THE FALL OF ATLANTIS

When the flood began, sweeping in green ripples across the misty continent, M. cried out to God for help but found none. He climbed the interlocking branches of his hut. Though the fog hung thick—as always—he still could see the water pouring in on every side, filling the valley like a bowl. Clutching vines on his roof, he watched the storm clouds churn.

Rain fell softly at first—then in lashing squalls.

He considered fleeing to the temple but knew at once it would be futile. Already his entire farm lay submerged, ruined. He would be drowned before he reached the first gate. Then he remembered the needleboat he’d carved from the trunk of a fallen gum tree. Unfortunately, he’d never quite finished the boat; it would be more accurate to call the object a hull-shaped log. Still, it was hollow, waxed, and buoyant. M. climbed down from his hut and waded toward the workshop.

The water inside rose to his waist. He’d stored the boat in the rafters, so he hoisted a limb he found bobbing in a corner and raked its leaves against one end of the hull. The boat turned, tilted, then plunged into the water. M. seized it by the handles he’d fashioned on either side and wrestled it to the door. Water now lapped at his ears.

Outside, he slung one arm around the boat’s midsection and hugged it to his body. Luckily, as a precaution against nesting animals, he’d covered the open seat with tanned elk hide, then sealed the edges with resin. He gripped both handles, one in each fist, and prayed that he might survive the storm.

The valley filled so quickly that M. felt in his gut the momentum of his ascent. Within seconds, all trees had vanished, swallowed by the rising tide. Crashing cataracts poured over the mountains. As M. drifted closer, carried toward the cliffs on an accelerating current, his boat began to twirl. At last he drew too close—and a thundering waterfall hammered him below the surface.

Solitude. Even as a boy, in the tiled courtyard of the primary academy, he’d preferred his own company, tracing with limpid steps the zigzag shadow of the perimeter wall. Though no one doubted his intelligence, his parents and teachers alike fretted over his indifference to youthful scholarship.

When he reached his thirteenth year—the age when children received their vocational academy assignments—M. learned that he would be trained in the agricultural arts, a common and rather undistinguished fate. He alone recognized its true merit.

During the next few years, as he studied soil composition, grain harvesting, livestock breeding, and the genetic secrets of the plantain, his classmates kept a quizzical distance. His abstracted nature, which previously had resembled simple boyish awkwardness, now grew more pronounced and—because apparently persisted in too long—more troubling. M. remained unfazed.

As soon as he graduated, he used the modest legacy he’d received from his father to buy a plot of land, and there he built a hut, a workshop, and a crooked row of sheds. Then he seeded seven fields of wheat and oats—along with a few plantain trees—and settled into a new life.

Suddenly M. felt himself ejected from the water, catapulted skyward. Still gripping the boat, he cartwheeled through the air, gasping for breath. Then he splashed down again. The wind whistled sideways, blowing rain in horizontal sheets and raising high, choppy waves. M. grew queasy as he rode the undulating swells. Then a massive wall of water rose up before him, curling green foam at its crest. Awestruck, M. watched its advance. When the wave collapsed on top of him, roaring with fury, its crushing weight drove him deep into icy darkness.

Among the reasons he’d chosen this land was that it lay in sight of a temple whose priest he hoped would accept his petition for special instruction. He set out one morning and soon strolled down the temple’s cavernous central gallery, flanked on all sides by huge pillars supporting vaulted arches of stone.

The priest stood before the altar. M. knelt, closed his eyes—and was immediately lifted out of his body and transported to a purely spiritual region. Here, without words, the priest communicated with M., telling him that his wish for instruction would be granted, that he must practice the utmost discretion with what he learned, and that he should continue to let the prompting of his own heart guide his future progress.

Thereafter, M. rarely visited the temple. He harrowed, plowed, sowed, and harvested—while from his secret cloister across the valley the priest imparted his deepest knowledge. In this way M. passed several years in a kind of dream state. Then, suddenly, the temple priest died. M. knew that his instruction remained incomplete—but had no inkling how it could possibly continue.

M. surfaced again, more gently this time. The boat, bottom-up, emerged like a dolphin—then M. appeared beside it, choking and coughing. His whole body ached with fatigue, but he managed to hold his head just above the water. The wind had subsided, though rain continued to fall. M. flipped the boat over, dragged himself up across the seat, and swung one leg around. Lying prone along the length of the hull, he passed out. The boat bobbed.

Then one morning M. became aware that a second priest now spoke to him—a man he’d never met before who lived in the capital city far to the south. Somehow this priest knew of M. and his predicament. In the eyes of the world, he certainly ranked higher than had the first priest—whom he clearly regarded as a kind of provincial flunky—but his knowledge of the mysteries lacked the subtlety and depth of his predecessor’s. He seemed more interested in wielding power than in deepening his understanding.

Nevertheless, M. knew that he couldn’t simply break off his training in the middle—and even recognized, ruefully, that this new priest might bestow a disciplinary rigor that until now he’d allowed himself to evade. He resolved to persevere.

As time went on, M. gained perspective on the wider world beyond his bucolic retreat—and came to see the second priest as a representative from a civilization on the brink of collapse. Not only were people exploiting technological advances to perpetrate savage violence, they had also turned their impulse to worship away from everything but themselves. A growing trend among the wealthy was to build a private chapel inside the public temple and to install on its altar an idol, carved from orichalcum, resembling its owner. The suzerain wallowed in corruption.

M. knew that this fever for destruction could lead only to cultural suicide. Sitting alone on the roof of his hut, he gazed out at the fog-shrouded treetops. Reluctantly, he began to recognize himself as the last repository of the ancient Atlantean tradition, a seed prepared for a future he could hardly imagine.

When M. awoke, night had fallen. He lay for a moment without moving and sensed that the storm was over. Gingerly, he sat up. The sea—for it was now a sea—stretched away from him on every side, flat and calm and glassy. He glimpsed no sign of land. Milky moonlight spilled over the water, and when M. looked up, he saw for the first time in his life a sky without a trace of mist—a cavernous black vault glittering with stars.