Area 51 (20 page)

But they also conducted some other missions.

"As you have talked with this Kaji fellow in Egypt, I have talked to some of the old fishermen here in the islands, who know the waters and the history. They say that in 1941 there were numerous sightings of German submarines moving here among the islands. And that the submarines did not seem interested in hunting ships--since we are off the main shipping lanes here--but rather to be looking for something in the waters around the islands."

Slater reached behind her and gathered some photos. "I think this is what they found."

She handed them over. They appeared to be the same photos that she had presented at the conference. Large stone blocks, closely fitted together in about fifty feet of water.

Slater talked as Nabinger looked at the photos. "They might have been part of the outer wall of a city or part of a quay. There is no way of knowing, with large portions covered with coral and other underwater life and the sea bottom close by sloping off into unexplored depths. This section with the stones might be just a tiny part of a larger ancient site, or may be the only site, built there thousands of years ago when that area was above water. Built by a people we don't know about, for a reason we can't yet figure out.

"The major pattern of the stones is a long J or more accurately a horseshoe with the open end to the northeast.

All told it's about a third of a mile long in about fifty feet of water. Some of the stones are estimated to weigh almost fifteen tons, so they didn't get there by accident and whoever did put them in place had a very advanced engineering capability. You can barely get a knife point in the joints between some of those stones."

Slater stood up and leaned over Nabinger's shoulder and pointed. "There."

There was a large, ragged gouge in one of the blocks.

"And this is?" Nabinger asked.

Slater shuffled through the photos. "Here," she said, handing him a close-up of the scar on the block.

Nabinger peered at it. There were other, very faint, older marks--writing around the edges of the gouge! Very similar to what was in his notebook, but the gouge had destroyed any chance of deciphering it!

"What happened to this stone?" Nabinger asked.

"As near as I can tell," Slater said, "it was hit by a torpedo." She touched the picture, running her fingers over the high runes. "I've seen others like these.

Ancient markings destroyed sometime in the last century by modern weapons."

Nabinger nodded. "They're just like the ones I deciphered from the lower chamber. Not traditional hieroglyphics, but the older, high rune language."

Slater walked over to a desk buried under stacks of folders and books. She rummaged through, then found what she was looking for. "Here," she said, handing Nabinger a folder. "You are not the only one interested in the high rune language."

He opened it. It was full of photos of high runes. Written on walls, on mud slabs, carved into rock--in just about every possible way by which ancient cultures had recorded their affairs. "Where did you take these photos?" Nabinger asked, his heart pounding with the thought of the potential information he held in his hands. He recognized several of the shots--the Central American site that had helped him begin his breaking of the rune code.

"There's an index in the folder detailing where each photo was shot--they're numbered. But, basically, several locations. Here, under the waves. In Mexico, near Veracruz. In Peru, at Tucume. On Easter Island. On some of the islands in Polynesia. Some from your neck of the woods in the Middle East--Egypt and Mesopotamia."

"The same symbols?" Nabinger asked, thumbing through the photos. He had seen many of the same ones before, but there were a few new ones in there to add to his high rune database.

"Some differences. In fact, many differences," Slater answered. "But, yes, I believe they all stem from the same root language and are connected. A written language that predates the oldest recorded language that is generally accepted by historians."

Nabinger closed the binder. "I have been studying these runes for many years.

I've seen a lot of what you have in here before--in fact I was able to decipher what I did of the wall of the chamber in the Great Pyramid using symbols from a South American site. But the question that bothers me--and why I have never made public my findings--is how can the same ancient writing have been found in such vastly separated places?"

Slater sat back down. "Are you familiar with the diffusionist theory of civilization?"

"Yes, I am," Nabinger said. He knew what Slater was referring to despite the

,,fact that the prevailing winds of thought this decade blew in favor of the isolationist theory of civilization. Isolationists believed that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of one another. Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Egypt--all crossed a threshold into civilization about the same time: around the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ.

Nabinger had heard the argument many times. Isolationists cite natural evolution to explain this curious bit of synchronicity. They also explain many common points in the archaeological finds of these civilizations as due to man's genetic commonality. Thus the fact that there are pyramids in Peru, in Egypt, in Indochina, in North America—some made of stone, some of earth, some of mud, but remarkably similar to one another given the distances between those sites--all that is just because each society as it developed had a natural tendency to do the same thing.

Nabinger himself found this a bit of a leap. It would have been quite a genetic coup if all these civilizations should also have developed this same ancient high rune writing and then abandoned it, well before the first hieroglyphics were being etched on papyrus.

The diffusionists argued the other side of the civilization coin, and Nabinger felt more affinity for their stance. They believed that those civilizations rose at approximately the same time on the cosmic scale--and exhibited all those similarities, including the high runes--because those civilizations had all been started by people from a single earlier civilization.

There were problems with the diffusionist theory, though--serious problems--and that is why Nabinger kept

his views on the subject to himself. The strongest argument against the diffusionist theory was that there was no way for people from these different locations to have communicated with one another or have had any social or cultural intercourse. Those early people would have had to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to diffusionist theory. They had a hard enough time even sailing around on the Mediterranean at that epoch, never mind crossing the oceans.

Slater's face wrinkled as she smiled. "And you know who the number-one spokesperson for the diffusionists is, don't you?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Leif Jorgenson. The man who sailed the Atlantic in a Viking ship to prove that Europeans were in North America long before Christopher Columbus. And who floated from Indonesia to the Hawaiian islands on a wood raft to support his theory that the islands were colonized from the west.

"But he's taken all that--and more--a step further in the last ten years. He's currently working the recently discovered ruins in Mesoamerica, looking at pyramids and the Mayan calendar and--guess what?--new high runes discovered there.

"Four years ago Jorgenson uncovered a massive site in Mexico near Jamiltepec.

Over twenty large earthen and stone pyramids covering almost seven hundred acres on the west coast of Mexico, less than two miles from the Pacific Ocean. It had been covered by the jungle and because of the mountains around it was accessible only by sea.

"At the site he found further evidence of cross-cultural communication at a time earlier than traditional historians say is possible. There was jewelry made with gems that could only have been mined over two thousand miles away in South America. Stonework very similar to that at other sites, some on the other side of the Pacific in Oceania. He has in his possession hard evidence of a certain degree of interaction among widely spread peoples many centuries ago, but he is basically being ignored by the mainstream scientific community because they simply do not believe it is possible."

Nabinger was aware of the find, but he didn't want to offend Slater. After all, he'd come to her. "How does Jorgenson think civilization originated?"

"He believes that there was an original culture of white-skinned, long-eared, pyramid-building, rune-writing people living and flourishing at what he calls the 'zero point,'"

Slater replied. "And that civilization spread out from that zero point at what he calls a 'zero time'--just prior to civilization developing simultaneously at all those other places that we are now studying. Civilization came from the zero point."

"And where is the zero point?" Nabinger asked, even though he had a very good idea of what the answer would be.

"It is the place so many legends call Atlantis."

"And that is why you are so familiar with his theories," Nabinger said.

"Yes. Because there are connections that have not been adequately explained."

She paused. "Let me put it this way. Most people dismiss Jorgenson's zero-point theory based on physical impracticality. They say that there is no way man at that time--somewhere around four thousand B.C.--could have made it from the zero point to the other locations around the globe, regardless of where you place the zero point. They would have had to cross the oceans.

"Jorgenson's reply is that while there is not enough scientific evidence to convincingly support his theory, there is also not enough to refute it. If you assume there was a way ancient man could have crossed the oceans and spread, then the evidence falls into place. Thus all the sea journeys Jorgenson has undertaken in replicas of old sailing ves sels."

She tapped the translation Nabinger had given her. "I must give you credit, young man, for pursuing your study of the commonalities among the high runes, in defiance of the common theories. Obviously it has brought you success that many other scientists and investigators have failed to find because they accepted the standard theories and could not see the greater possibilities in thinking differently. I have tried my own hand at translating the high runes, but it is not my area of expertise."

"Let's get back to the Atlantis idea," Nabinger said, checking his watch again.

"Jorgenson believes--and as you know there is scientific data to support this-

-that there was a major geological event in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere around 3400 B.C.

Pretty much every culture around the globe refers to a great flood at about that time. Even the Tibetan Book of the Dead talks of a large land mass sinking into the sea at that time, and they are on the other side of the world from the Atlantic.

"And there are so many legends referring to the same thing: a great civilization in the middle of an ocean, destroyed by fire or flood! The Mayans called Atlantis Mu.

The northern Europeans called it Thule. There was also the land called Lemuria--which a Madame Blavatsky picked up for her own cult of Thule--which is the question you started this meeting with.

"Lemuria was a land that scientists in the nineteenth century postulated must have existed because of the presence on Madagascar of a certain type of monkey, the lemur, that was also found in India. They believed Lemuria had been in the Indian Ocean. Blavatsky's followers, with the stroke of their pens, moved Lemuria to the Pacific, tying the legend in with the statues on Easter Island, which loops us back to Jorgenson's large-eared race. The statues on Easter Island are of, as you also know, a large-eared people."

Slater laughed. "I can tell you even better myths and stories. In 1922 another German published a book about Atlantis and claimed it had originally been occupied by a genetically perfect people. But the perfection was marred when an outside woman arrived and taught them how to ferment alcohol. So much for the perfect society. Because of this imperfection Atlantis was then destroyed by the tail of a comet! The continent burned and only a handful of people escaped."

"Where do these people get their ideas from?" Nabinger asked.

"Ah, ever the scientist," Slater said. "You want source material?" She went to her crowded desk and searched for a minute, before pulling out a dog-eared hardcover book.

"This is the original mention of Atlantis from the Timaeus, a treatise on Pythagorean philosophy written by Plato. I have it here in the original Greek.

Allow a little bit of leeway for my translation, as I don't often converse in the language."

She turned several pages and ran her finger down the writing. "As is traditional with the Greeks, this manuscript takes the form of a dialogue among several persons, Socrates being one of them. In this passage Solon is telling the story of some of the Greek legends--for example the flood of Deukalion and Pyrrha. He is rebuked by an older priest:

Solon, you Greeks are children. There have been and will be many destructors of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water."

She turned a few pages.

Many are the truths and great are the achievements of the Greeks. But there is one that stands out above all the rest. It is in our history that a long time ago our state stopped a mighty host which started from a dis tant point in a distant ocean and came to attack the whole of Europe and Asia. For the ocean in that long ago day was navigable outside of what we call the Pillars of Hercules-there, there was an island which was larger than North Africa and Asia Minor put together and it was possible for travelers to cross from it to our land.

Slater looked up from the book. "There are many who believe Plato is referring to North and South America, but then those people run into the same problem that Jorgen-son has. The technology of the day rules out an ocean voyage across the Atlantic, so whatever Plato is referring to, if it is real, had to be closer to Europe. Of course, Plato is also saying something that goes against conventional thought: that the ocean outside the Pillars of Hercules, the Strait of Gibraltar, was navigable to people at that time."