At first he couldn't remember how he ended up in a boat in the middle of the ocean. Dazed, he tried to figure out what had gone wrong. "Think," he told himself. "Start with yesterday afternoon, before the disaster."

After dinner, while the king and his court relaxed and waited for the midday meal to digest, a new wizard had appeared. The kid, no more than an apprentice, had appeared before the king, performed a few tricks that were no more magical than the slight of hand done by the magician in the marketplace. The king was enthralled. "Sorry, old fellow," he said to Marinus, "I know my father set great store by your powers but I need younger men around me." Marinus was so shocked, he barely heard it when the king continued, "Out of respect for all the years you spent with my father, I'll give you until the new moon to vacate your tower.

Marinus fumed all the way home. "How dare they take my livelihood?" When he got home, he slammed the door to his private chamber and stared out the window at the royal palace far below in the capitol. The white marble sparkled in the sun and the pennants atop its high towers snapped and crackled in the rising breeze.

"That whelp of a king hasn't got the sense of a newborn puppy." He gritted his teeth. "He thinks that some barely trained apprentice can take my place. Me! I have been Royal Wizard since he was just a gleam in his father's eye, yet he fires me the minute some flashy stage magician comes along and puts on a show."

He picked up his grimoire and flipped through the pages. "I keep telling him that magic has too many potential side effects for it to be done just for fun."

Finally he found what he wanted. "I'll show him. Get rid of me, will he? See if the new wizard can handle a genuine disaster."

He looked down at the city picturing the panic that would ensue; how they'd all beg him to come back and fix things. He hesitated. The people didn't deserve such fear. Then he shrugged.

"They deserve it too. This place is more corrupt than a decaying corpse." Then he grinned. "Besides, I'll step in at the last minute and save them all. They'll be so grateful that they'll be sure to give my job back."

As the moon rose, Marinus drew the sacred circle around his small stone altar. He lighted a fire under his ancient iron cauldron and when the water inside it began to boil, he dropped in the ingredients one by one. Then, swirling the water in the cauldron with his wand, he recited the incantation that would bring the wrath of the heavens to bear on Atlantis, the gem of the Mediterranean.

Almost immediately clouds blew across the moon and the heavens opened wide with an enormous crack of thunder. Water poured down as though from a waterfall. As the winds picked up, tornadoes skimmed across the land and the earth began to shake.

Marinus never had a chance to save the day. Before he could do more than grab his grimoire and climb into the boat that he kept on the bank of the river outside his tower, a wave of water gathered and pushed the boat down-river, out through the harbor, and into the deep Mediterranean waters where he watched Atlantis sink beneath the waves. Although he searched for hours, there was no other sign of survivors.

He pondered the spell for hours, going over every detail in his mind. He could find no flaw in his work but the spell's results had been hundreds of times more powerful than he had ever expected. He opened the grimoire and read through the procedure and incantation and still saw nothing wrong until he examined the list of ingredients. He squinted at the last item in the list. "Aha," he cried in triumph, "It was the ground unicorn horn. The spell calls for twenty-one grains, not twenty-one grams!"

Many days later, his boat came to ground on the Isle of Crete. For the rest of his long and lonely life, he told everyone he met about the terrible destruction of Atlantis, only leaving out the fact that it had been caused by his own near-sightedness.