The Treasure of Atlantis

CHAPTER I—THE FLOWING ROAD “It’s good to be back again, Morse, back to civilization, and it’s mighty good of you to take me in this way.” Stanley Morse looked at the orchid hunter as the latter leaned forward from the cozy depth of the saddlebag chair and stretched his lean hands to the blaze. The fingers were more like claws than human attributes; the whole man seemed little more than a well-preserved mummy, a strangely different person from the vigorous naturalist Morse remembered meeting three years before on the higher reaches of the Amazon—the “Flowing Road.” The man’s clothes hung in ludicrous folds about his gaunt frame, and he shivered despite the heat of the blazing logs that almost scorched his chair.