The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  “Solon traveled to Egypt, to the city of Sais in the Delta, a city founded by the goddess Neith, who, the Egyptians claim, is the same goddess the Hellenes call Athena. Solon talked to the priests, who kept track of ancient things, and tried to draw them out by telling them about the most ancient things in his part of the world, about the great Deluge and how long ago it had occurred. One of the priests, a man of very great age, laughed and said that the Hellenes were all children without one old man among them. Solon and the other Hellenes talked about the ‘great Deluge’ as if there had been only one of them, when in fact there had been many.

  “‘There have been, and will be again,’ he said, ‘many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.’ There have been great conflagrations upon the earth, fires that recur at long intervals, and when they happen many of those who live on the mountains and in other dry places perish, and only those who live near the rivers or the sea survive. There have also been great floods and then those who live by the rivers and by the sea are destroyed and only the herdsmen and the shepherds who live on the mountains are left alive. But neither fire nor flood destroys the Egyptian because the Nile saves them from fire and the river’s flood is always self-contained. That is the reason that though all other civilizations have vanished and not left any record of their existence, the Egyptians have remembered. ‘And whatever happened either in your country or ours,’ the priest told Solon, ‘or in any other region of which we are informed – if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old and are preserved in our temples.’”

  Holderlin searched Darnell’s eyes to make sure he grasped the full significance of what he was being told: how easily, and how often, the past had been forgotten.

  “What Solon knew, or thought he knew, about the origins of his own people was, according to the Egyptian, no better than the ‘tales of children.’ The priest tells him: You remember only a single deluge, but there were many. And then he tells him that far beyond the memories of any Athenian then living, there had been another Athens which contained ‘the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived,’ and that ‘you and your whole city are descended from the few survivors of this race of men.’ That city, that ancient city, was the best governed and the best in war of any city that ever was. Solon of course wants to know more about this, and among other things, how long ago this was. The priest tells him that this ancient Athens, which none of the Athenians now remember because of the great Deluge that destroyed it, came into being a thousand years before Egypt and Egypt is eight thousand years old.”

  “Nine thousand years ago?” asked Darnell, following intently.

  “Nine thousand years when Solon was alive, which was four generations before Critias tells the story to Socrates nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. The Egyptian is describing an Athens that existed nearly twelve thousand years before you and I were born, an Athens of which we have no record, but in which the Egyptian claimed to believe. If you think that impossible, ask yourself why. This country, for example, isn’t even two hundred fifty years old, and even without the kind of cataclysms that wipes out the memory of things, how much has already been forgotten about what happened at the beginning?”

  Darnell’s eyes moved to the photograph of his law school class. He was struck by how little he could remember of the once familiar faces that he had seen almost every day for three full years. In the absence of the kind of brilliant single-minded concentration Adam had – though where he had gotten it remained a mystery - human memory was at best a feeble instrument.

  “Twelve thousand years, Mr. Holderlin. Yes, go on.”

  “As I say, Solon wanted to know more, wanted to know everything: the laws they had, their way of life, what made them as great as the Egyptian said they had been. The priest tells him many things. He tells him that the best of the Egyptian laws are the counterpoint of the ones Athens had in what he calls the ‘olden time,’ when everything was dedicated to supremacy in both wisdom and war. He tells him that their histories contain the record of a number of great things the city did, but that one of them stands out as the greatest thing of all, the war that Athens fought against Atlantis.”

  Holderlin leaned forward, eager to go on, to share with someone, finally, after all these years, the secret, or rather the beginnings of the secret, he had uncovered, the great discovery he had made.

  “A mighty power – that was how the Egyptian described it –invaded all of Europe and Asia. He means Europe around the Mediterranean and what we call the Near and Middle East. This power came out of the Atlantic Ocean – and the narrator is compelled to point out that the Atlantic was in that distant time navigable, which has to mean that at the time Critias is telling this story the Atlantic was not navigable. There was an island in front of the Pillars of Hercules, an island larger than Libya and Asia put together. He doesn’t meant Libya the way we know it today; he means the whole of North Africa. This island had to have been enormous. Even more noteworthy is the fact that, according to the story, the island served as the way to other islands and that from these islands you could pass to the opposite continent. Do you see the significance of this? - Islands, a chain of them, easy navigation to another continent, what today we call the Americas, and Atlantis, this great empire, controlling all of it.

  “Atlantis had already subjected parts of North Africa and Europe and was on its way to conquering everything, ruling, for all intents and purposes, the entire civilized world as it was known at the time. Only Athens stood in her way, but Athens, by her strength and virtue, drove Atlantis back beyond the Pillars of Hercules and saved from slavery both Europe and Asia. And then, at the very moment of its greatest strength, Athens, along with Atlantis, disappeared.

  “It was one of those great cataclysms, perhaps the greatest one of all, tremendous earthquakes and floods. The priest, according to the account of Critias – the account, remember, that Plato has written – tells Solon that ‘in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth and the island of Atlantis in similar fashion vanished in the depths of the sea.’ Then he adds an interesting remark that parallels something he had said earlier: The sea that had once been navigable is now ‘impassable and impenetrable.’ When the island sank below the sea a great mud shoal was created, blocking the entrance to the Mediterranean.”

  Staring straight ahead, Holderlin concentrated on what he had learned and what he was now trying hard to explain. Suddenly, he extended his index finger and with a quick, slashing movement began to trace over and over again the outline of a triangle. The significance of this, if there was any, was lost on Darnell, but not the urgent sense of immediacy. Once, twice, three times - that same intense motion, the movement of a conductor with his orchestra or a teacher of geometry with his class. Then it stopped.

  “So, you see, Mr. Darnell, there it was, right in front of me, the story of Atlantis and where it was.”

  But Darnell did not see, or rather what he saw was no different than the common myth or legend everyone had heard: an ancient island that had sunk beneath the waves, a civilization that had once existed and then disappeared, leaving not the slightest trace of what it was or where it had been.

  “But you must see, Mr. Darnell. It isn’t that Atlantis once existed; it’s what the story tells us about where it was, and something more than that, something, I confess, I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t thought about, all the other times I had read it. Atlantis wasn’t just an island in the normal sense; it was larger than ‘Libya and Asia put together.’ It was more the size of a continent than an island and, remember, there were other islands on the other side, stepping stones, if you will, to the continent that formed the western boundary of the sea.”

  Darnell still did not understand. “But even if all of that was true, Atlantis disappeared. �
�In a single day and night’ – isn’t that what you said? – and it vanished beneath the sea.”

  Holderlin beat his knuckles on the edge of Darnell’s desk.

  “Yes, precisely! It vanished, but in that day and night how many people got away? How many of them were living somewhere on the western edge, how many of them made it to that bridge of smaller islands that led eventually to what we call the Americas? - None at all? Remember what the Egyptian priest told Solon, that whatever happened, fire or flood, there were always a few survivors? That was the possibility that finally caught my attention and ultimately became my obsession. Because, you see, if Atlantis had simply vanished and left no trace behind, how was it that Plato, in another place, described the way these people lived?

  “We do not have all of the dialogue called Critias, but we have enough to know that Plato did this. Of course, Plato might have created it entirely out of his own remarkable mind, but I could not let go of the possibility that he might have written about Atlantis the way Homer had written about Troy, not from the things he may have imagined, but from some authoritative source, those records that had once been kept with such painstaking devotion by the caste of priests in Egypt who had preserved them through eight thousand years. What if Atlantis was real, and what if some part of it had not been destroyed? What if the survivors had found their way across the islands, islands which themselves later disappeared, across to the safety of the western continent, to South America and then, perhaps….Well, that’s what I could not let go of once I decided that Plato, who believed absolutely in the truth, might not have been lying, and that just as Schliemann found Troy I could find Atlantis – not the island that sank in the ocean, but the new Atlantis that might have been brought into being by the survivors of the old one. And I did.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Two thousand years after Plato wrote those astonishing dialogues of his, there were reports that seemed to confirm what I now suspected. There was an island, Antillia, called by the Portugese the Island of the Seven Cities. The earliest etymology connected the name with Atlantis, and the island itself is marked on an anonymous map of 1424. You can imagine the excitement I felt the first time I examined it in the ducal library at Weimar. Whoever drew that map had done so with all the exactness the knowledge of the age permitted, which, while it may not have been the same as the precision cartographers can now employ, was certainly sufficient to give a likeness of the shape, proportion and relative distance among the things known to those who had seen them with their own eyes or listened to the trusted reports of others. What reason would anyone have to distort the truth, pretend that something was there that was not? What reason would anyone have had to invent such things, to tell such lies? It was the Middle Ages, how could the existence of an island make any difference to the Church?”

  Darnell could think of no reply, but it did not matter. The question was not one that had, or even needed, an answer; it was a question, one of the questions, that had driven Holderlin on what the world would have thought a mad pursuit, a search for a legend, a legend that he alone believed was true.

  The afternoon had turned to evening and evening was on its way to night. The lamp on Darnell’s desk cast an eerie, yellow glow, and, with each movement of Holderlin’s delicate, expressive hands, shadows pale and insignificant danced against the wall. Darnell watched in quite wonder as Holderlin became more animated, more excited, the more he told about the way that something he had learned from an ancient writing had led to what, if he were telling the truth, was one of the great adventures of modern times.

  “That map was dated, as I say, in 1424, but that was not the only time Antillia was located in the middle of the Atlantic. Beccaria the Genoese put it on a map in 1435, and the Venetian, Andrea Bianco, did so a year later in 1436. There were other maps, in 1455 and again in 1476, that did the same thing. On most of them Antillia is accompanied by three smaller islands: Royllo, St. Atanagio, and Tammar. What is most interesting is the way they are classified. They aren’t called legendary or mythical; there is not the slightest suggestion of any doubt about their authenticity.” Holderlin’s whole body seemed to tense; his head became so rigid it shuddered. There was a brilliant intensity to his eyes, as if his mind was filled with fire. “They are classified, these islands that are supposedly only the stuff of legend, as ‘insulae de novo repertai,’ newly discovered islands. Newly discovered islands, Mr. Darnell, newly discovered! Do you see what this means? They were real!”

  Suddenly aware of his own intensity, Holderlin threw up his hands and laughed with embarrassment. He jumped out of the chair and started toward the window, but then changed his mind and came back. Instead of sitting down again, however, he stood with his hand on the back of the chair in the idle posture of someone not quite certain how to compress into a few words of intelligible speech what it had taken him years to understand.

  “Maps, I must have looked at hundreds of them – and then there were all the other documents: charters, royal commissions, the records of journeys that never got started, journeys that were begun but never finished, the ships and crews never heard from again, lost somewhere in the vast reaches of the Atlantic. I visited libraries all over Europe, public libraries, private libraries, libraries in universities, libraries in monasteries. I found in one of them the letters of Paul Toscanelli, a Florentine, who had written to both Columbus and the Portuguese court. It was 1474, the height of the Renaissance, and Toscanelli was no fool. He does not just assume that Antillia exists, he takes it to be the half-way mark between Lisbon and the island of Cipango or Zipangus, the island we call Japan. But more curious even than that is the globe made in Nuremburg in 1492 by the geographer Martin Behaim. According to him, in 734, after the Moors had conquered Spain and Portugal, the island of Antillia was colonized by Christian refugees led by the archbishop of Oporto and six bishops. The inscription in the globe adds that the island was sighted by a Spanish vessel in the year 1414.

  “Others dismiss all this as legend, the workings of the far too credulous medieval mind, but to me it made perfect sense. It was just what Plato said, what he put into the mouth of that Egyptian priest – what he may have first learned from an Egyptian priest – that in every great deluge the only survivors were the ones who lived on mountains. Atlantis was larger than Libya and Asia, not so much an island as a continent. When the earthquake came, when Atlantis sank beneath the sea, some of the mountains must have become the islands that remain there, in the Atlantic, to this day. But that would mean that there were survivors, that Atlantis did not vanish without a trace; that the memory of what Atlantis had been survived, and could, somewhere else, live again. And then there was the word itself – Antilles – traced back all those thousands of years ago to Atlantis, and then identified as the land Columbus discovered in what is now called the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone assumes that this only proves that Atlantis had been a legend, that the islands said to have been ‘newly discovered’ in the 15th century had always been there, and that the name ‘Antilles’ was a giant misunderstanding, the result of having confused myth with reality. I believed on the contrary that the movement of the name traced the movement of a people, the remnant of what had once been, twelve thousand years ago, the greatest and most powerful civilization in the world. Any doubt I may have had vanished when I made my way to South America and traveled to Peru.”

  “To Peru?” asked Darnell. But Holderlin was already thinking of something else, a crucial piece of information that, in his hurry to tell his story, he had forgotten to add.

  “So much happened, there were so many possibilities I explored, so many different conjectures about what might have happened twelve thousand years ago, that is isn’t always easy to recall the sequence in which one thought followed the other, much less how each thought led me to take a certain action. There were so many false beginnings, promising starts that came to nothing and had to be abandoned so I could start again. Forgive me, if you can, for being sometimes less cohere
nt than I should. There was something vital I forgot to mention, something that made me think first that the islands I spoke of had been the mountain tops of Atlantis, and that at the same time seemed to prove it. And once again it was something I read in Plato, in that dialogue of which we have only the first part. In the Critias, describing the geography of Atlantis, he tells us that the island ‘was famous for its encircling mountains, more tall and beautiful than any that exist today.’ These mountains contained many villages that were wealthy and, moreover, had on them ‘timbers of different kinds in quantities more than sufficient for every kind of manufacture.’

  “‘Every kind of manufacture’ – that fact seemed decisive, or, rather, what that fact suggested. It meant they could build anything; ships, for example, that would have let them sail anywhere – west to the safety of the other islands, and, beyond them, to that other continent, when the earthquake and the great Deluge destroyed everything. But what really sent me in the right direction, what sent me to South America and Peru, was the description Plato gives about the things they built in Atlantis: the sheer size and grandeur of their palaces and other buildings; the way they cut canals, some of them a hundred feet deep, some of them a hundred feet in width, to make the island a series of concentric circles of land and sea, to protect themselves from any threat of invasion; the magnificence of its temples all coated in silver except for the statues that were covered in gold. Plato writes of what these people accomplished, that ‘it sounds incredible that any work of human hands should be so vast by comparison with other achievements of the kind.’”