Terra incognita
Andrew Brown
Atlantis C ome years ago I read an article on ,...Ivarieties of certainty that so impressed me that I dreamed about it twice, and when I met the author summoned up the courage to praise him for it. He told me that he'd never written it, never read it, and disagreed with the theories expressed in it in so far as he was able to understand my — by then rather confused — explana- tion. The fact that it never existed doesn't alter the interest of the article; it merely means that I will have to write it myself. This collection of Atlantean superstitions provides a splendid opportunity to do so.
Mr Berlitz invented the Bermuda Triangle. His book on the subject has sold, according to Macmillan's, ten million copies in 22 languages. Ten million copies — that is more than there are real books in the London Library, which institution appears, on this reflection, as a survival from a lost civilisation.
Lies about history are nearly always more pleasurable than the truth because they are more predictable. Hindsight and forgetfulness compose the glue that holds our picture of the world together. There are just too many complex relationships operating in history for us to be able to grasp them honestly and see what should have happened next. This fact diminishes the attraction that history has for most people. But simplify and reduce the impor- tant factors to one or two, as science fiction writers do, and the result becomes im- mediately attractive because it demands so much less of a sense of wonder to compre- hend than does reality. Consider The Lost World, one of Conan Doyle's 'Professor Challenger' books, apparently inspired by the stories of the explorer Fawcett.
This rests on the assumption that some- where in the Amazon jungles is a mountain so steep-sided and inaccessible that it has preserved fauna of dinosaurs, pterodactyls, and so on. Given this one assumption, the adventures of our explorers, once they reach the plateau, are fairly predictable, though very well done. This is only made possible, though, by ignoring such factors as parasites; a rather better story, by Brian Aldiss, has the hero successfully shooting a dinosaur, and then being squashed flat by one of its escaping ticks.
Lost cities in the Amazon jungle also play their part in Mr Berlitz's hook; indeed they provide an excellent introduction to his style of argument: 'Large stone cities, thousands of years old . . . supposedly located in the Brazilian jungle, have been reported and described by a number of explorers who allegedly visited them during the last several centuries.' (My italics).
This frequent use of 'let's pretend' words adds greatly to the unattractiveness of the book, and makes it difficult to discover what, if anything, Mr Berlitz really thinks about Atlantis. Perhaps, possibly, alleged- ly, supposedly, some researchers have thought that he may believe it is in the Atlantic, somewhere near the Azores. This belief is of course based on Plato, who, Mr Berlitz explains, 'was renowned as the greatest thinker of antiquity by the very fact that he wrote the report'. But other possible sites for Atlantis mentioned in- clude Tihuanaco in Bolivia, Heligoland, Yucatan, the Caucasus, Libya, Nigeria, Spitzbergen and Antarctica. I have omitted from this list the island of Thera, or Santorini, which provides the most reason- able historical basis of Atlantis disappear- ing beneath the waves, since Mr Berlitz's treatment of the theory provides a reason- able test of his good faith.
He starts by mentioning, fairly enough, the essential component of the Santorini theory, which is that the Egyptian records concerned had been mistranslated as saying 'a thousand' whenever they meant 'a hundred'. He goes on to say that this gives a date for the end of Atlantis not of 9500 BC (9000 years before Plato), but of 950 BC. Ah well, even Homer nods occa- sionally. What of the argument against the Santorini theory?
It is 'facile' for one thing; it is not new the explosion that destroyed Santorini was mentioned by Ignatius Donnelly, a prom- inent American crank, as an example of great natural destruction; but Santorini was destroyed by a volcanic explosion, which is not how Plato describes the end of Atlantis, and on this basis Mr Berlitz concludes that 'Santorini is probably simp- ly one more victim of natural disasters in the Mediterranean, and it is not in name or description connected with the Atlantis of Plato and other commentators'. 'Other commentators' is nice.
But it is difficult to discover what it was that Mr Berlitz thinks did end Atlantis. His suggestions include meteor strikes, earth- quakes, volcanic eruptions, suddenly melting glaciers, and nuclear warfare. You didn't know about prehistoric nuclear war- fare? It's all described in ancient Hindu scriptures, and also in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The misadventure of Lot's wife is an early example of the perils of radiation.
I labour these points not to establish that the theory of Atlantis is nonsense — that service has been performed for us by Mr Berlitz — but to establish what sort of nonsense it is. For one thing, it is numbing- ly unimaginative, even by the standards of bad science fiction. All the mysterious discoveries of the ancients turn out to be things we already have — aeroplanes, dinosaurs, the lightbulbs you will find in Egyptian tomb paintings, germ warfare, and so on. How long can it be before the first digital watch, bus pass, or word- processor is discovered in a tomb painting?
But the relentless banality of the Atlan- tean past is not what is really depressing about it, neither is the reader's ignorance on which Mr Berlitz so profitably pre- sumes. What terrifies me is the vagueness of Atlantean assertions; and the sales figures that show this fog of unknowing is what people pay for in a book. What does it mean to 'believe in Atlantis'? It is clearly not a scientific belief — one which values doubt and uses Occam's razor. Nor is it a religious belief, which is concerned to define mystery as closely as possible. It is rather the deliberate pleasure of holding two views that cannot be reconciled, and thus reducing the world to something meaningless and dull. I do not mean by this belief in Atlantis coupled with disbe- lief in Atlantis; I mean believing deliber- ately in any number of contradictory things about Atlantis, and choosing between them according to mood.
This habit of mind is widespread. It was the subject of the article that I dreamed about. It is the way most people think about politics, and news generally. Mr Berlitz won the Dag Hammarskjold prize for non-fiction in 1976.
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