(A pity that they wont ever send us to the same locale when we make these jumps. I know, I know, they want to spread us out over the maximum territory. The best we can hope for is to go to the same era but in different geographical regions. Which I guess is better than nothing. As they told us when we volunteered for this, time travel works best when two people who have a strong emotional connection are sent out as a team. And theyre right. Simply knowing that youre herethousands of miles away, sure, but in the same eragives me a warm, comfortable feeling. And that helps immensely in fending off the terrible isolation that would otherwise come with knowing that Im so distant in time from everything and everyone that I care for. All the same, Id like to be able to see you once in a while. Id like to be able to touch you. Id like to be able tooh, well, never mind. At least I can write to you. And maybe one of these days the courier will get back from the eastern part of the empire and therell be a letter from you to me.)
Meanwhile Atlantis gets closer every second.
Until thengive my regards to all my good friends in Naz Glesim, if there happen to be any, which I doubt.
Miss you miss you miss you miss you.
Roy
4.
Day 27, Month of New Light, Year of the Great River Atlantis, Lora! Im in Atlantis!
The island of Athilan, I should say. It came into view in the middle of the night, while Prince Ram slept. There came a whistling at the door and they woke him up, because he had to perform the Ritual of Homecoming. We went out on deck. And then at last I saw it, gleaming in the moonlight right in front of us.
Its a lofty island, rising high out of the Western Atlantic. The great mountain in the middle, which is called Mount Balamoris, is as I think you know the volcano that sooner or later is going to blow this whole place to oblivion. Later rather than sooner, I profoundly hope. But obviously Mount Balamoris has been inactive for hundreds or even thousands of years, and a fantastic city has been built on its vast slopes and down along the broad plain that runs to the sea.
What was on my mind as we made our final approach to Atlantis was the description of it that Plato gave in his dialog Kritias, which you and I studied while we were in training. That Atlantis was a continent, rich and beautiful, with an abundance of trees and shrubs, flowers and fruits, animals both wild and tame, and precious minerals. And that the capital city, on the southern coast, was a huge metropolis, fifteen miles around, having the form of two circular strips of land divided by three wide canals, with great walls of stone, bridges, towers, and palaces. At the center of the city was a holy quarter within an enclosure of gold, where the temples were covered with gold and silver and their roofs were made of ivory.
I can hear you reminding me that nobody in modern times takes Platos account seriously as history. Well, yes, I know that. I havent forgotten that he wrote it around 355 B.C. and even he says that Atlantis had been destroyed 9,000 years earlier. Which means he cant possibly have any hard data about it, because 9,000 years before Platos time Greece was deep in prehistoric darkness. Im aware that its been the general scholarly belief for a long time that Plato probably made the whole story up himselfthat all it is is a fantasy, just a pleasant work of fiction.
But is it? I wonder. Now that Ive had a look at Atlantis with my own eyes, Im not so sure that Plato was simply making it all up from scratch.
One thing we know, thanks to time exploration, is that Atlantis actually existed. As recently as the twentieth century it was thought to be purely mythical. But no: we have proof now that a spectacularly great island-city really did exist in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years before Platos time, and that it really was destroyed by a gigantic cataclysm. So it certainly isnt beyond belief that memories of the place and its horrendous destruction might have passed into legend, or that tales of fabulous Atlantis could have been told and retold for generation after generation, across time immemorial. And some confused bits and scraps of those ancient legends might still have been circulating in the Mediterranean region at the time when Plato lived.
The strange thing is how much the real Atlantis, the place that Im staring at even as I write this, actually does resemble the one that Plato described.
It isnt a continent, of course. Its a just a very large island, maybe the size of Borneo or Madagascar. But how can you tell, when you see some enormous landmass in front of you that stretches a vast distance out of sight in both directions, whether youre looking at a continental shore or simply a big island? Plato wasnt that far off the mark. Certainly Atlantis was much bigger than Great Britain or Cuba or Iceland.
He was wrong about other details. For example, the capitalss not on the southern shore. Its on the western one. But the city does have a circular layout, with huge walls made up of giant stone blocks laid one atop another. The masonry work was done with fantastic precision, too. Its absolutely perfect. There are waterways and bridges inside the walls, and splendid boulevards that no city on Earth could have equalled until modern times. Perhaps no city of modern Earth does.
And I tell you, Lora, this waterfront district right here is amazing. If you could only see it! Theres a tremendous semicircular harbor with a massive quay of black granite faced with pink marble, and stone piers jutting far out into the water. All around me are Athilantan ships that have come in from all over the world, and right at this minute Im watching them unloading what must be absolutely fabulous cargoes. Officials are checking everything out on shore, boxes and boxes full of precious metals and jewels, spices, furs, strange animals, rare woods.
Then, over to one side of the harbor, theres the Fountain-of the Spheres, which shoots an enormous jet of water into the sky every quarter-hour. On the other side is the Temple of the Dolphins, a white marble structure that has the most incredibly pure, balanced design. Believe me, it makes the Parthenon itself look a little shoddy.
A broad street, the Street of Starwatchers, runs just back of the waterfront. At the head of the Street of Starwatchers theres an imposing domed tower, the Imperial Observatory, and just behind it begins a tremendous avenue, the Concourse of the Sky, which cuts through the city for miles, leading toyes, a central zone of sacred buildings, just like Plato said, set on a sloping hill. The walls of the temples are covered with white marble, not Platos silver and gold, but when the afternoon sun strikes them the entire city blazes with reflected light.
The city continues on the far side of the sacred zone, sprawling right up into the foothills of Mount Balamoris. Beyond are parks, farms, the mines where copper and iron and gold are found, and a huge forest preserve full of all manner of wild beasts, including a herd of elephants. I dont mean the woolly mammoths that are roaming around in Ice Age Europe out where you are, but plain old ordinary elephants, very much like the ones we can see in the zoo, except I think these are even bigger. Theyve got ears the size of tents.
The climate here is extremely gentle. Judging by the fact that night and day are just about equal in length even in midwinter, Id say that Atlantis is located smack on the Tropic of Cancer, or else not very far north of it. Theres a little rain just about every day, but it clears off fast and in a little while the sun is out again and everythings nice and warm. The air is mild and beautifully transparent, the sky is a delicate blue, and wherever you look you see flowers in bloom. Its hard to believe that at this very moment most of Europe and North America is buried under ice. Or that enormous shaggy shambling mammoths and rhinos are grazing in the places where our great cities are going to be built some time in the far future. Or that little bands of men clad in furs are out there trying to hunt them with crude weapons made out of stone.
No wonder shimmering memories of this place continued-to glow in the minds of people like Plato thousands of years later. In every human tribe the wise old storytellers must have passed vivid legends of it down and down and down through the eons, across all those thousands of years of darkness that followed the time of destruction. That great lost city, that barely remembered paradise, that vanished realm of miracles and wonderswhat tales they must have told of it! And went on telling, year after year, century after century, while the ice slowly retreated, and mankind rediscovered the skills of farming, and learned to build towns and villages, and eventually, in Sumer and Egypt and China, began once more to approach the level of accomplishment that we call civilization.
The astounding thing, the utterly unbelievable thing, is this: that the old legends didnt even begin to tell the full story of how miraculous Atlantis really was. The actual Atlantis of the year 18,862 B.C., with its steamships and its electricity and its astonishing architectural and engineering marvels, is tremendously more fantastic than any of the Greek or Roman talespinners ever imagined.
I mean it. So far as technology goes, its right up there with todays New York or Paris or London in many ways, only much more beautiful than any of them. And it existed all the way back here in Stone Age times, when no one else in the rest of the world had managed to get very far beyond living in caves and fashioning knives and axes out of pieces of flint.
Right now I have no explanation of how this could have been possible. None whatever.
Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimors return to the isle of Atlantis involved him in so much ritual and formality that I began to think I was never going to get to see the city at all. We remained cooped up on the ship for an incredible length of time. It was almost as crazy-making as those days of waiting around at Thibarak harbor for the end of the departure rituals so that the royal fleet could finally set out.
First came the Ritual of Homecoming. In this one the Prince gave thanks for his safe voyage home with a lot of praying and burning of incense and the sacrifice of a bull. The Prince performed the sacrifice with his own hands. I hated having to watch at such close range, but I didnt have any choice. At least he killed the animal fast. Hes evidently had a lot of practice. He used a jewel-hilted blade made of what almost certainly was steel. I find that fascinating in a creepy sort of way, dont you? That theyd use high-technology stuff like a steel weapon to perform a barbaric rite like animal sacrifice, I mean. A weird mix. The bull was actually an aurochs, that extinct ancestor of modern cattle, an enormous beast with terrifying black-tipped curving horns at least a yard long.
I thought wed be going ashore then, but no, after a lot of chanting and parading around, and a feast of charred, half-raw aurochs meat that made me glad the Prince was putting it in his digestive tract and not in minethough its sometimes hard to tell the difference when youre a timetrip passenger, you knowthe Prince went belowdecks and busied himself in front of a little shrine in the captains cabin, invoking this god and that, for hours. A team of priests came on board and took part in this; but when they left, Prince Ram remained on the ship.
Night fell. Crowds stood along the quay, singing and hailing the Prince. He waved back at them from the deck of his flagship. There was a fireworks display such as Ive never seen in my life.
In the morning, the Princes younger brother and sister came to give him the official family welcome. Princess Rayna is about fifteen, Id say, and Prince Caiminor maybe thirteen. They look very much like Prince Ram, stocky and short, olive-hued skin, dark eyebrows.
Their reunion with their brother was all very formal, with touching of fingertips taking the place of kissing. The Ritual of Greeting lasted right on into mid-afternoon. Then at last they escorted him from the ship, andby courtesy of my carrier, Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimor Septagimot Stolifax Blayl, Premianor Tisilan of Athilan, I got a chance finally to set foot on the shore of lost Atlantis.
But I didnt get very far. Off we went to the nearby Temple-of the Dolphins, where a kind of tent had been set up for the Prince just inside the outermost row of perfect marble columns. Here he had to be purified, purged of any taint that he might have picked up while dwelling among the grubby uncivilized people of the mainland.
This Rite of Purification took another day and a night. They bathed him in milk and covered him with the petals of red and yellow flowers and chanted again and again, May you be free of all uncleanness. May you be free of all uncleanness. On and on and on. May the dirt of the mainland no longer cling to your skin, they chanted. May you be free of all uncleanness. Over and over, until I thought Id lose my mind.
But it taught me something important about this place.Theres real four-star racism here. Thats what the Rite of Purification is all about. The Athilantans have deep contempt for the mainlanders. They are the dirt of the mainland from which the rite is supposed to cleanse the Prince.
The Athilantan name for the mainlanders is the dirt people.
My command of Athilantan grammar isnt yet as strong as Id like it to be, so Im not sure whether they mean that the mainlanders live in dirt (that is, their scruffy caves and leantos) or that they actually are dirt. But I think its the latter.
So these noble, splendid, magnificently civilized Athilantans regard the people of Stone Age Europe as not much more than animals. Have you noticed that, too, out in Naz Glesim? Maybe its different there, where just a handful of Athilantans live in the midst of hundreds of mainlanders. Theyd have to be more careful there. But here, where there isnt a mainland face to be seen, the Athilantans dont even try to hide their scorn for them.
We thank you, O Gods, for the return of our beloved Prince to the human realm from the land of the dirt people.