From Atlantis to the Sphinx (20 page)

He decided on an extremely dangerous expedient: to go down in a diving suit. Realising that everyone would try to talk him out of it, he started by going to Boston and taking lessons in deep-sea diving. Then he was ready to approach the American Antiquarian Society, and his patron Stephen Salisbury. As he expected, Salisbury reacted with horror, and told Thompson he would be committing suicide. But Thompson persisted, and finally raised the funds he needed.

Next he dangled a plumb line into the well until it seemed to touch bottom; from this he determined that the water was about 35 feet deep. But how to know where to look for human skeletons in about 3000 square feet of water? He solved this by throwing logs weighing as much as a human body from the top, and noting the spot where they fell.

Next, he positioned a dredge, with a long steel cable, at the edge of the cliff, and watched the gaping steel jaws plunge under the dark surface. The men at the winch lowered the dredge into the dark water and turned the handle until the cable became slack. Then they closed the steel jaws, and heaved the dredge back up. As it came out above the surface, the water boiled, and great bubbles of gas surged up. On a wooden platform, the jaws deposited a load of black leafmould and dead branches. Then it plunged back again into the water.

For days this continued, and the pile of black sludge grew larger—one day it even brought up a complete tree, ‘as sound as if toppled into the pit by a storm of yesterday’. But Thompson began to worry. Supposing this was all he was going to find? Suppose Landa
had
been allowing his imagination to run wild? He would be subjected to merciless ridicule. Even fragments of pottery did nothing to raise his spirits. After all, boys might have used flat bits of broken pots to skim across the surface of the well.

Then, one early morning, he staggered down to the cenote, his eyes heavy with lack of sleep, and looked down into the ‘bucket’ formed by the closed jaws as it rose out of the water. In it he noticed two large blobs of some yellow substance, not unlike butter. They reminded him of the balls of ‘bog butter’ found by archaeologists in ancient settlements in Switzerland and Austria. But the ancient Maya had no cows or goats—or any other domestic animals—so this could not be butter. He sniffed it, then tasted it. It was resin. And suddenly, Thompson’s heart became light. He threw some of the resin on to a fire, and the air was permeated by a fragrant smell. It was some kind of sacred incense, and it meant that the well had been used for religious purposes.

From then on, the well began to yield up its treasures—pottery, sacred vessels, axe and arrow heads, copper chisels and discs of beaten copper, Maya deities, bells, beads, pendants and pieces of jade.

Thompson had moored a large, flat boat below the overhang of the cliff, alongside a narrow ‘beach’ with lizards and giant toads. One day he was sitting in the boat, working at his notes, when he paused to stare meditatively down into the water. What he saw startled him. He seemed to be looking down a vertical wall with ‘many deeps and hollows’, as described by the women who had been hauled up. It was, he quickly realised, the reflection of the cliff above him. And the workmen looking over the cliff were also reflected in the water, giving the impression that people were walking about below.

He had also read that the water in the cenote sometimes turned green, and sometimes became clotted blood. Observation over a period revealed that these comments were also based on fact. Algae sometimes turned the water bright green, and red seed capsules made it look like blood.

Finally, it was obvious that the dredge had reached the bottom of the mud and slime—about 40 feet below the original ‘bottom’—and that no more artefacts would be found. Now it was time to begin diving.

Thompson and two Greek divers descended to the flat-bottomed scow in the dredge bucket, and changed into diving gear, with huge copper helmets. Finally, Thompson climbed over the edge of the boat—the boys who would work the air pump solemnly shaking hands with him, in case he failed to reappear—and clambered down the wire ladder. At the bottom he let himself go, and his iron-soled shoes and lead necklace carried him downward. Yellow water changed to green, then purple, then black, and pains shot through his ears. When he opened the air valves, letting out the pressure, these disappeared. Finally, he stood on the rock bottom. Here he was surrounded by vertical mud walls left by the dredge, eighteen feet high, with rocks sticking out of them.

Another diver joined him and they shook hands. Thompson discovered that, by placing his helmet against that of his companion, they could hold intelligible conversations, although their voices sounded like ghosts echoing in the darkness. They soon decided to abandon their flashlights and submarine telephone—these were useless in water as thick as pea soup. It was not hard to move around, since they were almost weightless, like astronauts; Thompson soon discovered that if he wanted to move to a spot a few feet away, he had to jump cautiously, or he would shoot straight past it.

Another danger came from the huge rocks jutting out of the mud walls that the dredge had excavated. Sometimes these would break loose and fall down. But they sent a wave of water-pressure ahead of them, which gave the divers time to move. So long as they kept their air-lines and speaking tubes away from the walls, they were relatively safe. ‘Had we incautiously been standing with our backs to the walls, we would have been sheared in two as cleanly as if by a pair of gigantic shears.’

The natives were convinced that giant snakes and lizards swam in the pool. There
were
snakes and lizards—but they had fallen into the pool and were desperate to get out.

Thompson
did
have one bad experience. Digging in a narrow crevice in the floor, a Greek diver beside him, he suddenly felt the movement of something gliding down on him. A moment later, he was being pushed flat against the bottom. For a moment he remembered the legends of strange monsters. Then the Greek diver began to push at the object, and as Thompson helped him, he realised that it was a tree that had been dislodged from above.

On another occasion, gloating over a bell that he had found in a crevice, he forgot to open his air valves to let the air out. Suddenly, as he rose to change his position, he began to float upwards like a balloon. This was highly dangerous, for a diver’s blood is charged with air bubbles, like champagne, and unless these are released with a slow ascent, they cause a disorder known as decompression sickness or the ‘bends’, in which a man can die in agony. Thompson had the presence of mind to open the valves quickly; but the accident permanently damaged his eardrums.

The bottom of the cenote yielded the treasure he had hoped for: human bones and skulls, proof that Landa had been telling the truth, and hundreds of ritual objects of gold, copper and jade. They even found the skull of an old man—probably a priest dragged down by a struggling girl as she was hurled into the pool.

Only the treasure of Tutankhamen surpassed Thompson’s discoveries at Chichen Itzá. The treasures of the sacred well, and the incredibly dramatic story of their recovery, made Thompson famous. When he died in 1935, at the age of 75, he had—as he admitted—squandered most of his fortune on his Maya excavations; but it had been the kind of rich and exciting life of which every schoolboy dreams. His article on Atlantis had led him to a lifetime of adventure, a real-life version of Indiana Jones, who had originally inspired Graham Hancock’s first excursion into historical detection.

Chichen Itzá holds an important lesson for those who want to make sense of Meso-America’s bloody past. When I was sixteen, I read Prescott’s
Conquest of Mexico
, and was shocked by his account of the Aztec sacrifices. Yet the maidens of Chichen Itzá were not thrown into the pool by sadistic priests to pacify cruel gods; they were thrown in as
messengers
whose purpose was to speak to the gods, to beg the gods to avert some catastrophe. Then they were pulled out. Admittedly, a sacrificial victim whose ribs have been sliced open with a flint knife so that his heart can be torn out cannot expect to survive. But the Mayas, like the ancient Egyptians and Tibetans, seem to have believed that the passage to the underworld is long and perilous—these sacrificial victims were being offered a swift and safe passage. The priests thought that they were doing them a favour, and no doubt most of them prepared themselves for death in a perfectly calm frame of mind, instructed in precisely what to say to the gods by a grave and friendly priest.

Whether or not we can accept the notion of a geological cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis and Mu (there seems a general agreement that their destruction occurred contemporaneously), there can be little doubt about the evidence for great catastrophes in the remote past. In fact, ‘catastrophism’ was a respectable scientific theory in the mid-eighteenth century. Its chief exponent was the celebrated naturalist Count Georges Buffon, an early evolutionist. Buffon’s explanation of how so many species had become extinct was that they had been destroyed in great catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. Fifty years later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Scottish geologist James Hutton suggested that, geological changes occur slowly over immense epochs, but since at this time most scientists accepted Archbishop James Ussher’s view that the earth was created in 4004 BC (a view arrived at by adding together all the dates in the Bible), his view made little headway—until another geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, produced convincing proofs of the immense age of the earth in his
Principles of Geology
(1830-33). Science, as usual, lost no time in rushing to the opposite extreme, and declaring that catastrophism was a primitive superstition.

In the twentieth century, as Hapgood pointed out in his ‘Great Extinctions’ chapter of
Earth’s Shifting Crust
, this view was modified by discoveries like that of the Beresovka mammoth in 1901, with fresh flowers still in its stomach. Ignatius Donnelly had devoted many chapters to deluge legends—and evidence—in
Atlantis
, and even more in its successor,
Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel
(1883), which argued that the Pleistocene Ice Age (which started 1.8 million years ago) was brought about by a collision of the earth with a comet. In
Atlantis
he cites Brasseur to show that the Mayas preserved legends of the destruction of Atlantis.

Around the year 1870, a ten-year-old German named Hans Hoerbiger arrived at the curious conclusion that the moon and planets are covered with a thick layer of ice—in the case of the moon, 125 miles deep. Later, as an engineer, he saw the effect of molten iron on waterlogged soil, and concluded that some similar explosion had caused the Big Bang that created the universe. He came to believe that the earth has experienced a series of violent catastrophes, which have been caused by the capture of a series of ‘moons’. According to Hoerbiger, all the planetary bodies in the solar system are slowly spiralling in towards the sun. As the smaller bodies move faster than the larger ones, they inevitably pass close to the planets, and are ‘captured’. This, he said, has happened to our earth at least six times, and our present moon is only the latest in the series. Once captured, the moons spiral in on the earth until they crash on it, causing cataclysms. The last one was captured about a quarter of a million years ago, and as it came closer, its gravity caused all the water of the earth to bunch around its equator. Because of the lighter gravity, men became giants—hence the biblical quotation about ‘giants in the earth’. Finally it crashed, releasing the waters and causing great floods, such as those described in the Bible and the
Epic of Gilgamesh
.

Hoerbiger’s book
Glacial Cosmology
(1912, with Phillipp Fauth) caused a sensation, although astronomers derided it. In due course it was enthusiastically taken up by the Nazis, and Hitler designated Hoerbiger one of the world's three greatest astronomers, together with Ptolemy and Copernicus, and proposed to build an observatory in his honour. But in spite of all this approval, Hoerbiger remained distinctly paranoid, and told astronomer Willy Ley, ‘Either you believe in me and learn, or you must be treated as an enemy.’ His disciple Hans Schindler Bellamy, an Austrian, continued to propagate his theories after Hoerbiger’s death in 1931, and made even more of the evidence for earth cataclysms. It was not until the flight of Apollo 11 in 1969, and the moon landing, that millions of Hoerbiger disciples finally conceded that the Master had somehow been mistaken.

In the 1930s, a Russian-Jewish psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky became interested in ancient history through reading Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism
—which had proposed that Moses and the pharaoh Akhnaton were contemporaries, not separated by a century, as historians believe. Velikovsky’s research led him to conclude that a great deal of the dating of ancient history is hopelessly wrong.

His research convinced him that some great catastrophe had befallen the earth in the distant past. For a while he believed that Hoerbiger’s ‘captive moon’ theory might be correct, but finally rejected it. Then he came upon texts that seemed to indicate that the planet Venus was not mentioned by ancient astronomers before 2000 BC. Could it be that Venus had not been in its present position before the second millennium BC? But if Venus was ‘born’, as many ancient texts seemed to indicate, where was it born
from
? According to Velikovsky, Greek myth gives us the answer: Venus was born from the forehead of Zeus—that is, of Jupiter. According to Velikovsky, around 1500 BC, some great internal convulsion caused Jupiter to spew forth a fiery comet, which fell towards the sun. It came close to Mars, dragging it out of its orbit, then passed Earth, causing the catastrophes described in the Bible (and many other ancient texts, all meticulously cited). It went around the sun, and returned 52 years later, causing more catastrophes; then it settled down as the planet Venus.