Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  Over dinner, we chatted about Hübner’s hypothesis, which his family had evidently heard many times. He had a Pythagorean faith in numbers and no patience for ambiguous factors like Platonic allegories or fabricated myths. Either Atlantis was real and had almost certainly been located where he placed it, or it was complete fiction. “If my hypothesis was incorrect, the result would be a null set,” he explained.

  Near midnight Hübner drove back to Bonn, and his father and I sat quietly in the living room looking out the large picture window. The commuter train that I was going to be running for in a few hours rolled past along the riverbank. “I suppose Michael’s been to Morocco eight or nine times to search for Atlantis,” he finally said. “I know he thinks it’s real. But . . .” He looked tired, and for a moment I thought he might have dozed off.

  “But what if it isn’t real?” he finally said.

  • • •

  At his apartment in Bonn, Hübner had offered me a little veteran advice about traveling to Morocco. “I wouldn’t tell the people at the airport that you’re a journalist,” he said. “They lock those people up in Morocco.” I’d figured out by then that Hübner was a little suspicious by nature, but even in the wake of the Arab Spring, his paranoia seemed overblown. About a week later, after a long day flying from Athens to Madrid to Casablanca—where crowds of people filled almost every foot of airport floor space, waiting for four flights that boarded simultaneously like rush-hour trains leaving Times Square—I arrived at Agadir Al Massira Airport around 1:30 A.M. as tired as I have ever been. I approached an open immigration window, handed over my passport, and waited for the stamping sound as I squinted into the atrium beyond hoping to spot a currency exchange.

  “You speak English?” the man behind the glass asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It says here you are a writer.” Oops. “What sort of writing do you do?” he asked. “Are you a reporter? Why have you come to Morocco?”

  The answer, “to find Atlantis,” seemed inappropriate, so instead I mumbled something about vacationing and watched in silent terror as he slowly paged through my suddenly suspicious-looking passport: Ireland, Spain, Malta, Germany, Greece, now Morocco. My shoulder bag at this point contained two tape recorders holding hours of interviews that might require some explaining, several notebooks filled with similar material, and a laptop that if opened would display a new file named ATLANTIS INTERVIEW NOTES—MOROCCO. I could imagine the US embassy official roused out of bed to handle this crisis. (“Male, traveling alone, looking for Atlantis? I’ll try to get back to you on that next week.”) Mercifully, the agent silently handed back my passport and allowed me to pass through.

  In the morning, I took one of Agadir’s ubiquitous early-’80s-vintage Mercedes taxis to Hübner’s hotel in the foothills outside of the city. (He didn’t like Agadir, which caters to French package tourists who like sunbathing, and by the time I departed neither did I.) The main thoroughfare, Avenue Mohammed V, became the N10 highway, and once we turned north onto dirt roads, the only time the taxi slowed or stopped was to allow a herd of camels to cross. In the hotel parking lot I told Hübner about my odd airport entry and he seemed unsurprised. “Ja, they track you by your phone signal, too,” he said.

  I have to assume that a moderately skilled secret police force could have nabbed us at any moment if they wanted to: a sunburned white guy with tortoiseshell glasses and a hulking white guy with a foot-long ponytail, driving around the desolate foothills of the Atlas Mountains in a gigantic Nissan Pathfinder 4 x 4, openly consulting the map that Hübner had downloaded to his oversize laptop.

  Probably the best-known attribute of Plato’s Atlantis—other than its unfortunate, watery demise—is its concentric rings. As Christos Doumas had pointed out, the bull’s-eye of Santorini has hypnotized some people into thinking it might be Atlantis. (Hübner, naturally, had data to back up his claim against other sites, including Santorini, which met only twenty-three of his fifty-one specifications. “Bonn applies to the same number of criteria,” he said, dismissively.) Hübner wanted to show me the annular shape he had located almost exactly where Plato said it would be. “If you use the measurement of the Egyptian stade, it’s about 211 meters long,” Hübner said as we drove to the site. “So Plato’s fifty stades is about ten kilometers from the sea.” The place we were heading to was about twelve kilometers—seven miles—from the sea. Not perfect, by Hübner’s Seven Sigma standards, but by Atlantology’s usual benchmarks, remarkably close.

  We pulled off the road and hiked up a dry hillside covered sparsely with thornbushes. Hübner walked with his head bowed, which I first took to be a tall man’s habit from ducking under doorways. In fact, he was scanning the ground for clues. “Flint,” he said, picking up a small shard of rock and examining it closely. “There used to be prehistoric stone tools all over here. Now there are almost none.”

  The day was sunny and hot, so we moved slowly up the incline, stopping frequently to look for flints. After about an hour we reached the top. Hübner had warned me that we wouldn’t find a classic three-ringed structure, and it’s true that when we arrived it took my eyes a minute to adjust. Once they did, I saw that we were on the lip of a sort of natural bowl. At its center was a small hill, similar to the one Plato had mentioned at the center of Atlantis’s capital. Today this nucleus was occupied by a small cluster of plastic tarps, a makeshift campground for some nomadic Berbers.

  “It is about five kilometers across here, very close to Plato’s twenty-seven stades,” Hübner said. “In the center there are the ruins of a triangular structure, with a perimeter of several hundred meters. You can see it on satellite photos. There was a round building over there last year. I hope it’s still there.” On Google Maps the ring looked like a sort of jagged donut encircling several poorly drawn primary shapes.

  Hübner said that a few years earlier, thousands of ruined buildings had dotted this area, but fewer remained each time he returned. They were being carted off stone by stone to be crushed into the reddish pigment that seemed to paint nine out of ten structures in the Souss-Massa. Hübner wanted to slow or stop the destruction, but he was fighting a losing battle. The king owned all land in Morocco and hadn’t shown much interest in preserving pre-Islamic ruins, Atlantean or otherwise. And by the standards of, say, the Acropolis, there wasn’t much to see here, just dust and rocks and brambles. Plato had described a lush agricultural plain with two growing seasons. We were on the cusp of the Sahara desert. The landscape looked more like the surface of Mars than a thriving maritime port.

  Hübner had a stomach bug, so we postponed our visit inside the annular structure and cut our day short. I returned to the Agadir waterfront, ordered a mint tea at the bustling Jour et Nuit café, and watched Moroccan couples walk up and down the promenade holding hands. If I squinted, I could have been in Miami. The 1960 earthquake had obliterated the old city, and the lack of historical architecture made it hard to imagine that this was actually a Phoenician settlement; as with Cádiz and Gadeirus (the second son of Poseidon, who ruled the land facing Atlantis, according to Plato), the name Agadir is derived from the Phoenician word for wall or enclosure.

  The fifth-century-BC Carthaginian navigator Hanno described sailing through the Pillars of Heracles and passing down this coast, spotting a lagoon where elephants fed. About a day’s sail beyond that point, he claimed to have founded five cities. Though these cities have never been definitively identified, the historian Rhys Carpenter guessed that two likely possibilities were a fertile valley to the east of Agadir, which Hübner planned to show me, and the island of Mogador. Mogador was renowned in ancient times as a source of indigo dye made from marine snails, a possible connection with the blue vestments worn by the princes of Atlantis.

  Agadir certainly provided some of the most satisfying answers I’d yet found for Tony O’Connell’s two main conundrums, the mountains and the muddy shoals. Plato wrote that Atlantis’s
plain was surrounded by mountains and stretched to the infinite sea (presumably the Atlantic Ocean). Those mountains sheltered Atlantis from northern winds. The Souss-Massa is protected from the northerly gusts of the Azores High by the twelve-thousand- and thirteen-thousand-foot peaks of the High Atlas range.

  Herodotus reports that a Persian named Sataspes was dispatched by the emperor Xerxes to circumnavigate Africa. After passing through the Pillars and sailing down the west coast, “he encountered a race of little men who wore palm leaf clothing”—likely Pygmies—who “fled into the hills whenever he landed near them.” Here, Sataspes told Xerxes upon his return, he had to turn back because “the ship was unable to move any further forward but remained fast in the water.” Xerxes didn’t believe Sataspes and “had him impaled,” Herodotus wrote.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine Carthaginians, eager to keep the Greeks out of their western territories, passing these stories down a chain that led back to Athens, where they might have found their way into a tale about an island beyond the Pillars of Heracles that sank, “for which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable.”

  • • •

  Before sunrise the following morning I called down to my hotel’s front desk asking for a taxi and was informed that none would be available all day. It was Eid al-Adha, the Festival of the Sacrifice, which honors Ibrahim’s resolute obedience to the somewhat capricious Allah through his willingness to take his son Ismail’s life. The previous night a waiter had explained the holiday by saying something that sounded like “tomorrow is day we kill the ship,” which in New York would have earned him at the very least an unpleasant visit from Naval Intelligence. But the day’s first incantatory calls to prayer, drifting through my open windows as dawn began to break, lured me outside, and I found that my hotel’s desk person had not been exaggerating. For several minutes I stood on the edge of Avenue Mohammed V’s six lanes, which had been jammed with traffic from morning to night the day before. Not a single vehicle drove by in either direction.

  A few hours later, large groups of families dressed up in immaculately pressed and colorful robes began to appear on the sidewalks. I finally found a taxi driver napping in his vehicle down by the beach and persuaded him to take my fare. I’d made a date to meet Hübner at the gigantic Metro supermarket (also closed) on the outskirts of Agadir, and as we drove through the neighborhoods on the route, I understood what my waiter had been talking about. In every third or fourth doorway hung the carcass of a freshly killed sheep, an important part of the celebration.

  I was reminded that the setting of the Timaeus and Critias was a gathering at the annual Panathenaia festival in Athens, which culminated in a ritual sacrifice. “The theme is very appropriate to the festival of the goddess,” Socrates tells Critias of his plan to honor the event—a tribute to Athena—with his story of Atlantis. “And it’s a considerable advantage that it happens to be a true account and not a fictitious tale.”

  Everything I’d done hinged on the truth or falsity of a statement about truth or falsity. Plato would’ve gotten a kick out of that.

  Hübner and I drove the Pathfinder into the center of the annular structure, past where we’d seen the Berber camp the day before. Hübner explained that North Africa’s native Berber (or Amazigh) people have inhabited a triangular swath of the Souss-Massa plain for at least five thousand years and call the region island, because it is isolated by mountain ranges on two sides and the Atlantic on the third. Young boys were chasing goats through the rocky landscape. Vegetation in this part of the Souss-Massa is so sparse that it isn’t unusual to see trees loaded with goats, who climb onto any branch that will support their weight. Hübner’s stomach was feeling better and he was in a good mood. He and his brother, Sebastian, had located hundreds of stone constructions inside this circle and just outside of it. “Plato said many cultures came together,” he said. “There were so many buildings in the place we are going. Maybe it would have been like the New York City of the ancient world.”

  We stepped out of the SUV and started to walk, passing some stone circles and crossing over a sort of fence woven like a crown of thorns from thousands of prickly bushes. Hübner stopped frequently to pick up bits of stone, which he studied intently for flintlike qualities and then tossed back on the ground. It felt as if we were tracking some sort of beast that might have recently gone extinct. Though the pigment makers had evidently been digging like hungry squirrels going after tulip bulbs, the area was still filled with the remains of stone foundations of some sort—circles, ovals, rectangles. Hübner had once found a chunk of pottery near here that seemed to date from the Neolithic era, but beyond that, the area we were walking through was a complete mystery, in terms of who had lived here and when. Stavros Papamarinopoulos had made the not entirely helpful suggestion to Hübner that he should rent a helicopter for a few weeks to take aerial photographs of the entire area. “On the satellite you can see a large rectangular shape here, attached to a circle with cisterns in it,” Hübner told me over his shoulder. “Maybe it was a megalith to mark a spring,” like the hot and cold springs in Atlantis.

  As in Doñana Park, the unique landforms visible from space were invisible in the monotonous landscape. It was impossible to tell that we were actually inside the giant ring. We lost the Pathfinder and walked up and down hills until we spotted it again. Rain started to fall. We got very wet. Hübner paused to pick up and examine approximately ten thousand individual flints, one of which actually came in handy when I used it to scrape red mud off my pants and notebook after falling down a slope leading to a small, bubbling pool of water. Ever on the lookout for clues, Hübner walked past me, inched himself close to the edge, and stuck his hand in to see if it might be one of Plato’s hot springs. “It’s cold,” he said.

  In an Atlantis documentary, our visit to the annular structure would be the moment when the camera zoomed out to show the ring we were walking around, and the narrator would ask, “But could this really have been Plato’s Atlantis?” Hübner had located an abandoned circular settlement, roughly the dimensions Plato gave, outside of the Pillars of Heracles. His numbers matched up pretty well with Plato’s, but so did Werner Wickboldt’s. They couldn’t both be correct. Like Anton Mifsud, Hübner had inventive explanations for some of Plato’s details. The shiny orichalcum, Hübner hypothesized, had actually been a metallic paint made by mixing copper-colored mica and lime. (An Egyptian pharaoh, he told me, was said to have had his floors painted with a mixture of gold and lime.) No matter how hard I hinted, I couldn’t get Hübner to admit that his criteria might be in any way flawed or tainted by selection bias. When I asked about the million-strong army of Atlantis, which was not part of his data, he answered, “All I can say is that Atlantis was in Africa and there’s room for a lot of people.”

  Hübner had no doubt that Plato, through Socrates, had been speaking sincerely at the start of the Timaeus. “If the information is not correct, or if Plato has invented the story, it would be extremely improbable that all these criteria would apply to one place. And if he mixed criteria or made a fantasy, it would be very improbable that all these criteria could be found in one place.” I couldn’t help but think of the Wall Street geniuses who had made millions slicing and dicing mortgages into countless forms of new securities but who had almost wrecked the world economy because their sophisticated statistical models failed to account for the possibility that housing prices might actually fall.

  • • •

  If I didn’t quite share Hübner’s Platonic faith in numbers, I had to admire his dedication to gathering new data. The next morning the two of us walked around an abandoned lot on the outskirts of Agadir filled with nothing but tree stumps and litter. I watched as he used an old satellite map to search for evidence of a canal that might have once run through what was now an industrial park. Hübner stepped onto one of the taller stumps for a higher vantage point. “If there was a canal here, there might still
be moisture in the ground,” he explained, turning left and right. We didn’t find any. Later, he pulled over on the shoulder of a highway to take a sample from a ten-foot-high wall of sand through which the road had been carved. “This is a good chance to look for foraminifera,” he explained through the passenger-side window as he sifted sand between his fingers—foraminifera being nothing but tiny sea creatures whose fossilized presence might indicate an ancient tsunami.

  Hübner had two more sites he wanted me to see before I left. Catastrophic flooding was even more on my mind than usual, because a hurricane that had been building for several days on the other side of the Atlantic was headed directly toward my wife, kids, and home near New York City. I’d moved my departure up a day in hopes of beating the storm. I wasn’t exactly heartbroken by this prospect. After my run-in with passport control, I had never warmed to Morocco. My unease was not alleviated by Michael’s frequent references to Morocco’s surveillance state, which along with Atlantis was one of the two subjects he was comfortable talking about.

  The first place we stopped was a set of oceanfront caves at a place called Cap Ghir that matched Plato’s descriptions of docks carved out of the red, white, and black stone of Atlantis. The caves were, as promised, extraordinary. They could have been airplane hangars chiseled into a cliff face. Fishermen were still using them to shelter their boats.