The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

beneath the waves in a single day and night.
    In the second dialogue, the Critias , Plato goes into far more detail about the history and geography of the lost continent. He tells how Poseidon (Neptune), the sea god, founded the Atlantian race by fathering ten children on a mortal maiden, Cleito, whom he kept on a hill surrounded by canals. The Atlantians were great engineers and architects, building palaces, harbours, temples and docks; their capital city was built on the hill, which was surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by immense tunnels, large enough for a ship to sail through. The city was about eleven miles in diameter. A huge canal, 300feet wide and 100 feet deep, connected the outermost of these rings of water to the sea. Behind the city there was a plain 230 by 340 miles, and on this farmers grew the city’s food supply. Behind the plain there were mountains with many wealthy villages and with fertile meadows and all kinds of livestock. Plato goes into great detail about the city, suggesting either that he had been told the story at length or that he had the gifts of a novelist. The long account of magnificent buildings with hot and cold fountains, communal dining halls and stone walls plated with precious metals has fascinated generations of readers for more than two thousand years.
    But eventually, says Critias, the Atlantians began to lose the wisdom and virtue they inherited from the god, and became greedy, corrupt and domineering. Then Zeus decided to teach them a lesson. So he called all the gods together . . .
    And there, frustratingly, Plato’s story breaks off. He never completed the Critias , or wrote the third dialogue that would complete the trilogy, the Hermocrates . But we may probably assume that the final punishment of the Atlantians was the destruction of their continent.
    Many later scholars and commentators assumed that Atlantis was a myth, or that Plato intended it as a political allegory: even Plato’s pupil Aristotle is on record as disbelieving it. Yet this seems unlikely. The Timaeus , the dialogue in which he first tells the story, is one of his most ambitious works; his translator Jowett called it “the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to us”. So it seems unlikely that Plato decided to insert a fairy tale into the middle of it; it seems more likely that he wanted to preserve the story for future generations.
    For more than two thousand years the story of Atlantis remained a mere interesting curiosity. But in the late nineteenth century an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly became fascinated by it, and the result was a book called Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882), which became a bestseller and has been in print ever since. Even a century later, the book remains surprisingly readable and up to date. Donnelly asks whether it is possible that Plato was recording a real catastrophe, and concludes that it was. He points out that modern earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused tremendous damage, and that there is evidence that the continent of Australia is the only visible part of a continent that stretched from Africa to the Pacific, and which scientists have named Lemuria. (Lemuria was named by the zoologist L.P. Sclater, who noted that lemurs existed from Africa to Madagascar, and suggested that a single land-mass had once connectedthe two.) He also studied flood legends from Egypt to Mexico, pointing out their similarities, and indicated all kinds of affinities connecting artifacts from both sides of the Atlantic. He notes that there is a mid-Atlantic ridge, and that the Azores seem to be the mountain-tops of some large submerged island. Donnelly’s knowledge of geology, geography, cultural history and linguistics appears encyclopedic. The British prime minister Gladstone was so impressed by the book that he tried to persuade the cabinet to allot funds to sending a