DATELINE: ATLANTIS
DATELINE: ATLANTIS
A NOVEL BY
LYNN VOEDISCH
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Fiction Studio Books
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Copyright © 2012 by Lynn Voedisch
Jacket design by Barbara Aronica Buck
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-936558-57-5
E-book ISBN13: 978-1-936558-58-2
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All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by U.S. Copyright Law. For information, address Fiction Studio Books.
First Fiction Studio Printing: April 2013
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to the adventurers who endeavor to expand human knowledge by searching for traces of ancient civilizations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go out to many unnamed people who have read Plato’s Critias and Timaeus and from the ancient philosopher’s words have tried to devise where the ancient island (or islands) of Atlantis existed. Although most people today consider Atlantis a myth and dismiss Atlantis seekers as crackpots (and this is putting it mildly), there really are some level-headed thinkers who put together fact upon fact and are searching in various locations for evidence of a long-lost culture. None have found Atlantis yet, but many have found evidence that civilization probably started before historians say it did—which is after the end of the Ice Age or roughly 6,000 years ago.
Journalist Graham Hancock shattered many illusions about ancient life when he wrote Fingerprints of the Gods in 1996 and Underworld in 2002. He wrote of societies and cultures that existed during the Ice Age, shattering the long-held timeline. And he opined that something much like Atlantis might have existed. It was after Fingerprints was released that John Anthony West and his academic cohort geologist Robert Schoch, Ph.D., made a splash with their TV special Re-dating the Sphinx. Based on water-wear, they said the Sphinx was probably 8,000 or so years old! Personally, West thinks it’s older.
This gave new credibility to true Atlantis seekers who were tired of being called kooks, half-wits, and worse. Many organized on the Internet. One site that offers plenty of opinions is dailygrail.com, an Australian Internet site that focuses on many off-beat interests. It’s lively, often quite intellectual, and hardly ever beset by crazies.
I also give my thanks to Paul Bader who runs an online group, Halls of Atlantis on Yahoogroups, that is visited often by such serious contributors as Dr. Greg Little, a researcher who has found many interesting artifacts in the Bahamas. Dr. Little, aligned with the Association for Research and Enlightenment, takes his quest seriously. He and his wife Lora have gone diving in the Bahamas often and found leveling stones under the rocks that form the famous Bimini Road, discovered ancient anchors, and even foundations of what could have been ancient dwellings. Their videos are quite compelling (and available through A.R.E.).
Bader does have to deal with some strange folks, but he does so with quiet authority, pointing out mistakes and quieting the troublemakers, making his site a good place to learn a great deal about Atlantis lore.
Most books about Atlantis are for the lunatic fringe, but there are a few good ones. I learned a great deal from Andrew Collins, Otto Muck (translated from the German), and Charles Berlitz (although some of his material is too sensational).
Thanks also to those who took the time to read early drafts of my novel, including Annalouise Larsen, Carol Luce, Barbara Georgans, and Brad Blumenthal. Thanks also to Virginia Voedisch, who did first copyedits. If there are others I have forgotten to thank, please forgive me, for this project took up a long time, and other manuscripts followed, fighting for my attention.
Finally, my heartiest thanks go to Lou Aronica, who believed in me and published my work.
CHAPTER ONE: JAGUAR PRIZE
A hand stretches out from the jungle, reaching for Amaryllis. It trails up from the green fronds of the Yucatan, grows and strains as it pierces through the vault of foliage, aiming straight for the sky, where she streaks by at one hundred fifty miles per hour. Up close, the knuckles are bony and the veins pop out like ancient roots. As it nears her face, the hand opens, palm up, to reveal a large ball of light. Amaryllis tries to look into the object, but the brilliance forces her eyes away.
She shakes her head and breathes. She’s not prone to hallucinations, and this one takes her by surprise. She gazes out the airplane window again determined to conquer the fear.
Down in the jungle, below the humming airplane wing, the earth is steaming. Green velvet swathes the countryside from the lapis blue coast to the murky mud-brown inland. Here and there a fire burns, sending up towers of gray smoke. That’s how they farm, these descendants of the Maya. They burn a little plot of the jungle at a time, leach out the nutrients, then move on, leaving the earth to slumber.
The plane skids on an invisible spray of foam, banks on a hidden wave, and suddenly, they are a couple hundred feet closer to earth. Amaryllis grabs her gut, afraid Garret will see her unease. She has always hated flying in small aircraft, yet she insisted they take this rickety charter plane from Cancún. It was the only company that would agree to fly south beyond the rich, tourist-filled attractions of Xcaret and Tulum. They are zooming south along the Quintana Roo coast, to a place no one has ever heard of—a place so new it hasn’t been named.
“How will we know the guide?” Garret’s voice sounds dry. Amaryllis looks up to see his pupils fully dilated, overwhelming the retreating blue. His tongue plays against his cheek. He looks as if a small animal hides in his mouth.
She turns back to the window, searching the coastline for a familiar outcropping of rock. “Gabriel will see us coming.” But will he welcome me?
Garret nods as if trying to toss her words away. He reaches down to touch his camera bag, recently jammed under the seat during a wicked battle with turbulence. Garret has always prized his cameras over life itself, but now he doesn’t look so sure.
The plane begins to tip, making wide circles in the sky, bringing them closer to the coast. Sea cliffs catch the light—a bright white against Caribbean blue. Beneath the cliffs are caves, newly exposed by the hi-tech water diversion project a few hundred feet down the coast. The caves stand undisturbed and tourist-free. Amaryllis has been expecting the caverns to have changed since she saw them last—three weeks ago. But they sparkle in the midday sun, sublime, virginal. No one has found them yet.
“There,” she says, jabbing her finger at the cloudy, scratched window. “There’s the story.”
Garret squints, lowering his big head to the window. He says nothing, but his shutter finger begins to twitch. He grins.
#
Gabriel Santangelo never smiles in a simple way. He snickers or insinuates or beams like a child. This time, Gabriel is smug, pulling the corners of his lips into a tight smirk. He stands, with arms crossed, on a boulder halfway between the rocky coast and their seaplane.
“We’re not late,” Amaryllis yells to him, dragging her pack from the rear of the plane. The propellers chop the air into tangible lumps, reducing the words to blocks of sound.
“No mat--,” Gabriel hollers through cupped hands. “Not ab—not to—day.”
Amaryllis slips some hundred dollar bills to the pilot, the balance of their payment, through the open cabin door of the plane. The bright-eyed m
an counts the bills twice.
“U.S. dollars. Very nice. I’ll be back in two days.” She asks him what time he will arrive. He shrugs and slams the door. She and Garret leap onto Gabriel’s inflatable raft just in time to clear the seaplane, which angles off to the north, accelerates with a sudden roar and is as gone as the last of Amaryllis’ cash.
Gabriel grabs a line and pulls the raft to the rocky shore. He still has an inscrutable expression plastered on his thin, brown face.
“Wise guy,” Amaryllis slaps him on the arm as she leaps from the raft.
“Wise enough to keep secrets.”
He turns and marches toward the caves. She knows by now not to ask him to wait. She pulls her bag onto her aching shoulder and sloshes through the clear surf after his lanky form. Behind her, Garret grumbles in frustration.
#
“The reporter is not interested in the caves,” Gabriel says, pointing a finger at Amaryllis. Garret reaches into his camera bag, groping with frantic hands for a lens that can make sense of such beauty. They’re deep now into the underground passages. For twenty minutes they’ve seen nothing but wet rock, but now they go down into an impossible forest of shining white sculptures, dripping icicles, luscious crystal carvings. Fifteen feet down, a cavern opens, deeper still, the stalactites and stalagmites reflect Gabriel’s brilliant flashlight beams.
“Not interested…,” Garret repeats the guide’s words, not really hearing what he’s saying. He’s focusing, but not shooting. The angle is wrong. He needs to venture deeper and starts to climb down.
“No.” Gabriel moves in front of Garret, his thin, wiry frame no match for Garret’s linebacker physique. The photographer stops nonetheless. “We don’t go there today. The conditions are dangerous. The tide is coming back in.”
Gabriel fixes Amaryllis with a humorless gaze.
“Tomorrow, we see something better.”
#
This far south, the North Star is in its correct position, but all the other constellations look out of alignment. Amaryllis searches for Orion and can’t find the familiar belt stars. There are too many lights in the sky, and she begins to feel unmoored. Gabriel pokes at the fire, talking to Garret about his Maya ancestors. The photographer, still annoyed at being denied his chance to shoot the caves, sits in silence.
In the firelight, Gabriel looks like the high priest of the Temple of Kukulcan. With his sloping forehead, perfectly angled nose, and high, proud cheekbones, his face is the picture of Maya aristocracy. Put a plumed headdress on him, and he could step back several millennia.
That’s probably why Amaryllis was drawn to him in the first place. He looks so uprooted, a displaced soul in the twenty-first century. At Chichén Itzá, where she was on a journalists’ tour of the fabled ruins, Gabriel was one of the guides. He was the only one who spoke of the Maya as nobler than murderous savages.
“Consider the sophistication of the Temple, which the Spanish named El Castillo,” Gabriel told the tour group, his perfect English filled with authority. Amaryllis had the spooky feeling he was addressing only her. “This is a giant solar calendar. Four staircases of ninety-one steps, totaling three hundred sixty-four, with the final step to the top marking the final day of the year. The terraces represent the eighteen months of the Mayan year. The balustrade is constructed so that a snake, depicting the god Kukulcan, appears to slither down the central staircase on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. When the image is complete, the snake connects with the featured headdress at the base of the steps.”
Amaryllis watched him lecture, as his black eyes gave off sparks of enthusiasm. He was a man in his thirties, educated, and there was no doubt that he spoke of his direct ancestors. She decided to ask the questions he wanted to hear.
How sophisticated must the Maya have been to quarry, dress, and raise boulders of such enormous size? How was this accomplished if they hadn’t discovered the wheel? To invent a monument of such astronomical accuracy, the Maya must have had other uses for the temple than simple human sacrifice. What did the temple represent? What secrets did the Maya have that the Spanish destroyed?
Gabriel considered each question. No one had the answers, he said. But Amaryllis had gotten his attention. He asked where his questioner worked. When she mentioned the Los Angeles Star, he slipped her his business card.
“I’ll tell you the history no one wants to print,” he said, taking a deep breath into his tight-fitting khaki shirt. She saw his pectoral muscles flex and felt her face flush.
Restless now, poking through the fire, Amaryllis realizes he has told her nothing yet. She interrupts his monologue.
“So what did the Spanish want to keep quiet?” she asks and then munches on a roasted marshmallow, part of Garret’s junk-food stash. She avoids the photographer’s curious gaze. Gabriel looks into the flames and pauses as if he’s not going to answer.
“Young Garret Lucas here probably believes everything the Western world has told him about the Maya,” Gabriel says, never lifting his eyes from the fire. Garret scowls, but lifts his shoulders in anticipation of some real conversation—the kind with more than one participant.
“All I know is that they were cannibals and sacrificed virgins,” Garret says. “And I came down here to take some photos Amy said are gonna blow the socks off archaeologists. National Geographic material. That’s all I know.”
“Amy?” Gabriel looks over at her with another one of those unreadable smiles.
She closes her eyes for a moment. “Yes, it’s Amy in Los Angeles. Amaryllis Quigley is such a stupid byline.”
Garret, to her amazement, doesn’t laugh. He nods his head, considering the suitability of her given name.
“So what do we have here in these caves, Amaryllis?” Gabriel pronounces her name as if testing a delicate French pastry.
“We have some ruins that no one has found before,” she says, feeling the men turn their attention to her, sensing the bareness of her legs, the warmth of the fire on her knees and the goose bumps on her thighs. “They have been completely hidden for centuries, maybe thousands of years.”
“Much longer,” Gabriel says, turning his bronze face to the night sky.
#
Amaryllis had been snorkeling, bobbing on the bathwater-warm waves with Natalie Pritchard, the only person on the whole damn journalist’s junket with enough gumption to abandon the agenda and try some unscheduled activity. At Amaryllis’ urging, they ditched a dismal hotel tour in Cancún and ended up on the Quintana Roo coast, far south of Tulum, gazing at fish and diving to view beds of coral.
It had been one of those days in the Caribbean that was shockingly lucid. The blues were so pure and the air so bright that the landscape vibrated and hummed. A person could feel the clarity deep in the marrow of her bones. These things happen after storms. A hurricane had passed over the week before the journalists landed at Cancún. When they touched down, the last of a tropical depression had moved offshore.
The high-pressure zone slid in to take the storm’s place, instantly purifying the atmosphere and calming the ocean swells. Stirred up only hours before, the ocean floor was alive with coral reefs and sapphire and topaz fish. However, more than wildlife came to light.
Along the coastline lay a surprise. Partially submerged, rising from the water, sheer-edged cliffs beckoned like sugar-glazed pastries. Huge limestone caves, unmapped, just released from a thousand-year bath. Solidified—like Aphrodite—from ocean foam.
“Nice caves,” Natalie called, as Amaryllis swam away from her, away from everyone and everything predictable and sane. She stayed in the caves until dark, long after Natalie took the rented Jeep back to the hotel. Back on the beach, Amaryllis reached into her jeans pocket, gritty with sand, and fished out Gabriel’s card.
#
“This can’t be here.”
Garret stands, as Amaryllis had three weeks before, at the rear of the last cave, looking through a cramped passage into a clearing. After the closeness of the subterranean worl
d, the sudden opening of light, air, and space brings a bit of relief. That is until Amaryllis realizes she is gazing at a landscape with hills, only the hills aren’t hills, but triangular structures. Then, even on second viewing, she gulps hard when realizing that the buildings are pyramids, structures of the Maya that have slept under the sea for untold centuries. This stretch of coastline could only been above water during the Ice Age, about eleven hundred years ago.
“They always were there,” Gabriel says, through the narrow chasm and striding across a vast beach where the caves open again to land. The beach once was a seafloor crawling with crabs and starfish. “You didn’t know where to look.”
Amaryllis puts her hand on Garret’s shoulder and feels blood pounding through the large artery near his neck. He shakes her off, for he’s already snapping photographs.
“It’s real,” she mumbles, then turns to follow Gabriel.
What can a journalist say about a wonderland that she is witness to? What can she feel when she stumbles upon a treasure so ancient, so unexpected, so ghostly that it makes her want to weep? In fact, Amaryllis did weep when she found this place. For a short time, she wandered around the neighboring town in the Yucatan, crying in bookstores and libraries, dropping her tears on page after page of history books. She cried for the Maya and their lost world. She cried over the wanton destruction by the arrogant Spaniards. She sobbed for the burned books and smashed treasures. But mostly, she wept for what would become of her when she let the world know of this hidden land. No longer would she be a young reporter slugging away at stories about plucky entrepreneurs. She wouldn’t be pining for a Pulitzer Prize anymore. She’d have one. And what would she do then? The entire trajectory of her life will have changed.
Dateline: Atlantis Page 1