. What are now known as Cuba and the West
Indies were among the highest points of the continent, and now stand
like monuments to its departed greatness.

The civilization of Atlantis was remarkable, and its people attained
heights which seem almost incredible to even those who are familiar
with the highest achievements of man in our own times. The Chosen Ones
preserved from the cataclysm which destroyed Lemuria, and who lived to
a remarkably old age, had stored up within their minds the wisdom and
learning of the races that had been destroyed, and they thus gave the
Atlanteans an enormous starting-advantage. They soon attained great
advancement along all the lines of human endeavor. They perfected
mechanical inventions and appliances, reaching far ahead of even our
present attainments. In the field of electricity especially they
reached the stages that our present races will reach in about two or
three hundred years from now. Along the lines of Occult Attainment
their progress was far beyond the dreams of the average man of our own
race, and in fact from this arose one of the causes of their downfall,
for they prostituted the power to base and selfish uses, and Black
Magic.

And, so the decline of Atlantis began. But the end did not come at
once, or suddenly, but gradually. The continent, and its surrounding
islands gradually sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, the
process occupying over 10,000 years. The Greeks and Romans of our own
Cycle had traditions regarding the sinking of the continent, but their
knowledge referred only to the disappearance of the small
remainder--certain islands--the continent itself having disappeared
thousands of years before their time. It is recorded that the Egyptian
priests had traditions that the continent itself had disappeared nine
thousand years before their time. As was the case with the Chosen Ones
of Lemuria, so was it with the Elect of Atlantis, who were taken away
from the doomed land some time prior to its destruction. The few
advanced people left their homes and migrated to portions of what are
now South America and Central America, but which were then islands of
the sea. These people have left their traces of their civilization and
works, which our antiquaries are discovering to-day.

When the Fifth Cycle dawned (our own cycle, remember) these brave and
advanced souls acted as the race-teachers and became as "gods" to those
who came afterward. The races were very p