Clive Cussler - Atlantis Found

"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."

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 shook 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."