Atlantis and the Silver City (15 page)

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IMAGE
14)
The fruit of the carob tree
.

The carob tree is one of the most common in the Algarve, often seen alongside country roads. It needs little or no attention. In fact, it is more prevalent there than anywhere else in Europe or the Middle East, indicating that it could well be native to the area.

Carobs have become a valuable, much-sought-after crop. An extract from them is used for a diverse range of products, including white chocolate and a thickener for fruit drinks, as well as in the beauty and ointment industries.

Algarve country folk still make a kind of flour from them, used in baking certain types of breads and cakes. Carobs are also used to brew a potent alcoholic liquor. These products are found on sale at regional fairs, and restaurants offer cakes and puddings made with the flour for desserts.

Overall, that sounds pretty much as Plato described.

Finally, Plato specifies a good supply of timber (clue 43): “There was an abundance of wood for carpenters’ work.” The mountains mentioned earlier are known to have been originally covered in indigenous trees, much used for boatbuilding by the Carthaginians, Romans, and, later, the Moors and the Portuguese. Today’s elderly Algarveans remember the rivers being used to float timber down to the shipyards for this very purpose. The museum on Portimão’s quay has an area devoted to this industry and its traditions.

Animals

In clues 44 to 47, Plato indicates Atlantis had many tame and wild animals, particularly elephants. There was plenty of food for them, including those that lived in lakes, marshes, rivers, mountains, and plains. Note the word “tame.” It implies that animals were domesticated on Atlantis long before their introduction has been generally acknowledged by historians. The control of herds of cattle would have required the prior taming of horses and dogs. Again, this is at odds with the established view; horses were thought to have been first tamed around 4500
B.C.
on the steppes in central Asia. This, however, ignores such visual evidence as engravings on bone and antlers found in caves in southwest France depicting horses with straps and bridles. These have been carbon-dated to between 10,000 and 14,000
B.C.
Drawings in another cave have been found in La Marche in France, also of horses with bridles and straps.
⁵⁴
It would appear that Plato’s comments stand up in the light of the most recent evidence and horses were being used by man well before the demise of Atlantis. Coincidentally, the Portuguese Lusitanian breed is recognized to be very old, and the animals are much sought after for their temperament and intelligence.

The story is the same for dogs. There is mounting evidence that they have been man’s companion for a very long time. One touching example was an ancient grave, dated to a period long preceding the end of Atlantis, found to contain a human together with a puppy.
⁵⁵

Unfortunately, as a consequence of civilization and competition with man, many wild animals have now been eliminated in southwest Iberia. The process is still continuing; but 11,500 years ago, the area would have been rich in wildlife, including elephants. As elsewhere in southern Europe by that time, these would have been mainly of the pygmy variety.
⁵⁶
They were also prevalent on the large Mediterranean islands. Like numerous other wild animals, they had been driven inexorably south seeking refuge from the Ice Age and the slowly encroaching glaciers. Plato would almost certainly have been aware that elephants between one and two meters tall were still to be found in Sicily in his era, as they were not extinct there until the first century
A.D.
Elephants were also known to roam northern Morocco, itself almost certainly part of Atlantis if my theory is correct. They would inevitably have crisscrossed the original land bridge between Gibraltar and Africa.

I know of an elephant’s tusk in a private collection that was exposed on an Algarve beach after a particularly violent storm. It has not been tested to ascertain its age, so the following explanations are possible:

•  It could be from the period when elephants roamed the area.

•  The famous Carthaginian general Hannibal was noted for the elephants he trained and used in warfare to terrify the enemy. Imagine the horror of suddenly facing a herd of huge, rampaging beasts you had never encountered before while armed only with spears, tridents, or swords. It was an ingenious ploy and must have caused mayhem. An Algarve legend has it that, when recalled from a campaign in Africa to fight the Romans, Hannibal returned, complete with elephants, sailing via the Algarve and establishing a port at Alvor called Porto Hanibalis. It is said that he exercised the elephants and trained them for his famous epic trek across the Alps by walking them into the mountains to a spa called Caldas de Monchique, where they slaked their thirst before returning to
the coast. The beach where the tusk was found is next to Alvor; it could have been from one of his herd. Incidentally, Anibal is a not-uncommon boy’s Christian name in the Algarve.

•   It could have been from a Portuguese caravel, an oceangoing boat, returning from Africa a few hundred years ago with ivory as part of its cargo, shipwrecked in a storm.

We will never know unless the tusk is carbon-dated.

Interestingly, in 1967 an issue of
Science
magazine reported that a research ship had recovered mastodon and mammoth teeth two to three hundred miles off the Portuguese coast, indicating that the area could have sunk alarmingly. The earthquake in 1755 alone resulted in the seabed sinking over a three hundred–kilometer radius, well within range of the mammoth finds. The combined subsidence caused by the many other huge quakes in the last twelve thousand years could have been considerable.

One of the animals left that would still have been common up to a few centuries ago, the wild boar, was hunted to virtual extinction but has now been given the freedom to rapidly repopulate the mountains. It is increasingly foraging farther south and wreaking havoc overnight in holiday villa gardens. Deer have been reintroduced, and game birds such as the red-legged partridge are prevalent. Mixed herds of goats and sheep are still a common sight, complete with marshalling shepherds and foraging over wide areas.

The wild Iberian lynx, common in the mountains as recently as a hundred years ago, is now almost extinct.
⁵⁷
It is the most threatened species of wild cat in the world. Sterling efforts are being made to save it at special breeding centers in Spain and the Algarve.

It is little appreciated that many of the African wild animals originated in Europe. They include, for example, rhinos, giraffes, and antelopes. They migrated south over land bridges that once existed between countries and continents—like Gibraltar and Morocco.

Clue 99 refers to sacred bulls roaming free in the temple and, as part of an alternate fifth- and sixth-year ceremony, one of them was captured by the ten rulers with only staves and nooses, then sacrificed. That sounds very much like a Plato adornment. The detail given is just too fanciful
and it would have been unlikely that bulls would be permanently roaming free—with the inevitable excrement—amongst so much pristine adornment. No one would have been able to worship freely without being in fear for his life. Would you bend over, eyes closed, to pray to heaven, given a fair chance that a sharp horn would be planted in your backside, hoisting you there? Nevertheless, it does have echoes in parts of the current proceedings in Portugal’s bull rings. The poor bull is tormented by a skilled toreador on horseback, who repeatedly pierces its neck with barbs. Eventually the bull, its neck running with blood and somewhat winded, is allowed a brief respite while a team of unarmed, colorfully attired men, the
Forcados
, enters the ring on foot. Their leader starts to goad the bull into charging him while the rest of the team members line up behind him. It is barbaric, but an incredibly brave and riveting spectacle, as the bloodied bull thunders into a full head-down charge. The
Forcado
stands his ground and literally throws himself on the bull’s head, hands on his hips, letting the horns through the space between his arms and sides. The bull tries to toss him, but he usually clings on, limpetlike, often almost upside down with his legs flying in the air. All but one of the remaining team then pile in behind to support him, forcing the bull to a standstill. The last
Forcado
runs around the back and anchors the animal by pulling its tail. The men then disperse and the bull is finally released. (
SEE IMAGES
15
A
, 15
B
,
AND
15
C
IN THE PHOTO INSERT
.)

It would not be beyond possibility for the man with his arms around the bull’s horns to let go as the bull tosses its head. He would go somersaulting back as depicted in illustrations of Minoan ceremonies.

Unlike in Spain, in Portugal the bull is not killed in the ring but is put down after the fight if he is badly injured.

Plato also mentions marshes and their wild life. Repeating clue 46: “… for as there was provision for all other sorts of animals, both for those which live in lakes and marshes and rivers.…” Large areas north of Cádiz and east of Huelva, in Spain, are now national parks. Not swamps, they can more accurately be described as wetlands. Wild life—including a few lynx—is left in peace there. In the Algarve, huge areas around river estuaries and stretching well inland were once marshy or underwater. As in Spain, many of them are now protected sanctuaries, havens for wading birds. Others
have been drained and reclaimed, one example being the famous Penina Golf Course, designed by legendary English golfer Sir Henry Cotton. Thousands of eucalyptus trees were planted there to help drain the land. The course is not far from the 3,500
B.C.
necropolis at Alcalar mentioned in Chapter Three. In the days when the latter was constructed, the estuary from Alvor would have reached far inland, probably encompassing Penina.

Conclusion

So … more clues click into place.

The inescapable conclusion is that the conditions in southwest Iberia are exactly as Plato described. It’s as though the ancient Greek philosopher were a modern-day travel writer. His descriptions match so well, it’s as if he were filing a report on the region for a weekend color supplement.

The same climate now prevails and the fruits, pulses, and vegetables he writes about can all be found today in any Algarve or southern Spanish market, even down to the bountiful chestnuts.

They would, however, all—including those elephants—have needed water with efficient storage methods and an effective irrigation system. Plato was very specific about it. I need to investigate, look at water sources, and see if some tangible proof has survived more than 11,600 turbulent years.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Refining the Target

I
n clues 93 to 96, Plato describes an incredibly large canal/reservoir that completely encircled the vast Atlantis plain. “The depth, and width and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to a depth of a hundred feet and its breadth was a stadium [185 meters] everywhere. It was carried around the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length. It received the streams which came down from the mountains and winding round the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea. Farther inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea. The canals … brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal to another, and to the city.”

Standing on a road bridge, as I looked to either side, a shiver ran down my spine. To say I was skeptical about Plato’s grand canal surrounding the plain was an understatement; but, confound it, here was proof that he might not have been embellishing that much after all. Stretching away on both sides was what must once have been a wide canal. It was now only a
few meters deep, due presumably to the buildup of silt and earth. Its walls were reinforced on both sides and the base was now just fertile soil, used for agriculture. Westward, it continued until it would have joined the estuary of the river Arade and emptied into the sea. Eastward, it trundled on in front of Estômbar, a typical Algarve hill village dominated by a church at the top with houses spilling down steep, narrow streets, looking like a wedding-cake confection. Once past it, the “canal” disappeared into the countryside. The local school was built on part of its bed. (
SEE IMAGE
16
IN THE PHOTO INSERT
.)