, the Centaurs,
the Satyrs and the like are mere filtrations of the Atlantean
tradition. The only theory behind such experiments was that they
were contrary to the natural order, and so worth trying. Men of
more scientific mind more plausibly passed Zro vapour through
sea-water; but they only created serpents of vast size, which
they cast into the sea about the High House as guardians. The
sea-serpent, whether legend or fact, is derived from this ex
periment. It is quite possible that some such survive. Another
school, objecting strongly to the sex-process, “which must be
transcended as the Lemurians overcame gemmation” vivisected men
and women, taking various parts of the brain, especially the
cerebellum, the pineal gland, and the pituitary body, and cul
tivated them in solutions of Zro under the invisible rays of
black phosphorus. The best results of this work was a race of
translucent jelly-folk of great intellectual development; but so
far from being able to travel through space, they could hardly
move in their own element. Another school argued that as Zro in
vapour combined the virtues of the liquid and the solid Zro, so a
fiery state might be produced which would so impregnate their
bodies as to make them ‘mates of the aether’. This school held
that fiery Zro already existed in Nature, “in the heart of the
Living Atla”, and asserted that those who died by absorption into
Atla passed straight to Venus. Many of them therefore tried hard
to obtain messages from that planet. Familiar with Newton’s first
law of motion, they further held it possible to prepare Zro in
such a state that a current of it could never be deflected or
dissipated, and so, if it could be made in sufficient quantity, a
bridge to Venus might be built by which they might travel. They
therefore tunneled through the planet, as previously explained,
to have a sort of cannon for the Zro. But as their supply was
pitifully insufficient, they endeavoured also to prepare a Zro
which would have the power of multiplying itself. Alchemical
tradition has some record of this problem.
Yet another group of magicians argued that as Nature had cast
off the planets from the Sun–a disputed point, some thinking
this due to magic, which if so completely destroys the argument–
it would be contrary to Nature to cause the planets to fall back
into it. They busied themselves with attempts to increase the
Earth’s gravitational pull, and (alternatively) to check her
course. Their schemes were generally regarded as Utopian–yet
they could boast of the discovery of the Zro that lightened
bodies, and of a kind of aether-screen which generated mechanical
power in inexhaustible quantities by making matter slightly
opaque to aether. This engine only worked on a very small scale.
A screen two inches long would tear itself from fastenings that
would have held an earthquake, while the rocks in its
neighbourhood would melt in a few minutes, and the sea boil
instantly where its rays struck. The most brilliant of this
school asserted “Matter is a strain in the aether.” He explained
gravitation in this way. Place two ivory spheres in a rubber
tube; the strain on the tube is least when the balls touch. The
tendency is therefore for them to come together. Friction alone
checks them. Now aether is infinitely elastic and without
friction. From these data he calculated the Law of Inverse
Squares.
A more mystic school saw life everywhere. It knew all that we
know, and more, about ions and electrons; it saw every phenomenon
as a manifestation of will. The crowning glory of this school was
the discovery that Zro in its ninth stage, eaten and drunken with
concentrated intention, produced the desired result, whatever
(within wide limits) that result might be. This went far to
supersede the use of all specialized forms of Zro, and so to
unify the magical practice.
It seems curious with all this magic, Magic itself should be
the thing most deplored. But it was the means, and, as such,
“that which is in particular not the end”. The word for Magic,
‘Ijynx’, was the only dissyllable in the language, for Magic was
the essentially two-fold thing, more two-fold (in a way) than the
number two itself. It is interesting here to sketch briefly the
mathematics of Atlas. The task is not easy, as their minds worked
very differently from ours.
The number 1 was a fairly simple idea; but two was not only
two, but also ‘the result of adding 1 to 1′ and ‘the root of 4′.
The numbers grew in complexity out of all reason. Seven was 6
plus 1, and 5 plus 2, and 4 plus 3, and so on; as well as ‘the
root of 49′, ‘half 14′ and the like. They even distinguished 4
plus 3 from 3 plus 4. Each number also represented an idea or
group of ideas on all sorts of planes. It would have been quite
possible to discuss dressmaking in terms of pure number. To give
an example of the way in which their minds thought, consider the
number three. Three, in so far as it gives the first plane
figure, suggests superficies; with regard to the dimensions of
space, solidity. Three itself is therefore ‘that ineffably holy
thing in which the superficies is the solid’. Of course hundreds
of other ideas must be added to this; and to grasp and harmonize
them all in one colossal supra-rational idea was the constant
task of every mathematician. The upshot of this was that all
numbers above 33 were regarded as spurious, illusionary; they had
no real existence of their own*; they were temporary compounds,
unreal in very much the same sense as our square root of 1. They
were always expressed by graphic formulae, like our own organic
compounds. To take an example, the number 156 was regarded as a
sort of efflorescence of the number 7; it was never written but
as 77 plus [(7+7)/7] plus 77. Again 11 was usually written 3 plus
5 plus 3. It was always the aim to find symmetry in these
expressions, and also ‘to find an easy way to 1′. This last is
difficult to explain.
Eleven was their great ‘Key of Magic’. It is a twofold number
in ‘the act of becoming 1′. Thirty-seven was the essence of 1
inasmuch as multiplying it by 3 gives 111, three ones, which
divided again by 3 in another manner, yield 1. “One would rather
think of 48 as 37 plus 11 than as 4 times 12″ is the statement of
an elementary text-book dating from the earliest days of Atlas.
It was a sort of moral duty to teach the mind to think in this
manner.
The number 7 was the ‘perfect number’ with them as with us,
but for very different reasons. It was the link between Earth and
Venus, for one thing; I cannot explain why. It was ‘the number of
Atla’, and the ‘house of success’ (two being the ‘house of
battle’). It was also grace, softness, ease, healing and ‘joy of
Zro’ as well as ‘play of phosphorus’. Many mathematicians,
however, attacked it with rigour; there was at one time an almost
general consent to replace it by 8, and its ‘rapture-combination’
31, by 33. Despite the intense preoccupation with such ideas,
mathematics as we know them had reached a perfection which if it
does not surpass that of our own civilization, fails principally
because of its theorems, handed down to Euclid and Pythagoras,
although imperfectly, formed a springboard whence we might leap.
The initiation of children was also a matter reserved for the
High House. Weaned at three months, the children were tended by
the lower classes until the age of puberty, an occurrence which
fitted them at once for initiation. A legate from the High House
was sent for, and in his presence the child was brought,
acquainted with Zro by its father and mother, and full
instruction in ‘working’ was further conferred by any member of
the ‘house’ who chose to do so, this in practice meaning by
everybody. The ceremonies were frequently long and exhausting;
children often enough died in the course of them. This was not
regarded as a serious calamity; some schools of magicians even
pretended to rejoice. The representatives of the High House had a
prior right to the parents of the child; at times he conducted
the initiation in person, a high honour, but invariably fatal. On
rare occasions male children were sent over to the Atla to be
devoured. The parents of so fortunate a child were advanced in
rank on the spot, and had special privileges conferred on them,
sometimes even being transferred to a ‘House of Houses’. All
those who dwelt in the High House were veiled whenever they
appeared, in order to prevent it being known that they were of
the same appearance in all respects as their inferiors. This
ordinance had been made after the Great Conspiracy, with which I
shall deal in the chapter on History.

a