Free She Walks in Darkness by Evangeline Walton

He wasn’t quite pleased.
    “I said I’d had enough of both to last me a lifetime; what ailed me now was nerves, and I’d soon adjust. ‘As for books, it’s a great privilege to have access to yours, sir. Any real scholar would give a year of his life for my chance at them.’ He smiled at that, and was completely friendly again, more so than I’d ever seen him. ‘I hope that you will always think so, my young friend. I had not known that you English were such courtiers.’
    “It wasn’t flattery, and I told him so. Libraries that have books like his keep them under lock and key. For a while we talked so hard that we forgot everything else. He really opened up, told me his own pet theories.
    “‘You know—who does not?—that civilization is said to have begun in the ancient Near East. Yet though it appears later in Egypt, it already wears a somewhat superior form. Why, if a civilizing “Pre-Dynastic Race” brought it from the East, as some say?’
    “I said, ‘Perhaps the native Egyptian genius had already improved it before we find traces of it, sir.’
    “‘No. The same race that brought it to the banks of the Nile had already carried an earlier stage of it to the banks of the Euphrates. All growth, all improvement, took place among the original culture-bearers. Among people of the pure ancient blood.’
    “I remembered then some of the reasons why we’d thought him a queer fish. I asked him, as tactfully as I could, if he had any idea just who those original culture-bearers could have been.
    “‘I know. And soon I will prove it.’ His eyes blazed; he looked like an exultant fanatic. ‘Did not Plato say that Atlanteans once occupied the Tyrrhene coast? Whether the place that in his Greek foolishness he called Atlantis lies beneath the sea, or—as is more likely—beneath the sands of the Sahara, that land was the cradle-land, the birthplace of all the arts of man. The birthplace of the Rasenna.’
    “I was startled. ‘But I thought they came from a place called Tyrrha, sir. Somewhere in Asia Minor.’
    “‘There they rose again after the disaster that destroyed their earlier home. From there they came to Italy—yes, a fugitive starving remnant of them came to teach the Western savages as once they had taught those earlier savages of Egypt and Sumer. Their civilization was the ancestor, the creator of all. None before or since, anywhere in the world, but has sprung from it.’
    “I stared, then ventured feebly, ‘What about the New World civilizations, sir? The Mayas and the Incas?’
    “‘Do not the Atlantic currents lead straight from the Mediterranean to Central America? To the place where the Mayas kept a calendar that dated back to a time thousands of years before the building of their own cities? Did not the Maya also wear feather crowns like those of ancient warriors of the Near East? Those ignorant savages who entered America through the Bering Strait—there were many pleasant lands in which they could have stopped to build cities before they reached Central America. Why there—amid deserts and jungles—did they suddenly learn how to build? Why?’
    “I said truthfully, ‘I don’t know why.’
    “‘Then think why! The Phoenicians fought with the Rasenna for a western ‘Isle of Refuge.’ I say that some of the Rasenna reached that isle, and went on to become teachers in the wild lands beyond, even as they had already taught all other civilized peoples in the world.’
    “He stopped for breath, but his eyes still shone. ‘The Rasenna were the torch-bearers, the creators, born to lead all mankind. Had they kept their heritage pure— not been corrupted by Greek wordiness, absurd Greek dreams of democracy—they would have built the empire that their bastard heirs, the Romans, built. But they would have held it. We would now be living in a sane and ordered world. Not in chaos—not in a mad, mechanized jungle where no man has time to enjoy beauty and the arts for frenziedly