Atlantis Beneath the Ice by Rand Flem-Ath

Author:Rand Flem-Ath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2012-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

EMBERS OF HUMANKIND

Numbed with fear, the few shocked and terrified survivors of Atlantis floated lost and confused amongst the debris left in the wake of the earth’s nightmare. But the nightmare did not dissipate with the coming of the welcome dawn. There was to be no waking from this dream for many centuries. Instead it was left to those blessed by favorable winds and tides, which carried them to hospitable shores, to bind together and rebuild after the devastation. Only embers of humankind—those who had fled to the mountains—survived.

It is a tribute to the survivor’s sheer courage and overwhelming will to live that, adrift, fighting the elements, they somehow began to piece together the tattered remnants of their world. But perhaps the future could offer only hope to their battered hearts. No horror of tomorrow could compete with the devastation they had left behind, buried under the falling snow that was now smothering their island home. But their solitude was not total as they believed, tossed and tormented in their ships, so tiny in the ocean’s vastness.

Equally shocked as the Atlanteans were the survivors in the highlands that had escaped the tidal waves. Shivering in their mountain-top shelters were the remaining hunters and gatherers of the earth. Clinging to the comfort of ways that had stood them well for hundreds of thousands of years, little did they suspect that those ancient routines would be overturned in a peaceful revolution brought by strangers from the sea.

The hunters and gatherers were strong, uncoddled people, secure in the proven ways of their ancestors who had carved a living from the bounties of nature wherever they found them. They had fought the ravages of nature before: the droughts, the storms, the famines, and the thousands of dangers of chance. But nothing in their memory had been like this. Nothing had prepared them for the day the earth’s crust shifted, carrying them forever away from their familiar existence. And so, shivering in their mountain retreats, they began to eke out a new life in the land, until they were joined by strangers from the sea. They shared nothing with these strangers but a vivid memory of the past that had been swept away by the earth’s anger and a mutual fear of the future.

We can only imagine the conflict that raged within Atlantean and non-Atlantean alike at the joy of finding other living souls. Aliens to each other they truly were: but aliens bound together by a mutual need to conquer the circumstances that threatened to destroy them all.

The first task was to secure the future with a stock of food. Maps of the globe would become invaluable in the future, but the survivors of the flood were facing a critical problem—the need to feed themselves. They had to reboot agriculture. The earliest experiments with agriculture began in the same century that Atlantis fell. The chances of such a coincidence are astronomical.

Plato, who preserved the legend of Atlantis from ancient Egyptian sources, wrote about those first desperate days after the ocean broke across its boundaries.

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