Then they began to converge on sources of wonderment: a centaur, eight feet high if he was an inch, walking across a meadow with his son and daughter cantering around him: Some baby dinosaurs. A cave angling gently into a hillside, bearing promising signs of enchantment. A road winding up another hill toward a ruined castle. The grownups mostly remained aboard the airships and gave the children a few minutes to flame out, though Lord Finkle-McGraw could be seen making his way toward Atlantis, poking curiously at the earth with his walking-stick, just to make sure it was fit to be trod by royal feet.

A man and a woman descended the gangway of Atlantis: in a floral dress that explored the labile frontier between modesty and summer comfort, accessorized with a matching parasol, Queen Victoria II of Atlantis. In a natty beige linen suit, her husband, the Prince Consort, whose name, lamentably, was Joe. Joe, or Joseph as he was called in official circumstances, stepped down first, moving in a somewhat pompous one-small-step-for-man gait, then turned to face Her Majesty and offered his hand, which she accepted graciously but perfunctorily, as if to remind everyone that she'd done crew at Oxford and had blown off tension during her studies at Stanford B-School with lap-swimming, rollerbiading, and jeet kune do. Lord Finkle-McGraw bowed as the royal espadrilles touched down. She extended her hand, and he kissed it, which was racy but allowed if you were old and stylish, like Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw.

"We thank Lord Finkle-McGraw, Imperial Tectonics Limited, and Machine-Phase Systems Limited once again for this lovely occasion. Now let us all enjoy these magnificent surroundings before, like the first Atlantis, they sink forever beneath the waves."

The parents of Atlantis/Shanghai strolled down the gangways, though many had retreated to their staterooms to change clothes upon catching sight of what the Queen and Prince Consort were wearing. The big news, already being uploaded to the Times by telescope-wielding fashion columnists on board Жther was that the parasol was back.