Atlantis Beneath the Ice (18 page)

He shuffled into a hobbit-sized cupboard and left us to gaze at his treasures: the writer in us anxious to reach for a book, the librarian in us wondering what mystical cataloguing system he used.

Our host reappeared smoothing the cover of a massive volume. Never was the phrase “you can’t judge a book by its cover” more appropriate. Its ugly milky-colored cover stretched across its bulk like a cheap coat two sizes too small. It was curling at the edges like the skin of a Californian too fond of the sun, and despite the bookseller’s tender ministrations, there was a tinge of the odor of neglect about it.

Inside lay the magic: page after rustling page of Athanasius Kircher’s words, the illustrations delicately detailed, a man’s life work beneath our hands.

Juggling it on our laps on the tube trip home wasn’t easy. And perhaps it was only our naïveté about the true extent of the treasure we held that kept us laughing as we balanced the
Mundus Subterraneus
between us and congratulated ourselves on our find. It stayed on the table in our bedsit for many months. The map of Atlantis was boldly drawn in Kircher’s hand, the symbol of the journey we had made.

But even the pleasures of the
Mundus Subterraneus
had to give way to material necessity if we wanted to stay in London and continue our quest. We ran out of money. And so we carried our treasure to the slick venue of Sotheby’s and sat on the uncomfortable chairs and watched as a man with a voice like, well, like an auctioneer, raised his gavel and barked Kircher’s book away to an anonymous phone bidder. Within weeks we both had jobs and our three-month sojourn in London turned into five years of fine memories.

HOW NORTH BECAME DOWN

In
Mundus Subterraneus
Kircher claimed that the remains of Atlantis lay beneath the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. He also revealed the mysterious map of Atlantis that he claimed had been stolen from Egypt by the early Roman invaders (see
figure 7.3
on page 120). The inscription on the map translates as, “Site of the island of Atlantis, now beneath the sea, according to the beliefs of the Egyptians and the description of Plato.”

At first glance, the map seems odd to modern eyes because north, as indicated by the downward-pointing compass, is at the bottom of the page. But the ancient Egyptians believed that the most important direction was south, toward the headwaters of the sacred Nile. Therefore south must be “up.” Kircher reproduced this belief.

The map appears much more familiar to us if we look at it upside down. What looks like America then appears on the left, with Spain and North Africa on the right—where we are accustomed to seeing them in twentieth-century maps. However, if we lift a modern globe off its hinges and roll it about like a beach ball so that the South Pole faces us, placing South America on our right and South Africa and Madagascar on our left, we can immediately see that the Egyptian map of Atlantis represents an ice-free Antarctica in size, shape, scale, and position (see
figure 7.4
).

The present shape of Antarctica as depicted is based on the current ocean level, not that of 11,600 years ago. Atlantis did not actually sink beneath the waves. Instead, as the old ice caps melted, the ocean level rose, covering some of the continent’s permutations. Further distortions in our modern map, compared with Kircher’s, are a result of the weight of today’s Antarctic ice sheet. This immense blanket of snow and ice depressed parts of the continent, causing more and more land to fall below the ocean level. Nevertheless, the shadow of Atlantis can still be seen in the modern map of Antarctica.

If the horror of an earth crust displacement were to be visited on today’s interdependent world culture, the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization. Only among the merchant marines and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish. But the valuable maps they carried would be saved by survivors for hundreds, even thousands, of years, until once again they could be used to guide seamen across the world ocean to rediscover lost lands.

EIGHT

EMBERS
OF HUMANKIND

Numbed with fear, the few shocked and terrified survivors of Atlantis floated lost and confused amongst the debris left in the wake of the earth’s nightmare. But the nightmare did not dissipate with the coming of the welcome dawn. There was to be no waking from this dream for many centuries. Instead it was left to those blessed by favorable winds and tides, which carried them to hospitable shores, to bind together and rebuild after the devastation. Only embers of humankind—those who had fled to the mountains—survived.

It is a tribute to the survivor’s sheer courage and overwhelming will to live that, adrift, fighting the elements, they somehow began to piece together the tattered remnants of their world. But perhaps the future could offer only hope to their battered hearts. No horror of tomorrow could compete with the devastation they had left behind, buried under the falling snow that was now smothering their island home. But their solitude was not total as they believed, tossed and tormented in their ships, so tiny in the ocean’s vastness.

Equally shocked as the Atlanteans were the survivors in the highlands that had escaped the tidal waves. Shivering in their mountain-top shelters were the remaining hunters and gatherers of the earth. Clinging to the comfort of ways that had stood them well for hundreds of thousands of years, little did they suspect that those ancient routines would be overturned in a peaceful revolution brought by strangers from the sea.

The hunters and gatherers were strong, uncoddled people, secure in the proven ways of their ancestors who had carved a living from the bounties of nature wherever they found them. They had fought the ravages of nature before: the droughts, the storms, the famines, and the thousands of dangers of chance. But nothing in their memory had been like this. Nothing had prepared them for the day the earth’s crust shifted, carrying them forever away from their familiar existence. And so, shivering in their mountain retreats, they began to eke out a new life in the land, until they were joined by strangers from the sea. They shared nothing with these strangers but a vivid memory of the past that had been swept away by the earth’s anger and a mutual fear of the future.

We can only imagine the conflict that raged within Atlantean and non-Atlantean alike at the joy of finding other living souls. Aliens to each other they truly were: but aliens bound together by a mutual need to conquer the circumstances that threatened to destroy them all.

The first task was to secure the future with a stock of food. Maps of the globe would become invaluable in the future, but the survivors of the flood were facing a critical problem—the need to feed themselves. They had to reboot agriculture. The earliest experiments with agriculture began in the
same
century that Atlantis fell. The chances of such a coincidence are astronomical.

Plato, who preserved the legend of Atlantis from ancient Egyptian sources, wrote about those first desperate days after the ocean broke across its boundaries.

A
THENIAN
: Do you consider that there is any truth in the ancient tales?

C
LINIAS
: What tales?

A
THENIAN
: That the world of men has often been destroyed by floods, plagues, and many other things, in such a way that only a small portion of the human race survived.

C
LINIAS
: Everyone would regard such accounts as perfectly credible.

A
THENIAN
: Come now, let us picture to ourselves one of the many catastrophes—namely, that which occurred once upon a time through the Deluge.

C
LINIAS
: And what are we to imagine about it?

A
THENIAN
: That the men who then escaped destruction must have been mostly herdsmen of the hills, scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere on the mountain-tops.

C
LINIAS
: Evidently . . .

A
THENIAN
: Shall we assume that the cities situated in the plains and near the sea were totally destroyed at the time?

C
LINIAS
: Let us assume it . . .

A
THENIAN
: Shall we, then, state that, at the time when the destruction took place, human affairs were in this position: there was fearful and widespread desolation over a vast tract of land; most of the animals were destroyed; and the few herds of oxen and flocks of goats that happened to survive afforded at the first but scanty sustenance to the herdsmen?
¹

Plato’s account represents the earliest rational explanation for the appearance of domesticated animals. His theory postulates the emergence of agriculture, beginning with the domestication of animals, as a reappearance of a skill learned long before in Atlantis. As we shall see, the dating of the earliest experiments with agriculture appears to match the century of Atlantis’s fall. In the highlands of Turkey two of the worlds’ most important crops—wheat and barley—were shaped to humans’ design between eleven thousand and twelve thousand years ago,
²
at the time that Plato tells us Atlantis perished.