This is where we were

This is from Scott-Elliot's ur-text The Story of Atlantis, probably the 1904 edition.
My copy has modernised maps (which is a shame).

Five million years this place has been here, and now, the Twin Continents reach their final equilibrium, their final setting for the coming catastrophe, and let us not be mistaken, the catastrophe will come. The warring Emperors of the Atlanteans, South and North, who can be told apart by their flags alone, Black and White respectively, draw their lines.

Like ants, the workers in the occult factories that litter the outer rings of the Golden City scurry to build vast fleets of vimana-ships, each with the capability of destroying millions with a single shot. Vrilbatteries leach the ley force from the earth, and every day, as the life flows from the ground, the hairline cracks grow wider; the coastlines recede from the sea. The slave-economy is the centre of Atlantean commerce; the citizens go about their lives, and live and love and hate and eat and sometimes starve and have the whole range of human experience, without ever really seeing the people who make their privilege possible.

The Rmoahals know. A whole culture bought and sold, used as tools, soldiers, labour. They sing their freedom-songs under the whip, even while the mystic scientists of Poseidonis, Ruta, Daitya and Leagh arm, indoctrinate and... alter helpless armies of thrall-warriors.

Lemuria has suffered more. Long since occupied by the so called Good Law, the eastern continent will be first to be destroyed. As for the breakaway Muvians, The Atlanteans call them warlike and perverse; they deny the sanctity of marriage, they say. They let their women fight, they say. They keep all their goods in common, they say. They ignore the rules of economic growth. They don't buy or sell slaves. The Muvians are doomed, just as much as everyone else, and they know they are, but in the free cities of the East, the cry goes out, isn't it worth it? And they prepare to fight.

The colossal, brutal, psychically powerful Lemurians dwindle. Once they herded the great saurians across the plains of the Eastern lands, and watched, but now once more they prepare for a final war.

It doesn't have to happen. Humanity can still be saved, will endure beyond the catastrophe. The Manus assure us of that. But our actions as part of a people in danger will determine the course of the next age. Peace or chaos, slavery or freedom? What cards have we drawn? What role will we play?