REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg MY VOYAGE to ATLANTIS
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REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg MY VOYAGE TO ATLANTIS By the time you read this, I will have In a second dialog, Critias, Plato pro- made a voyage to the lost continent of At- vided further details about the lost conti- lantis—what’s left of it, if it ever was nent. It had been, he said, a place of high there in the first place. If I unearth any splendor, with soaring palaces and vast relics of its ancient fabulous civilization canals and majestic bridges. One temple, while I’m there, I’ll surely make that six hundred feet long and three hundred news known in a later column. feet wide, was entirely covered by silver, A voyage to Atlantis? What did you say, and its roof was of gold. Its ceiling was Silverberg? fashioned from ivory inlaid with silver Let me explain. and gold. There were gardens, racecours- Atlantis has been a topic of speculation es, parks, superb harbors thronged with ever since about 355 B.C., when Plato, ships, and wealth beyond measure. And then in his seventies, composed a dialog all this had gone to the bottom of the sea called Timaeus. Its chief characters are in a single day and night. Socrates and two friends, Timaeus and Plato’s Atlantis was fiction. His pupil Critias. At one point Critias tells the sto- Aristotle said of it, “He who invented it ry of the ancient, vanished island of At- destroyed it.” But the fable was a com- lantis, which, he says, his great-grandfa- pelling one, and it survived the downfall ther Dropides had first heard from the of Greek culture. When European sea- great lawgiver Solon. Solon, Critias de- men began venturing into the Atlantic in clares, learned about Atlantis from Egypt- the fifteenth century, there were frequent ian priests of the city of Sais around 550 reports that the remnants of the lost con- B.C. They had told him of the invasion of tinent had been sighted, and when they Athens, nine thousand years earlier, by a reached South and Central America and mighty army that had entered the Med- found the highly developed civilizations iterranean from the Atlantic at the Pil- of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, it was lars of Hercules, today known as the easy to conclude that these were descen- Strait of Gibraltar. These invaders came dants of refugees from that great land. from an island called Atlantis, larger than In the centuries that followed many a Asia and Africa put together. (What Plato scholar, working from the assumption meant by “Asia” and “Africa” was what we that Plato’s story was no fable but veri- know as Asia Minor and North Africa.) table history, and that Atlantis was the The Atlantean warriors attempted to region where mankind first rose from subdue Greece and Egypt, but were met barbarism to civilization, propounded and driven back by the Athenian army. theories of where Atlantis had been, “Then, O Solon,” the Egyptians had said, what had happened to it, and where the “did the power of your city shine forth in all survivors of the great cataclysm had men’s eyes, glorious in valor and strength.” gone. Some said that Atlantis had been as (Both Greece and Egypt as political enti- far away as the vicinity of Brazil, but oth- ties were still far in the future, nine thou- er students of the tale had different ideas. sand years ago.) Not long after this great Among them was one Bory de Saint-Vin- victory, “there occurred violent earth- cent, whose Essai sur des Iles fortunees et quakes and floods, and in a single day and l’antique Atlantide of 1803 set forth the night of rain . the island of Atlantis dis- notion that Atlantis had been located just appeared, and was sunk beneath the sea.” off the northwest corner of Africa, close by 6 Asimov’s the shore of what is now Morocco, and knights. By the time Father Espinosa that after the earthquake and flood all wrote of them they were virtually extinct, that remained of it were the tips of its for the Spaniards had waged a war of con- highest mountains, the present-day is- quest against them, island by island, from lands of Madeira, the Azores, and the the first Spanish landing in 1417 to their Canaries, rising above the Atlantic like final defeat in 1497, and most of the sur- the masts of a sunken ship. vivors were finished off by the diseases It does sound plausible, although mod- that the Spaniards had brought with ern-day geologists and climatologists them. A certain amount of inbreeding has have shown pretty conclusively that the probably perpetuated Guanche genes islands could not have been formed that among the present-day population of the way, nor has undersea exploration in the Canaries, but they are essentially a van- area turned up any evidence of the ru- ished race, as lost as . well, Atlantis. ined palaces and temples of vanished At- One interesting thing about the lantis. But one argument in favor of the Guanches is their physical resemblance to Canary Islands theory that kept the idea the Cro-Magnons who occupied Western alive for many decades was the verifiable Europe from about twenty-five thousand presence in historic times of a genuine years B.C.E. onward, driving out the older and mysterious lost race, a group of tall, Neanderthal race and leaving such re- dark-haired, blue-eyed folk who could markable records of their presence as the have been the survivors of the destruction dazzling cave paintings of Chauvet, Las- of Atlantis and—all Atlantean fantasies caux, and Altamira. The Cro-Magnons, aside—might well have been the last ves- like the Guanches, were a tall people, the tige of the Cro-Magnon race that once men averaging more than six feet in dominated much of Western Europe. height. Like the Guanches, they had high They are known as the Guanches—a foreheads, big skulls, wide cheekbones, term derived from the words Guan Chen- long skulls, and relatively short arms. We erfe, which in their language meant “Son have no way of knowing what color eyes of Tenerife,” Tenerife being one of the sev- and hair the Cro-Magnons had, but other- en Canary Islands that lie just off the Mo- wise the resemblance is considerable, and roccan shore. In fact they were found on a solid case can be made out for the is- the other six islands too, and each had its landers as being the last surviving ves- own name for them—Mahos, Bimbaches, tige of the Cro-Magnon folk, who had Gomeros, etc. But it is as Guanches that moved south from their French homeland we refer to the entire aboriginal popula- to escape later invaders and to find tion of the Canaries today. warmer weather and settled in Spain and They were a handsome race. A six- Morocco, just a short hop across the teenth-century account by the friar Alon- Mediterranean from the Canaries. so de Espinosa says of them, “This people And the Atlantis connection? One curi- had very good and perfect features, and ous thing about the Guanches is that well-shaped bodies. They were of tall they had no maritime skills—very odd, stature, with proportionate limbs. The for island-dwellers. Each group of them people to the south are of rather a brown lived a land-bound life on its own island, color, either from inheritance or from the and there was no commerce between one hot climate, their skins being toasted by and another. It is tempting to think that the sun, as they go about nearly naked. the ancestors of the Guanches got to the But on the north side they are white, and Canaries at a time in the distant past the woman are beautiful and rosy, with when some great and vigorously expand- long hair.” Their clothes were made of the ing civilization existed in that part of the skins of animals; they farmed only barley Atlantic—the Cro-Magnons, let us say. and beans; each island had a king who There is not much support for the idea presided over a court of nobles and that any human group was capable of Reflections: My Voyage to Atlantis 7 March 2012 lengthy travel by sea at such an early well wiped the Guanches out by 1497, did time, but one theory that has won consid- preserve a few fragments of their lan- erable acceptance is that Cro-Magnons guage, which bears no resemblance to any could have crossed over from the main- language spoken anywhere else. Chucar land of North Africa on a land bridge that guayoc Archimencey reste Bencom sanec, subsequently sank into the sea. Another we are assured by Antonio de Viana, a na- theory, a rather more speculative one, to tive of Tenerife who wrote in 1604, meant put it mildly, proposes that the Cro- “Spare the life of the noble protector Ben- Magnons had originally come eastward com’s brother.” Van der relac machet Za- on that bridge from the lost continent of hana was Guanche for “native born who Atlantis to conquer France and Spain. becomes your vassal.” Zucasa meant But either theory easily allows for the “daughter.” An anapa was a spear carried theory that the people that became before the king. The early Spanish ac- known as the Guanches, having no abili- counts give us seven more full sentences ty to travel by water, were stranded atop and about one hundred single words.