Atlantis Found (33 page)

Giordino moved in close to Pat and squinted at the glyphs. “Unicorns,” he announced. “They’re unicorns. See, they only have one horn coming from the top of their heads.”

“Fanciful,” muttered Hatfield skeptically. “As fanciful as sculptures of nonexistent Greek gods.”

“How do you know?” Pitt challenged him. “Perhaps unicorns actually existed nine thousand years ago, before they became extinct along with woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.”

“Yes, along with Medusas with snakes for hair and Cyclops with only one eye in their forehead.”

“Don’t forget gargoyles and dragons,” added Giordino.

“Until bones or fossils are found that prove they existed,” said Hatfield, “they’ll have to remain a myth from the past.”

Pitt didn’t debate further with Hatfield. He turned and walked behind the stone chairs still holding the mummies and stared at a large curtain of sewn animal hides that covered the far wall. Very gently, he lifted one corner of the curtain and looked under it. His face took on a mystified expression.

“Careful,” warned Hatfield. “That’s very fragile.”

Pitt ignored him and raised the curtain in both hands until it had curled above his head.

“You shouldn’t touch that,” Hatfield cautioned irritably. “It’s a priceless relic and might crumble to pieces. It must be handled delicately until it can be preserved.”

“What’s under it is even more priceless,” Pitt said in a impassive voice. He nodded at Giordino. “Grab a couple of those spears and use them to prop up the curtain.”

Hatfield, his face flushed crimson, tried to stop Giordino, but he might as well have tried to halt a farm tractor. Giordino brushed him aside without so much as a sideways glance, snatched two of the ancient obsidian spears, planted their tips on the floor of the chamber, and used their butt ends to hold up the curtain. Then Pitt adjusted a pair of floodlights until their beams were concentrated on the wall.

Pat held her breath and stared at the four large circles carved into the polished wall, with strange diagrams cut within their circumferences. “They’re glyphs of some kind,” she said solemnly

“They look like maps,” spoke up Giordino.

“Maps of what?”

A bemused smile spread Pitt’s lips. “Four different projections of the earth.”

Hatfield peered through his glasses over Pat’s shoulder. “Ridiculous. These glyphs don’t look like any ancient maps I’ve ever seen. They’re too detailed, and they certainly bear no resemblance to geography as I know it.”

“That’s because your shallow mind cannot visualize the continents and shorelines as they were nine thousand years ago.”

“I must agree with Dr. Hatfield,” said Pat. “All I see is a series of what might be large and small islands with jagged coastlines surrounded by wavy images suggesting a vast sea.”

“My vote goes for a butterfly damaged by antiaircraft fire on a Rorschach inkblot test,” Giordino muttered cynically.

“You just dropped fifty points on the gray matter scale,” Pitt came back. “I thought that of all the people, I could count on you to solve the puzzle.”

“What
do
you see?” Pat asked Pitt.

“I see four different views of the world as seen from the continent of Antarctica nine thousand years ago.”

“All jokes aside,” said Giordino, “you’re right.”

Pat stood back for an overall view. “Yes, I can begin to distinguish other continents now. But they’re in different positions. It’s almost as if the world has tilted.”

“I fail to see how Antarctica fits into the picture,” Hatfield insisted.

“It’s right in front of your eyes.”

Pat asked, “How can you be so dead sure?”

“I’d be interested in knowing how you reached that conclusion,” Hatfield scoffed.

Pitt looked at Pat. “Do you have any chalk in your tote bag that you use to highlight inscriptions in rock?”

She smiled. “Chalk went out. Now we prefer talcum powder.”

“Okay, let’s have it, and some Kleenex. All women carry Kleenex.”

She dug in her pocket and handed him a small packet of tissues. Then she fished around in her tote bag through the notebooks, camera equipment, and tools used for examining ancient symbols in rock, until she found a container of powdered talc.

Pitt spent the short wait wetting the tissue with water out of a canteen and dampening the glyphs carved on the wall so the talc would adhere in the etched stone. Then Pat passed him the talc, and he began dabbing it on the smooth surface around the ancient art. After about three minutes, he stood back and admired his handiwork.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Antarctica.”

All three gazed intently at the crude coating of white talc Pitt had dabbed on the polished rock and then wiped clean, outlining the etched features. It now bore a distinct similarity to the South Polar continent.

“What does all this mean?” Pat asked, confused.

“What it means,” explained Pitt, gesturing toward the mummies sitting mute in their throne chairs, “is that these ancient people walked on Antarctica thousands of years before modern man. They sailed around and charted it before it was covered with ice and snow.”

“Nonsense!” Hatfield snorted. “It’s a scientifically proven fact that all but three percent of the continent has been covered by an ice sheet for millions of years.”

Pitt didn’t say anything for several seconds. He stared at the ancient figures as if they were alive, his eyes moving from one face to the next as if trying to communicate with them. Finally, he gestured toward the ancient, silent dead. “The answers,” he said with steadfast conviction, “will come from them.”

24

HIRAM YAEGER RETURNED TO his computer complex after lunch carrying a large cardboard box with a basset hound puppy inside that he’d saved from the city pound just hours before it was scheduled to be put to sleep. Since the family golden retriever had died from old age, Yaeger had sworn that he had buried his last family dog and refused to replace it. But his two teenage daughters had begged and pleaded for another one and even threatened to ignore their school studies if their retriever wasn’t replaced. Yaeger’s only consolation was that he wasn’t the first father to be coerced by his children into bringing home an animal.

He had meant to find another golden retriever, but when he’d looked into the sad, soulful coffee-cup eyes of the basset and seen the ungainly body with the short legs, big feet, and ears that dragged on the floor, he’d been hooked. He laid newspapers around his desk and allowed the puppy to roam free, but it preferred to lie on a towel in the open box and stare at Yaeger, who found it next to impossible to steer his concentration away from those sad eyes.

Finally, he forced his attention on his work and called up Max. She appeared on the monitor and scowled at him. “Must you always keep me waiting?”

He reached down and held up the puppy for Max to see. “I stopped off and picked up a doggy for my daughters.”

Max’s face instantly softened. “He’s cute. The girls should be thrilled.”

“Have you made progress in deciphering the inscriptions?” he asked.

“I’ve pretty much unraveled the meaning of the symbols, but it takes a bit of doing to connect them into words than can be interpreted in English.”

“Tell me what you have so far.”

“Quite a lot, actually,” Max said proudly.

“I’m listening.”

“Sometime around 7000 B.C., the world suffered a massive catastrophe.”

“Any idea of what it was?” inquired Yaeger.

“Yes, it was recorded in the map of the heavens on the ceiling of the Colorado chamber,” explained Max. “I haven’t deciphered the entire narrative yet, but it seems that not one, but two comets swept in from the far outer solar system and caused worldwide calamity.”

“Are you sure they weren’t asteroids? I’m no astronomer, but I’ve never heard of comets orbiting in parallel.”

“The celestial map showed two objects with long tails traveling side by side that collide with the earth.”

Yaeger lowered his hand and petted the dog as he spoke. “Two comets striking at the same time. Depending on their size, they must have caused a huge convulsion.”

“Sorry, Hiram,” said Max, “I didn’t mean to mislead you. Only one of the comets hit the earth. The other circled past the sun and disappeared into deep space.”

“Did the star map indicate where the comet fell?”

Max nodded her head. “The depiction of the impact site indicated Canada, probably somewhere in the Hudson Bay area.”

“I’m proud of you, Max.” Yeager had lifted the basset hound onto his lap, where it promptly fell asleep. “You’d make a classic detective.”

“Solving an ordinary people crime would be mere child’s play for me,” Max said loftily.

“All right, we have a comet crashing to the earth in a Canadian province about 7000 B.C. that caused worldwide destruction.”

“Only the first act. The meat of the story comes later, with the description of the people and their civilization that existed before the cataclysm and the aftermath. Most all were annihilated. The pitiful few who survived, too weakened to rebuild their empire, saw it as their divine mission to wander the world, educate the primitive stone-age inhabitants of the era who endured in remote areas, and build monuments warning of the next cataclysm.”

“Why did they expect another threat from space?”

“From what I can gather, they foresaw the return of the second comet that would finish the job of complete destruction.”

Yaeger was nearly speechless. “What you’re suggesting, Max, is that there really was a civilization called Atlantis?”

“I didn’t say that,” Max stated irritably. “I haven’t determined what these ancient people called themselves. I do know that they only vaguely resembled the tale passed down from Plato, the famed Greek philosopher. His record of a conversation that took place two hundred years before his time, between his ancestor, the great Greek statesman Solon, and an Egyptian priest, is the first written account of a land called Atlantis.”

“Everyone knows the legend,” said Yaeger, his thoughts spinning into space. “The priest told of an island continent larger than Australia that rose in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean west of the Pillars of Hercules, or the Strait of Gibraltar, as we know it today. Several thousand years ago, it was destroyed and sank beneath the sea after a great upheaval, and vanished. A riddle that has puzzled believers, and is scoffed at by historians to this day. Personally, I tend to agree with historians that Atlantis is nothing more than an early saga of science fiction.”

“Perhaps it was not a total fabrication after all.”

Yaeger stared at Max, his eyebrows pinched. “There is absolutely no geological basis for a lost continent to have disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean nine thousand years ago. It never existed. Certainly not between North Africa and the Caribbean. It’s now generally accepted that the legend is linked to a catastrophic earthquake and flood caused by a volcanic eruption that took place on the island of Thera, or Santorini as it is known today, and wiped out the great Minoan civilization on Crete.”

“So you think Plato’s portrait of Atlantis, in his works
Critias
and
Timaeus,
is an invention.”

“Not portrait, Max,” Yaeger lectured the computer. “He told the story in dialogue, a popular genre in ancient Greece. The story is not related in the third person by the author, but presented to the reader by two or more narrators, one who questions the other. And, yes, I believe Plato invented Atlantis, knowing with glee that future generations would swallow the con, write a thousand books on the subject, and debate it endlessly.”

“You’re a hard man, Yaeger,” said Max. “I assume you don’t believe in the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic.”

Yaeger shook his head slowly. “Cayce claimed he saw Atlantis fall and rise in the Caribbean. If an advanced civilization had ever existed in that region, the hundreds of islands would have produced clues. But to date not so much as a potsherd of an ancient culture has been found.”

“And the great stone blocks that form an undersea road off Bimini?”

“A geological formation that can be found in several other parts of the seas.”

“And the stone columns that were found on the seafloor off Jamaica?”

“It was proven they were barrels of dry concrete that solidified in water after the ship carrying them as cargo sank and the wooden staves eroded away. Face facts, Max. Atlantis is a myth.”

“You’re an old poop, Hiram. You know that?”

“Just telling it like it is,” said Yaeger testily. “I prefer not to believe in an ancient advanced civilization that some dreamers believe had rocket ships and garbage disposals.”

“Ah,” Max said sharply, “there lies the rub. Atlantis was not one vast city populated by Leonardo da Vincis and Thomas Edisons and surrounded by canals on an island continent, as Plato described it. According to what I’m finding, the ancient people were a league of small seafaring nations who navigated and mapped the entire world four thousand years before the Egyptians raised the pyramids. They conquered the seas. They knew how to use currents, and developed a vast knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that made them master navigators. They developed a chain of coastal city-ports and built a trading empire by mining and transporting mineral ore they transformed into metals, unlike other people of the same millennium who lived at higher elevations, led a nomadic existence, and survived the disaster. The seafarers had the bad luck to be destroyed by the giant tidal waves and were lost without a trace. Whatever remains of their port cities now lies deep underwater and buried beneath a hundred feet of silt.”

“You deciphered and collected all that data since yesterday?” asked Yaeger in undisguised astonishment.

“The grass,” Max pontificated, “does not grow under my feet, nor, I might add, do I sit around and wait for my terminal innards to rust.”