I incline to the opinion that Plato’s story was well founded, and that the identities found in Peru and Mexico, Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa, are due to these countries, like the Isles of the Mediterranean, being situated in the full sweep of Atlantian influence.
A third book in which I found further confirmation of my now growing belief in the Atlantean tunnel system was Harold Wilkins’s Mysteries of Ancient South America (1946), which I have already cited. He writes:
A curious tradition of the old world of Asia, is that old Atlantis had a network of labyrinthine tunnels and passages running in all directions, in the day when the land-bridge between the drowned land and Africa, on one side, and old Brazil, on the other, still existed. In Atlantis, the tunnels were used for necromantic and black magic cults.
On what grounds Mr Wilkins makes his final deduction, I have not been able to ascertain, but he seems in no doubt about the existence of the intercontinental tunnel system.
Although it is not my intention to go into detail about the various similar artifacts and signs which have been found on opposite sides of the Atlantic pointing to a common source of inspiration – the works of Ignatius Donnelly, Colonel A. Braghine and H. S. Bellamy have already covered this in full – I should like to make a few comments about the continent of Atlantis itself to substantiate my belief that it provided a virtual land-bridge between America and Africa. The site of the island has, of course, been given in many different parts of the Atlantic by earlier writers, but I believe that Plato himself, the first great authority, is still the most reliable. Writing in Critias, he says:
At that time, it was possible to cross the sea. There was an island beyond the gateway which, so you tell me, you call the Pillars of Hercules. This island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and travellers could in those days pass from there to other islands, and thence on the far side of the sea, to a continent.
The Pillars of Hercules are of course, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the size of Atlantis as he gives it – ‘larger than Libya and Asia’ – would clearly occupy much of the ocean between the coasts of Africa and South America. The continent ‘on the far side of the sea’ is without question America: thus was the landbridge formed.
My theory of contact with both America and Africa is shared by that redoubtable writer on ancient mysteries, Dr Lewis Spence, who has written several volumes on the lost continent including The Problem of Atlantis (1924), The History of Atlantis (1926) and Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942). One of his other books on the theme, Atlantis in America (1925), particularly addresses itself to the association between the lost continent and the Americas, and during the course of the book, he writes:
I hold that the occurrence on either side of the Atlantic of a civilisation having certain salient cultural characteristics proves that Europe and Africa on the one hand and America on the other must have received it from a common source – Atlantis. The chief components of this culturecomplex are a common tradition of cataclysm, mummification, witchcraft, and certain art-forms and distinctive customs.
Dr Spence cites the evidence of another expert to support this theory:
Professor Edward Hull is of the opinion that ‘the flora and fauna of the two hemispheres support the geological theory that there was a common centre in the Atlantic where life began and that during and prior to the glacial epoch great land bridges north and south spanned the Atlantic Ocean. I have made this deduction by a careful study of the soundings as recorded in the Admiralty charts.’
And by way of further proof Dr Spence adds:
An equal wealth of biological evidence regarding a former land connection between European and American soil also exists. The European carnivorous animals of the Tertiary times show a marked affinity with those of America. The burrowing Amphisbaenidae, or lizard snakes, are confined, sixty-four species of them, to America, Africa and the Mediterranean region. Kobelt shows conclusively that the land shells on the two opposite sides of the Atlantic imply an ancient connection having subsisted between the Old World and the New, which became ruptured only during the Miocene epoch of the Tertiary Period. Certain ants occur both in the Azores and America. Sixty per cent of the butterflies and moths found in the Canaries are of Mediterranean origin, and twenty per cent of these are to be found in America. Some crustaceans afford the best proof of an ancient connection between Europe and America.
On the similarities to be found in human characteristics, Robert Ernst Dickhoff has this to say:
Consider the enormous distance from ancient Babylon to Mexico, and begin to wonder just how it was possible for two such separated peoples living on separated continents, to have like beliefs and to portray these beliefs when they show pictures carved in stone, speaking of gods humanoid in their physical appearance, half man, half bird, or half man and the rest a serpent. That the spiritual, gifted pre-Mexican people understood the value of symbols is well expressed in their national emblem, which shows an eagle holding a serpent in his beak, and in one of his talons the serpent is rendered helpless. Babylonian – Mexico, the eagle-headed god Ashur holding the serpent god Quetzalcoatl in his beak and renders him helpless, in a land called Mexico [sic] … The logical solution to this riddle seems to point to the use of tunnels to explain the above unusual demonstration of a symbolic occurrence bordering on weird spiritual powers, called phenomen. [sic].
Having, I trust, established this land-bridge across the Atlantic, let us now look at the island of Atlantis itself, to which the passageways were linked. I think I need say little of the history of Atlantis, as the story of the destruction of this once mighty and advanced civilization by a holocaust about the year 9600 BC is familiar to every schoolboy. According to Platos account, the continent must have covered an area of roughly 2,650,000 square miles, or slightly less than that of the continent of Australia.
In his The History of Atlantis (1926), Dr Spence gives us a splendid picture of the continent as he believes the evidence shows it to have been:
We must imagine Atlantis, an island nearly the size of Australia, as the seat of a great prehistoric civilisation of very considerable pretensions. A race of fine physique – such physique, indeed, as the world has not since beheld – inhabits it. It celebrates religious ceremonies in large caves decorated with elaborate paintings … Its public life circulates and flourishes around these cave temples, and it develops social classes, the protypes of these of the present day.
Dr Spence then presents two viewpoints on the precise location of the lost world – one, his own, and the other that of an earlier writer, both of which place it in the Atlantic between the coasts of South America and North Africa. The first writer, M. Pierre Termier, a French geologist, is quoted extensively, and this is the crucial sentence. ‘There was,’ he says, ‘a South Atlantic, or African-Brazilian continent, extending northward to the southern border of the Atlas, eastward to the Persian Gulf and Mozambique Channel, westward to the eastern border of the Andes and to the sierras of Columbia and Venezuela.’ By way of confirmation, M. Termier adds: ‘Geologically speaking, Plato’s theory of Atlantis is highly probable.’
Dr Spence then examines the evidence himself and concludes:
Supposing it to have lain, as Plato says, directly in front of, and at no great distance from, the Hispano-African coasts, then we must think of a landmass which extended westward at least to the 45th parallel of longitude, and from north to south, nearly from the 45th parallel of latitude to about the 22nd parallel of latitude. This area embraces not only the Azores and the Canary Islands, but much of the Sargasso Sea as well, though not its thickest part, and lies directly above the great banks surrounding the Azores and the Canaries. If we regard the Canaries as its south-eastern extremity (and it could not have come much farther in this direction without touching the African coast), and the Azores as the northern limit of the Atlantean landmass proper and prolong it westwards towards the 45th parallel of longitude, we have not only an area commensurate wit
h that mentioned by Plato, but with those natural features which strikingly demonstrate its former presence.
In an interesting footnote to this argument, Dr Spence draws on even earlier authorities to support his claim and write:
Engel and the Comte de Corli learnedly insisted that the Atlantean boundaries had touched Europe and Africa on one side and America on the other. According to them, man had passed from the Old World to the New by way of an Atlantean land-bridge, the submergence of which had destroyed the ancient communication between the two continents.
So, now, we have the evidence of the landmass which would have made possible a tunnel system bridging that vast area of the Atlantic Ocean. But is there any evidence of such tunnels being built?
In his two works which refer to Atlantis, Timaeus and Critias, Plato informs us that utilizing their natural resources, ‘the Atlanteans built temples, palaces, bridges and tunnels, also directing the waters, which flowed in a triple circle around their ancient metropolis, in a useful manner.’ That they were capable of constructing huge underground passageways is surely made evident by the fact – which Plato also tells us – that they were able to build a canal well in excess of 1,000 miles long, parts of which were roofed over!
The claim that such tunnels were indeed created has been argued by an anonymous writer in the ancient history magazine Papyrus, in March 1921. He claimed that it was these passageways which enabled the Atlanteans to flee from the holocaust and thus populate much of the rest of the world. In his article, ‘Some Notes on the Lost Atlantis’, he writes:
Atlantis sent her children over the entire world. Many of them are to this day living as Red Indians in Canada and the United States of America. They colonised Egypt, and built up one of the mighty Egyptian Empires. They spread over the North of Asia as the Turanians and Mongols – a tremendous and prolific race, still constituting a majority of the population of the earth.
Perhaps, though, the most convincing evidence of the tunnel network emerges when we study the evidence about underground passageways running through the major continents of the world which all unerringly lead to the site of Atlantis – just as they do to the lost world of Agharti. The map makes this evident, I think, but I should like to augment the route with some specific details.
We have, of course, already traced the route through North and South America, with the tunnel, at its northernmost point, crossing beneath the Bering Strait into Russia. We shall pick it up from there in a moment. At the southern end it is lost in Brazil and from here traverses – as I have shown – what was formerly Atlantis to emerge in Africa. Let us continue the route from this point. Naturally, there is not evidence for every mile of this journey – or else the mystery would not have persisted for so many agesl – yet what we have does enable us to draw an authentic route.
The strongest tradition of subterranean passages in Africa is to be found in the north, as Harold Bayley has written:
That the Atlanteans colonised the North of Africa is generally supposed, whence it becomes likely that the marvellous excavations at Rua were related to the worship of the serpentine Rhea: these are mentioned by Livingstone who wrote, ‘Tribes live in underground houses in Rua. Some excavations are said to be 30 miles long, and have running rills in them: a whole district can stand a siege in them.’
There are also stories of ancient underground tunnels which were once used as hiding places by the natives, to be found in Nigeria, in the district of Wama – an appropriate name which several authorities believe to have derived from the word ‘womb’. According to an old legend, there is a tunnel here which stretches for hundreds of miles ‘unto the sea’. As the nearest sea is the Atlantic Ocean, this in all probability indicates that the point at which the African tunnel made its crossing to Atlantis was somewhere along the west coast of the continent in the vicinity of Guinea.
This is not all the evidence of tunnels in Africa, for as Harold Bayley also tells us:
The existence of underground ways seems to be not infrequent in Africa, for Captain Grant, who accompanied Captain Speke in his exploration for the source of the Nile, tells of a colossal tunnel or subway bored under the river Kaoma. Grant asked his native guide whether he had ever seen anything like it elsewhere and the guide replied, ‘This country reminds me of what I saw in the country to the south of lake Tanganyika’: he then described a tunnel or subway under another river named also Kaoma, a tunnel so lengthy that it took the caravan from sunrise to noon to pass through. This was said to be so lofty that if mounted upon camels the top could not be touched: ‘Tall reeds the thickness of a walking-stick grew inside; the road was strewed with white pebbles, and so wide – 440 yards – that they could see their way tolerably well while passing through it. The rocks looked as if they had been planed by artificial means.’
Such evidence leaves me in no doubt of a unique and extremely lengthy passageway traversing Africa which was certainly not the handiwork of the indigenous population.
The trail next leads us to Egypt, and that collection of wonders of the ancient world, the pyramids around Cairo. For here at El Giza, there is said to be a tunnel which actually has an entranceway concealed in the basement of one of the pyramids. Once found, this doorway provides ‘a tunnel running clear to Tibet’ according to an old account. The belief in a subterranean world is firmly entrenched in Egyptian lore, and one of the main panoply of gods was Osiris, Lord of the Underworld. The tunnel system in question is also claimed to be referred to in this reference in the ancient Book of the Dead: ‘I am the offspring of yesterday; the tunnels of the Earth have given me birth and I am revealed at my appointed time.’
Dr Raymond Bernard, that expert on Agharti we met earlier, has made a special study of the tunnels in Egypt and firmly believes in their link with both the subterranean kingdom and lost Atlantis. He has written:
A tunnel that opens at the base of the pyramids in Egypt is claimed to go on in the direction of South Africa for a distance of 900 kilometres. Another tunnel that opened on the west coast of Africa was claimed to go underwater to the site of the vanished Atlantis. This same tunnel also goes in the opposite direction to another city, claimed to be the capital of the network of subterranean passages.
It is probable that the gigantic statues believed to be early Egyptian kings were really Atlantean gods or supermen dwelling in the Subterranean World, with whom the early Egyptian kings were in contact. A tunnel connected with the subterranean chamber of the Pyramid of Gizeh [Giza] connected Atlantis with its Egyptian colony, and it was through this tunnel that the god-kings of Atlantis appeared among the Egyptians in their immense temples.
Still in the context of Egypt, a curious story is related by Harold Wilkins about a French explorer named Monsieur Frot, who in 1938 claimed that there was evidence to be found in Bolivia of ancient Egyptian excursions into South America. M. Frot said he had discovered an inscribed stone on an old Carthaginian trail that ‘proved that the ancestors of the Egyptians, long before they passed to Africa and the Nile, had established an ancient South American empire, ranging from what is now Bolivia to Bahia’. The Frenchman apparently disappeared somewhere on the Mato Grosso shortly afterwards without adding further to this theory – which, if we are prepared to accept it, does seem to add further evidence of concourse between Africa and South America by people who must surely have been Atlanteans!
We next pick up details about the tunnel system in India where, as I related much earlier in the book, the French Orientalist Louis Jacolliot first secured information on the kingdom of Agharti and presented it to Western readers. Not wishing to repeat what has gone before, just let me quote from Eric Norman’s book The Hollow Earth, which summarizes the Indian tradition:
There is an ancient legend among the Hindus of India that tells of a civilisation of immense beauty beneath central Asia. Several underground cities are said to be located north of the Himalayan mountains, possibly in Afghanistan, or under the Hindu Kush. This subterranean Shangri-la is inh
abited by a race of golden people who seldom communicate with the surface world. From time to time, they travel into our land through tunnels that stretch in many directions. Entrances to the tunnels are believed to be hidden in several of the ancient cities of the Orient. Tunnel entrances are said to be in Ellora and the Ajanta caverns in the Chandore Mountain range of India.
We have now almost homed in on the heart of the subterranean passageways, the city of Shamballah, but before doing so we must also trace the remaining part of the tunnel system – that which runs from the Bering Strait across Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and China.
Ferdinand Ossendowski and Nicholas Roerich have already given us a clear picture of the knowledge existing in the USSR concerning Agharti, and so we can go immediately to one of the two most important sites in the country, at Kilyma near the Cherskiy Range of mountains. Here, several hundred miles from the Bering Strait, a network of tunnels exists that have scarcely been explored since they were first discovered during the last century. The passageways have been known about for hundreds of years, but had always been regarded simply as large caves until explorers found that they stretched away endlessly beneath the mountains in a generally southwesterly direction.
Inspection of the tunnels along a considerable distance made it evident that while some stretches had clearly been formed naturally, there were other parts that had received the attention of human hands. Where this had occurred the surface of the wall was almost smooth, as if it had been bored by some kind of machinery.
These tunnels, which I believe run on to Mongolia and beyond, are very similar to another system discovered less than a quarter of a century ago in Azerbaijan. There, strange noises and lights which seemed to emanate from a bottomless well caused Soviet scientists to investigate and stumble upon ‘a whole network of tunnels, which turned out to be linked with others in Georgia and throughout the Caucasus’ according to Peter Kolosimo in his book Timeless Earth (1968). He writes of this discovery:
The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power Page 21
