Atlantis Gold

Chapter 30

Maddy shook the lost pages of the Critias in her hands while she talked to Hunt. “Why couldn’t Atlantis have been in Cuba? It’s the Atlantic, it’s not far from Bimini, which has been proposed as an Atlantis location. The concentric ring pattern is here.”

Hunt shrugged as he looked around at the islet and sea. “If it is, though…then where is it? The buildings, the roads…the treasure?”

Maddy stared back down at the ancient manuscript, brow furrowed in deep concentration. “There’s something special about these pages.”

Hunt’s eyes widened. “Well, yeah — they’re about 2,400 years old! That makes them pretty special.”

“No, something more than that.” She paused for a few moments in deep thought, then continued. “Consider for a minute what the story of Atlantis as told by Plato was really about?”

Hunt took a deep breath as he looked out across the sea to the verdant Cuban mainland. “it’s an allegory for what happens to a civilization that becomes greedy and corrupt.”

Maddy nodded slowly as a smile spread across her face. “Precisely. Because what supposedly happened in the Critias and Timaeus documents that already existed before we knew about this?” She shook the scroll in her hand.

“The gods punished the people of Atlantis by unleashing a deluge of floods and massive tidal waves that destroyed the city and submerged it permanently beneath the ocean.”

“Also correct. But what if the Atlanteans had a plan to escape and rebuild after that catastrophe? To relocate to another area and start a new life?”

Hunt held her gaze for several moments during which he reflected ever so briefly on their past times together, before replying. “Sounds like that would be called a second chance.”

“A second chance—exactly!”

“But how would the logistics of that work — moving all the building materials, which were supposedly exotic, rare Earth metals, and the treasure, the cultural items like books that made them a people to be admired in the first place — how would they preserve and move all of that?”

“Good question.” Maddy held the pages up to the sun and looked up at them. “See how some of the words are fainter than others? When you look at it straight down against a surface it’s not really noticeable, but when I shine light through it like this, it’s much more apparent.”

Hunt leaned in and looked up at the unfurled scroll of parchment Maddy held up to the sunlight. “Oh yeah, I do see that. It’s like they had a bold font all those years ago!”

Maddy’s laughter carried on the sea breeze along with the squawks of gulls. “They did it the old fashioned way, with a quill using extra ink — probably some kind of plant extract mixed with animal blood — on select words. But why these particular words, Carter?”

He took a closer look at some of the words. “Sorry, but the words themselves are all Greek to me.”

She smiled at him. “I see you haven’t lost that sense of humor I remember.”

“Some things are worth holding on to.” He looked away from the manuscript and into Maddy’s eyes. They sparkled for a moment and then she pointed to one of the words on the parchment that was emboldened by the sun. “I really do need to be in my office for this, but I can make some sense of it. This word here, I don’t know what it means, for example. It is literally Greek to me!” She gave Hunt a playful shove. “But take this one here…” She moved her finger across the parchment to another boldened word.

“Vacated…” She moved her finger to another part of the scroll. “Southern…” Again, she moved to a different bolded word. “Province.”

Hunt made prolonged eye contact with her. “And Cuba is the ‘southern province’?”

Maddy nodded emphatically. “I’m sure of that, based on what I read earlier before we left the Bahamas. And look at these other words: They’re ancient Greek and have no direct translation today, but as best I can tell, if I look at only that series of bold words, it says, In this new place they learned the evil of their ways and were able to live for generations of fruitful activity.”

Hunt appeared perplexed. “So this…Cuba…is the old place…but where is the ‘new place’?”

Maddy bit her lip while continuing to stare at the manuscript she held up to the sunlight. “Well that’s the funny thing…it doesn’t say. The story — the Critias, which is the end of Plato’s Atlantis tale, the first part being the Timaeus, ends here by saying…” She squinted at the scroll while interpreting the ancient Greek. “…from the sea it rises again. I’m pretty sure that’s what it says, anyway.”

“You’re probably right, Maddy. But okay, so Atlantis was destroyed, the people relocated in anticipation of those God-induced floods and tidal waves, rebuilt the city somewhere else, meaning it rose again from the sea…right?”

Maddy shrugged. “That’s how I see it.”

“But where?”

Maddy looked up at the scroll again, shaking her head. “It doesn’t actually say where that I can see — either in the bold words or the regular text. I guess I’ll have to have a more thorough translation done back at home, and then—”

“Guys, hey — over here — I found something!” In addition to his voice, they heard the sound of Jayden’s footsteps pounding across the island to the beach. He stopped at the edge of the beach and beckoned them. “Come with me, check this out!”

“Everything okay?” Hunt asked.

“Yeah, no emergency, just found something cool. Not sure what it is, though. This way!”

Maddy carefully rolled the scroll back up and tucked it away. Hunt took a last look at the water, checking for boats or planes, but saw none. Then he and Maddy jogged across the sand and caught up with Jayden, who led them across the island’s thin cover of scrubby vegetation. They trekked across the middle of the island, which was roughly crescent-shaped, while a flock of gulls wheeled around overhead. Before long, Jayden reached the edge of the beach and stood in place for a second, hands on his knees, out of breath.

“Found a campsite!”

“What? There are people on this island?” Maddy’s eyes widened, but Jayden stood up straight and shook his head. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Hunt and Maddy left the beach and followed Jayden at a trot toward the middle of the barrier island, finding the going easy over the flat, hard ground. After a few minutes, Jayden stopped walking and looked around. He pointed into the distance, along the curving crescent of the island’s natural shape. Colored swatches of fabric contrasted sharply with the brownish-green of the island’s terrain.

“Those are tents,” Jayden said. “Come on.”

They trekked the rest of the distance to the campsite. Maddy stopped a few yards short of the camp, balking at the obvious remnants of recent human activity. “Jayden, are there…did you see…are there dead people here?”

But Jayden shook his head immediately. “No. Saw no people, living or otherwise. Not that I checked every single area, but I’m pretty sure it was left in haste. Come on, I’ll show you.”

They walked over to the nearest tent, a green fabric two- or three-person affair, the stakes of which had been bent and twisted beyond repair, collapsing the fabric so that it no longer had its intended dome shape.

“Whose camp was this?” Hunt asked, getting right to the point.

“Not sure yet, but whoever it was, they had some technology.” Jayden picked up an ethernet cable off the ground from inside the tent and held it up.

“Any actual computers or drives left behind?” Hunt wanted to know.

“Not that I could find so far, but let’s have a look around.” Jayden ducked farther inside the collapsed tent while Maddy combed the ground nearby and Hunt ventured to the next tent over. This one was also ruined, mangled into unusable scaffolding supporting a shredded, orange fabric. Inside, he saw a mix of soda pop and Cristal beer cans on the ground, along with a sleeping bag and a battery powered lantern. He moved to the sleeping bag and lifted it off the ground. Beneath it he saw a pile of books. He dropped the bag and picked up the volumes, which were relatively recent hard covers with titles like, ATLANTIS: THE EIGHTH CONTINENT, MEET ME IN ATLANTIS, THE TRUE MYTH OF ATLANTIS, and the like. He opened the pages of a few, looking for handwritten notes or any sign of the owner’s identity. He found nothing inside the first couple of books, but third caused him to suck in his breath when he opened its cover.

The pages had been cut away and inside the book was a 9mm pistol. Hunt carefully extracted it from the book and checked that the safety was on and that the magazine was full. Looking for the serial number, he saw that it had been filed off. He started to put the gun back in the book but then thought better of it and tucked it into the waistband of his shorts, pulling is shirttail over it.

He looked around the tent some more but found nothing further of interest. Outside the tent, Maddy was stooped down on the ground, combing through the vegetation with her fingers. She picked up something and held it up to Hunt as she heard him emerge from the tent. It was small and brass-colored. “Look at this, I’m finding some bullet casings.”

Hunt nodded and lifted up his shirt. “And I found a gun. Let me see one of them.”

Maddy’s eyes widened at the sight of Hunt’s new acquisition and he took the brass shell from her, inspecting it briefly before dropping it to the ground. “Yep, 9mm, it could be from this gun. But let me see that one…” She handed him one of the other spent shells in her hand.

“This one is a different caliber. So there are either more firearms still on this site, or there was some sort of shootout here, with all the players long gone.”

Jayden emerged from another tent and walked over. “Look what I found?” He held up another pistol, of a different model than the one Hunt found.

“Found a 9mm myself,” Hunt said, showing Jayden the gun in his waistband. “I figure we may as well keep them until we get out of here, since we never know what kind of jam we may find ourselves in.” He looked all around at the sea surrounding the island and thee sky above.

“But what do you think happened here to make someone want to leave their guns behind?” Jayden asked.

“Is the serial number filed off that one, like it is on the one I found?” Hunt asked. Jayden inspected the gun before answering. “Sure is. Just like the VIN number was gone from that sweet El Camaro I used to have.”

“Your taste in cars it what concerns me the most about that statement.”

“Hey, you two — over here!” At the sound of Maddy’s voice they broke off their conversation and looked farther into the camp, where Maddy stood in an open, grassy area in the middle of a circle of ruined tents. They trotted over to her, where she stood next to a wide pit that had been dug into the Earth. A couple of shovels, one of their handles broken, lay alongside a rock-hammer lay in the open hole.

“They tried to excavate something, it looks like. At the very least, they wanted to see what lay beneath the top layer of soil.”

Hunt peered into the hole, where a flat layer of exposed dead coral, limestone, lay exposed.

“Not only that,” Maddy said, “but this isn’t the only pit they dug.” She pointed farther away in the campsite. “There are at least two more that way.”

“Let’s check them out,” Hunt said, moving off toward the other freshly dug pits. Maddy snapped off a photo of the current pit and then she and Jayden joined Hunt at the next nearest one. It looked much like the other one, with one important exception.

“Oh my goodness!” Maddy exclaimed, looking down inside it. “Is that….could it be?”

Both Jayden and Hunt stayed on the rim of the pit while she climbed down into it. The object of interest was white and tapered, protruding from the dusty limestone.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it looks like an elephant tusk,” Hunt said.

Maddy’s voice echoed off the bottom of the pit since she couldn’t bear to turn away from the amazing find. “Not elephant,” she shouted, “but wooly mammoth! Oh, I really shouldn’t be doing this, but look!”

Jayden gawked at the white tusk as Maddy began to tug at it where it disappeared into the coral. “Wooly mammoth? You mean, like those big hairy elephants that went extinct….how long ago?” He and Hunt slid down into the pit to give her a hand.

“It’s been documented that mammoths still existed 10,00 years ago.”

“And Atlantis flourished about 11,000 years ago,” Hunt pointed out as he put an arm on Maddy’s leg to steady her while she worked at extracting the gargantuan tusk.

“Did you know,” Jayden said, his voice brimming with childlike enthusiasm, “that wooly mammoths were alive when the great pyramids of Egypt were being built?”

Maddy looked up from the pit. “But not in the same place.”

“If this was Atlantis,” Hunt said, waving an arm around the Cuban island, “then there were mammoths roaming around Atlantis?”

“I like to picture Atlantean hunters riding them,” Jayden said, staring at the partially unearthed tusk. “That’s what I would have done.”

“No doubt,” Hunt said. “But even with this impressive find, it seems like we’re getting farther away from Atlantis, not closer. In the Bahamas we actually found a gold pyramid. Here we’ve got an animal tusk. Not to mention, whoever was camped here — Treasure, Inc. or someone else — didn’t think it was worth coming back to after they left in a hurry.”

Maddy again looked up from the tusk to answer. “This looks like a pretty standard camp to me — either archaeology or maybe paleontology. Except for the guns,” she said with a frown.

“Could be that a regular archaeology or paleontology team was working here, and just like with what happened to your team in Giza, they got run off by Treasure, Inc,” Jayden offered. “They seem to monitor important dig sites around the world.”

“The number of spent shell casings around here seems to bear that out,” Hunt agreed.

Maddy suddenly took off her pack and removed from it the rolled up scroll. Once again she unfurled it.

“It’s like that thing is a Harlequin Romance novel or something — you just can’t get enough of it!” Jayden quipped.

“Seeing the mammoth made me remember something I read in here earlier that made no sense, but now it might…” Her eyes scanned the document’s Greek words.

“How about if Jayden and I see if we can get this thing out of the ground while you work with the manuscript,” Hunt suggested. Maddy nodded absentmindedly without taking her eyes from the scroll while Hunt and Jayden maneuvered into place around the mammoth tusk. The two men worked at chiseling more coral away from the tusk while Maddy pored over the manuscript, lips moving silently as she worked through the cryptic words.

Jayden chipped away at the coral with one of the rock-hammers left behind while Hunt pulled on the tusk. Jayden would break chunks of coral loose and Hunt would pull out another section of tusk, until they could see the base of the massive tooth.

“Hold up,” Hunt said, stooping to examine what they had uncovered. “Wow, it looks like it’s still attached to the skull!”

“Geez, what if the entire skeleton is in there?” Jayden exclaimed.

Maddy glanced up from the manuscript. “Oh my God. It is! I mean, it will be, you’ll see. This place was Atlantis. But they moved it and reestablished it in another location. And now I know where.”