And heres a chapter from, The Westbury End Book Club! Cleveland Heights, Ohio 2010 “So, where is Atlantis?” Mase asked out the blue. We were sitting at the kitchen table. Mase was reading the newspaper and I was picking greens to cook for Sunday dinner. “What?” I pulled a dark green leaf from the broad stem and dropped it into the large bowl I was collecting them in. “You never did tell me what happened to Atlantis. Did you write about it in the new book?” The new book. Just the thought of it gave me pause. I still hadn’t finished it. Hadn’t really been working on it. All I knew is that I thanked God that nowadays those manuscripts didn’t still permeate my mind every second of the day. “Yeah. I’m still working on the final rewrite,” I said. “Do you think I should put it in? “Duh. Everyone wants to know about it.” “Everyone like who?” I laughed “Who even read my first book? Probably nobody.” I hadn’t ever checked on the sales for In the Beginning. But they couldn’t be good. I had refused to do any marketing for it. Still, just like Mase, my publisher kept questioning me about finishing the sequel. I’m sure that little publishing house had lost money by agreeing to publish me. “Anyway,” I said, looking across the table at Mase, “it’s not for me to explain every ancient mystery. I am just gonna write about what was in the remaining manuscripts that Dr. Sabir translated.” “You mean what you translated.” I smiled. “Yeah. That I translated. People will have to figure the rest out for themselves. I’m still nervous about revealing all that stuff. I’m only doing it because I think the information should be out in the world somewhere. I don’t want to have to feel guilty when I go to my grave.” Mase shook his head and chuckled. “And who knows if anyone, if they did read it, believed what I wrote in the first book.” “Sooo?” he said. “So?” I cocked my head and looked at him. “Atlantis?” “Oh, yeah. I forgot we were talking about that.” He narrowed his eyes waiting for me to answer. “Stopped trying to change the subject.” “I’m not.” I smiled. “C’mon.” I stood up, pulled the dish towel I had thrown over my shoulder off and wiped my hands with it. Dropping it on the table, I said, “I have to show you on a map. Ive got an atlas in my study.” We headed down the hallway. Mase went in and plopped right down in one of the chairs, leaving me to struggle and get the huge book down off the top shelf of the bookcase. I took it over to desk, pushed the stuff that was laying on it aside and put the atlas down. Opening it up, I leaned over the desk and flipped through the first few pages searching for a map of the world that would make it easy for Mase to follow. “Plato wrote - ” I said turning a page. “Plato?” he interrupted. “Justin. C’mon now. I just wanna know what the manuscripts said about Atlantis. Not what Plato wrote.” “Plato knew about Atlantis,” I said, looking over at him. “Just maybe he found out about Atlantis from someone who actually knew about my manuscripts.” I gave him a cheeky grin. “Don’t you care about that?” Mase got up from the chair and walked over to the desk. Leaning down, he put his face close to mine. “Justin.” He just said the one word. “Okay,” I said and chuckled. It was obvious he was not interested in the ‘backstory.’ “Here.” I found a good map and pointed at a place close to the Mediterranean. “This is the area that the ancients called the Pillars of Hercules. They were two huge rock formations that protruded off the shores of Africa and Spain and flanked the entrance of this area,” I drew a circle with my finger. “It leads out into the Atlantic.” I pointed to a spot on the map of the land masses separated by a narrow waterway. “See. Look. It almost looks like the edges of the two continents are kissing. Only about eight miles separate the shores of Africa and Spain at this point. Can you see how close they are?” He nodded. “So, on the Spain side there’s the Rock of Gibraltar, right here. That’s one side of the Pillars. The other “rock” was either in Morocco, here,” I pointed, “or here in Ceuta.” I hesitated and stood up straight. “You know,” I said looking at him. “I kinda like have to say Plato because he and Josephus - ” “See. I don’t even know who that is.” I laughed. “You do know who that is. Josephus? From the Bible?” He looked at me as if we had a two-inch plate of glass between us and he couldn’t hear a word I was saying. “Anyway,” I continued, taking the clue, “They were the only ones of the ancients that wrote about Atlantis. Plato wrote that when you went through the Strait - ” “Straight?” “The Gibraltar Strait. S-T-R-A-I-T. It’s the waterway that is in this narrow passage. Need to brush up on your geography?” “No, Sweetie. Now, keep going.” “Well, he -- he is Plato, said that when you pass through here,” I followed my finger from the Mediterranean, through the Gibraltar Strait and out into the Atlantic, “you would find Atlantis. He said that the Continent of Atlantis was bigger than Libya, although he probably meant all of Africa, and Asia combined. So here, take your finger,” I placed his finger on the map right in the middle of the Mediterranean, where I had started. “Now follow along the Strait, then pass through the Pillars of Hercules.” I dragged his finger through the beginning of the route and let him finish the path without my guidance. “Now, what do you see?” “Water.” “No, Mase. What land mass do you see?” “I see water. There is no land.” “If you keep going. Across the water. Into the Atlantic. What do you see?” “North America.” He seemed irritated. “And South America, right?” “Yeah. I mean, of course. They’re both right there. Kinda stuck together, Justin.” “Okay, then.” “Okay, what?” “You just found Atlantis.” “Uhm. No. I found the Americas.” “You found Atlantis. The Americas and the Continent of Atlantis are the same.” “Atlantis disappeared under water,” he said, not seeming to believe me. “No. The knowledge of how to cross the Atlantic disappeared and when people couldn’t travel farther, not able to cross the Atlantic anymore, the Continent of Atlantis disappeared. At least in their minds. ‘We would give them life, but not all the knowledge that we had. It would be lost to them.’” I quoted. “From the manuscripts?” “Mm hmm.” Thanks to my photographic memory, more than ten years later, I still remembered every single word of the translation I did from Dr. Sabir’s journal. “So, the continent didn’t sink into the Atlantic Ocean?” “Not unless we live underwater.” He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Mase. C’mon. An entire continent larger than Africa and Asia combined could not just disappear.” “It didn’t disappear. It sank.” “A continent that big could not have sunk, either. There would be evidence of it somewhere. Has anyone ever found a large land mass under the Atlantic? No. I’ll answer that one for you.” “I mean, they’ve found things under the ocean that show remnants of ancient cities.” “Cities, but not continents, Mase. Don’t you think that if an entire continent sunk we would have been able to find it by now? I’m the archaeologist here. I would know. C’mon. I wouldn’t tell you something wrong.” He turned around and went back and sat in the chair with that “whatever” look on his face. “Mase,” I went over and knelt by him, “Archaeologists have used satellite space photography, have digitally mapped out subsurface sites through ground penetrating radar,” I counted it on my fingers. “They have excavated a hundred different sites underwater and used all the historical data they could find to locate Atlantis. And not just in the Atlantic Ocean, but everywhere and they have found nothing.” “Well, maybe there just wasn’t such a place as Atlantis,” Mase said. “Most people don’t believe there was anyway. Makes more sense than what you’re saying.” “Oh, there was an Atlantis.” I pushed up off the arm of the chair and walked back over to the desk and closed the atlas. “It was a huge land mass in the Atlantic. And that land mass was North and South America. Our ancestors were able to cross the Atlantic.” I reached up and tried to put the book back on the shelf. It was too heavy and awkward, and Mase finally decided to get up and help me. “Ever heard of the Continental drift?” I asked “Yeah. Theory that the surface of the Earth moves around,” he said. “Right. All the continents started out all stuck together. It was called Pangaea and then, due to continental drift, they moved apart.” “Yeah. I know about that.” “So, millions of years ago when all the continents were smashed up together, cracks started opening up through the surface. The holes spread into rifts and water started first oozing and then gushing in between the cracks. That was the start of the Atlantic Ocean. When it broke open it pushed the land masses apart and formed the continents.” “Yeah. And?” “So, those continents – Africa, Europe and the Americas were closer together at first.” “You said that.” “Travel distance wasn’t as far.” “And what? That’s when people, well, our ancestors, traveled between them.” “Yeah. People traveled easier and faster between the continents. But once the land started moving, it kept moving. Really the land is still moving. But I digress. At some point the land masses got too far apart for man to travel with the technology they had at that point. Anyway, after a while it became too far and too difficult for people to make the trip, that technologically was gone. People lost the know how to do it. The lost knowledge theory. You know when people could no longer perform brain surgery and build pyramids.” “Yeah. But we found out from the manuscripts that was on purpose.” “Well, me and you know that.” “And everyone that’s read In the Beginning,” he said and winked at me. I smiled. Yep, all probably ten of them, I thought. “So, the Americas,” I said, “the then called ‘Continent of Atlantis’ was forgotten. The ‘true’ story of Atlantis has gone from real to legend to myth because no evidence was ever found. But believe me the continent is not. A myth that is.” He grunted, seemingly disgusted at the knowledge of all this stuff. He went back over and plopped back down into one of the chairs and shook his head. “You know, Justin, you and your manuscripts are going to destroy all the intrigue and excitement of our ancient history.” “Ha-ha. You’re upset about that. Wait until I tell you why they built the pyramids.”
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:45:17 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015