Atlantis Beneath the Ice (9 page)

ATLANTIS
IN ANTARCTICA

It began on a morning like any other. Steam rose from the swamps and bogs of the tropics. Clouds of mist covered the quiet lakes of Africa. Only a faint rustle across the grasslands betrayed the presence of the morning’s first breeze. But on this day the silence was broken by a sound and a trembling that filled the earth with alarm. A rumbling that slowly turned to a roar as the earth’s foundations were uprooted.

The beat of hundreds of thousands of wings brushed the sky as flocks of birds rose from their nests to seek safety. Roaming herds raised their heads from their foraging, sniffed the air, and shuffled uneasily. As the terrifying roar began to deafen them and the undulations of the earth triggered a deep panic, the wild animals began to run, desperately seeking shelter from the coming catastrophe. Terror struck the hearts of men and women as they flung themselves to their knees, pleading with the gods to spare them. But no mercy was to be shown.

Earthquakes of extraordinary violence strained the very foundations of the earth. At the polar caps, mountains of ice began to crumble and dissolve. The din became unbearable as great shelves of ice were shaken loose from their precarious perches and slid into a relentlessly rising sea.

Unchained, the ocean spilled from the confines of its gigantic basin. Gathering its mighty force, it began a slow, inevitable roll to the shore.
Gaining speed and power, the unrestrained wave raced with the turning earth to overwhelm defenseless shores.

The earth itself was an active performer in the tragedy. The sliding crust was the unseen instigator of the ocean’s rebellion. Beneath the sand and rock of the ocean floor, the earth’s crust buckled like an angry horse ridding itself of a dreaded rider.

Tidal wave followed tidal wave as earthquakes broke new ground. Rivers overflowed as gales of rain relentlessly pounded the earth. A flood, a deluge, a storm, and a hell—the likes of which no living human had seen—plagued the planet as the world’s ocean broke its boundaries.

Slowly the water began to die down, the roar of the earth subsided, and the sun once again rose on a silent world. But it was not a silence of peace. It carried with it the ominous quiet of the slow and deadly process of freezing. A third disaster was preparing to strike opposite sides of the globe.

In Siberia, the reign of the great ivory-tusked, shaggy-haired mammoths came to a sudden end. The lush grasslands that had provided them with a bountiful living disappeared as snow began to fall. When it was over, Siberia had been transformed from a country that could support the voracious appetites of mammoths to a land whose very name would come to be synonymous with desolation.

The deadly process was not confined to the animals of Siberia. On the other side of the globe, in Lesser Antarctica, a veil of snow and ice was drawn across the land. As each century added more snow, the history of the people who once lived there began to fade.

The Atlanteans perished in such an overwhelming catastrophe that the fruits of their long and profound history were torn to shreds by the upheaval of the earth. Locked in the Antarctic Circle; Atlantis was buried beneath the ice. But a great legend had begun.

The Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 427–347 BCE) launched the adventures of a thousand armchair and boots-to-the-ground explorers with an intriguing tale that he assured his listeners, “though passing strange, is yet wholly true, as Solon, the wisest of the Seven, once confirmed.”
¹

Solon (ca. 638–559 BCE) was Plato’s ancestor and one of the seven acknowledged wise men of ancient Greece. The Roman biographer Plutarch (ca. 46–124 CE) describes the dire situation that led to the appointment of Solon as Athens’s ultimate judge.

The city stood on the brink of revolution, and it seemed as if the only way to put a stop to its perpetual disorders and achieve stability was to set up a tyranny. . . . At this point the most level-headed of the Athenians began to look toward Solon. They saw that he, more than anyone else, stood apart from the injustices of the time and was involved neither in the exhortations of the rich nor the privations of the poor, and so finally they appealed to him to come forward and settle their differences.
²

Solon is considered the father of democracy. His concern for freedom and his compassion for the underprivileged compelled him to overturn long-ingrained injustices. Serfdom and slavery as payment for debt was outlawed, and the exclusive power of the aristocrats was abolished. But soon Solon faced obstacles, as Plutarch explains.

Once Solon’s laws had been put into effect, people came to visit him every day, praising some of them and finding fault with others, or advising him to insert a certain provision here or take out another there. A great many wanted to ask questions and cross-examine him on points of detail, and they kept pressing him to explain what was the object of this or that regulation. Solon saw that it was out of the question to meet such demands, but also that he would earn great ill will if he turned them all down. He was anxious to disengage himself from these complications and thus escape the faultfinding and captious criticism of his fellow countrymen, for as he remarks himself, “In great affairs you cannot please all parties.” So he made his commercial interests as a ship owner an excuse to travel and sailed away obtaining leave of absence for ten years from the Athenians, in
the hope that during this period they would become accustomed to his laws. He went first of all to Egypt.
³

Solon and his compatriots considered Egypt the fountain of knowledge. To travel there, no matter the hardship, was a necessary pilgrimage for those seeking wisdom. Clustered around the searing sand at the base of the pyramids were not the looted vaults echoing the edicts of dead pharaohs that greet us now, but instead a thriving community, wise with age and possessing a wealth of information controlled by the esteemed priests, whose authority could challenge even that of the pharaoh.

A deep reverence for the past permeated the priests’ every action, thought, and deed. The past was the key to the future. It determined the pattern and shaped the mold that the priests were honor bound to preserve. More than mere caretakers of ritual, they were astronomers, mathematicians, magicians, civic administrators, and guardians of the secret sciences of antiquity. Only the brightest children could enter the priesthood. If they were fortunate, after a long period of study and devotion, a handful were chosen to see the sacred texts.

These were the priests that the esteemed Solon sought out. “He spent some time studying and discussing philosophy with Psenophis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Sais, who were the most learned of the Egyptian priests. According to Plato it was from them that he heard the legend of the lost continent of Atlantis.”
⁴
What we do know of the location of Atlantis is voiced by the Egyptian priest whom Plutarch identifies as Sonchis.

Sonchis had tutored the philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 582–507 BCE), who was recognized as a genius in his time. (Rumors persisted that Plato owed more to Pythagoras than he revealed to his devoted followers. It was whispered that he had plagiarized a book written by Pythagoras.)
^a

Pythagoras was the first person to claim that the earth was spherical, that it was “inhabited round about and that there were places on
the opposite side of the globe where: our ‘down’ is their ‘up.’”
⁵
He also believed that a vast island continent lay in the southern hemisphere. Some regard him as the first to suggest that Antarctica and the other continents even existed.
⁶

Pythagoras established a brotherhood in the Italian city of Croton. The community was eventually overthrown in a revolt that may have taken the teacher’s life. The Roman poet Ovid (43–18 BCE) claimed to have the text of a speech the great philosopher gave to the citizens of Croton “For my part, considering how the generations of men have passed from the age of gold to that of iron, how often the fortunes of differing place have been reversed, I should believe that nothing lasts for long under the same form. I have seen what was once solid earth now changed into sea, and lands created out of what was ocean . . . ancient anchors have been found on mountain tops.”
⁷

Like Sonchis, Pythagoras shared the belief that what is most ancient is most perfect. This attitude is hard for those of us who live in the twenty-first century to grasp. For unlike the children of ancient Greece and Egypt who were raised with myths that spoke of perfect beings who thrived in ancient times, children now gaze at incredible science fiction projections of the future. Although our confidence is sometimes shaken, it is still to the future, rather than the past, that we look for perfection.

The idea of “progress” has penetrated current thinking so completely that it is vaguely disturbing, yet endlessly fascinating, to learn of the great achievements of ancient Egypt, Mexico, or Peru. Impressive ruins shake our sense of the inevitable march of progress and make us wonder about our own future. That an advanced civilization thrived and then perished in remote times is an uncomfortable realization for those who believe in the inevitability of progress.

Six centuries after the death of Pythagoras, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela published a map of the world that included a depiction of the philosopher’s southern island continent (see
figure 4.1
). Mela called this mysterious island Antichthones, meaning “land of the people of the other side of the earth.”

Solon met Pythagoras’s tutor, Sonchis, in the Egyptian city of Sais, where he tried to impress the priest with tales of Greek mythology about the Great Flood. But Sonchis interrupted his visitor, saying, “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an old Greek. . . . You possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age.”
⁸

Sonchis gave Solon a lesson in what ancient history
really
meant with his vivid description of events that had devastated the earth before the Flood wreaked its havoc.

Many and manifold are the destructions of mankind that have been and shall be; the greatest are by fire and water; but besides these there are lesser ones in countless other fashions. Your own story of how Phaethon, the child of the Sun, yoked his father’s chariot, and
because he was unable to drive it along his father’s path, burnt up things on the earth and himself was smitten by a thunderbolt and slain is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a deviation of the bodies that move around the earth in the heavens and consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on earth.
⁹

To save humankind, Zeus destroyed Phaethon with a thunderbolt and then unleashed the Flood to put out the fire. This “story” traces precisely the sequence of events that would erupt during an earth crust displacement. A shocking change in the path of the sun is followed by violent worldwide earthquakes and floods.

Sonchis possessed an extremely “modern” perspective about mythology. He treated the Greek myth of Phaethon and his careening horses dragging the uncontrollable sun behind them as a symbolic version of real physical events. Considering the literal mentality of his time
^b
—six centuries before the birth of Christ—this is an amazing example of thinking outside the box. His sophistication extended to his geographic description of the world, a view radically different from what is taught even in the twenty-first century.

THE EUROPEAN WORLDVIEW

Our current geographic perspective originated with the European age of discovery and reflects the ethnocentric prejudices of those Europeans. Even the common divisions of east and west as presented on a typical map—the Middle East, the Far East, and so forth—are strictly relative to Europe. There is no
geographic
justification for placing Europe at the center of the world (see
figure 4.2
).

As the European explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries traveled around Africa and South America, charting unknown seas and seeking routes to exotic treasures, they renamed sections of the ocean. The prospect of navigating an unknown and overwhelming sea became less terrifying if it was divided into manageable sections (no matter how artificial) that could be tidily plotted on the explorer’s newly drawn maps. For example, after a dangerous voyage through the treacherous straits that now bear his name, Ferdinand Magellan (ca. 1480–1521) finally reached a calm and open stretch of water, which, in his relief, he christened the Pacific Ocean, meaning the “peaceful ocean.” Similarly, Vasco da Gama (ca
.
1460–1524) named the route that took him to India, the Indian Ocean.