Could this at last be one?  The pavement, cleared with care, proved of a disappointing size, measuring 8 feet by 4 at the widest.  The tessellae were exceptionally beautiful and fresh in color; and each separate design represented some scene in the story of Apollo.  No Bacchus with his panther-skin and Maenads, no Triton and Nymphs, no loves of Mars and Venus, no Ganymede with the eagle, no Leda, no Orpheus, no Danae, no Europa—­but always and only Apollo!  He was guiding his car; he was singing among the Nine; he was drawing his bow; he was flaying Marsyas; above all—­the only repeated picture—­he was guiding the oxen of Admetus, goad in hand, with the glory yet vivid about his hair.  Could it (someone suggested) be the pavement of a temple?  And, if so, how came a temple of the sun-god upon this unhomely coast?

The discovery gave rise to a small sensation and several ingenious theories, one enthusiastic philologer going so far as to derive the name Halzaphron from the Greek, interpreting it as “the salt of the west winds” or “Zephyrs,” and to assert roundly that the temple (he assumed it to be a temple) dated far back beyond the Roman Invasion.  This contention, though perhaps no more foolish than a dozen others, undoubtedly met with the most ridicule.

And yet in my wanderings along that coast I have come upon broken echoes, whispers, fragments of a tale, which now and again, as I tried to piece them together, wakened a suspicion that the derided philologer, with his false derivation, was yet “hot,” as children say in the game of hide-and-seek.

For the stretch of sea overlooked by Halzaphron covers the lost land of Lyonnesse.  Take a boat upon a clear, calm day, and, drifting, peer over the side through its shadow, and you will see the tops of tall forests waving below you.  Walk the shore at low water and you may fill your pockets with beech-nuts, and sometimes—­when a violent tide has displaced the sand—­stumble on the trunks of large trees.  Geologists dispute whether the Lyonnesse disappeared by sudden catastrophe or gradual subsidence, but they agree in condemning the fables of Florence and William of Worcester, that so late as November, 1099, the sea broke in and covered the whole tract between Cornwall and the Scillies, overwhelming on its way no less than a hundred and forty churches!  They prove that, however it befell, we must date the inundation some centuries earlier.  Now if my story be true—­But let it be told: 

* * * * *

In the year of the great tide Graul, son of Graul, was king in the Lyonnesse.  He lived at peace in his city of Maenseyth, hard by the Sulleh, where the foreign traders brought their ships to anchor—­sometimes from Tyre itself, oftener from the Tyrian colonies down the Spanish coast; and he ruled over a peaceful nation of tinners, herdsmen, and charcoal-burners.  The charcoal came from the great forest to the eastward where Cara Clowz in Cowz, the gray rock in the wood, overlooked the Cornish frontier; his cattle pastured nearer, in the plains about the foot of the Wolves’ Cairn; and his tinners camped and washed the ore in the valley-bottoms—­for in those days they had no need to dig into the earth for metal, but found plenty by puddling in the river-beds.