Water world: Fact or fable?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/05/2015 (4138 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mark Adams sometimes has his head in the clouds, but the heaven he’s seeking is very much down to earth.

The goal of his latest book — a delightful mix of scholarship, humour and travelogue — is to try to prove a sunken lost city exists, an underwater metropolis that has baffled the world ever since an ancient Greek philosopher said it vanished beneath the ocean waves, but didn’t say where.

And although he doesn’t mention it, it’s easy to guess that Adams would be doing cartwheels in paradise if he could do what nobody else has been able to — find the place.

The elusive piece of real estate is called Atlantis, and in Adams’ scintillating hands it is a fascinating, fun exploration recounted with élan, an ease that suggests he writes without giving a whit whether he impresses you or not. And that’s kind of relaxing.

Not so for Adams. He needs an athletic mind to bounce from fact to fable, from non-fiction to fallacy, from fabrication to folklore, from fixation to philosophy in a dizzying search of myriad beliefs and speculations about this city under water that, fittingly, would make anybody’s head swim.

It was the super-smart Plato who started the argument 2,000 years ago. He talked in his writing about a place he called Atlantis, drowned in the ocean by petulant gods because it upset them. Most scholars of language and history have had no trouble labelling the story fiction, although Plato himself is said to have said it was true.

We might have heard nothing of it from Adams except for questions that intrigued him: If there is no lost city, why is an army of pseudo-scientists, amateur scholars, weekend sleuths, self-taught archaeologists and, yes, oddballs (some of whom would have trouble finding their car keys, let alone Atlantis) continuing to look for it? Why have so many of them dedicated their lives to finding it?

Plato provides lots of clues, but none about location.

Adams’ two-year quest was to travel the world talking to these people along with notable archaeologists, anthropologists and philosophers. Examining their evidence is a rollicking, sometimes-irreverent ride through everything from legitimate scholarship and science to eccentricity and balderdash — from conversations with a renowned geophysicist in Athens to a visit to Minnesota and the library of a dead so-called Atlantologist, whose conduct would have been charitably described as peculiar (but not as bizarre as the Nazis who went looking for Atlantis in the 1930s).

When Adams visits three prominent sites speculated to be the location of Atlantis — Malta, Greece and Morocco — it’s clear by then that he hopes the city does exist, and he’s a cheerleader for its proponents. But this doesn’t change him into a preacher — if anything, he’s self-deprecating about it. The joy in his journey remains.

Discovering the underwater Atlantis is such an enormous challenge that, by comparison, it makes finding a needle in a haystack a sure thing even for someone with a white cane. Three-quarters of the world is ocean, and so far humans have only examined three per cent of it.

The conventional belief, meanwhile, is that Atlantis isn’t a real place but an allegory and therefore has about as much chance of existing as a television evangelist who doesn’t ask for money.

But Adams’ enthusiasm for the idea is so engaging that the fabled city seems to come alive in his narrative, rise from the ocean depths to shake off the water that has hidden it so well, and reveal itself in classical Grecian style — magisterially sited, richly ornamented, built to impress the weak and embrace the strong, stone structures of unconquerable power and nobility.

So after all his world travels and investigation, does Adams think Plato’s lost and sunken city exists or ever did?

He’s not being coy when he says it all gets down to this: Atlantis is either a likely true story with some flaws in it, or a likely flawed story with some truth in it. The first says odds are Atlantis is real, the second says odds are it’s isn’t.

Adams makes up his mind on page 285.

 

Barry Craig is always losing cities owing to his lousy sense of direction.