The Atlantis Problem

Always a keen explorer, many’s the morning my grandfather would wake me early with an excited shake of my shoulder.

 

“Wake up, Jed,” he would say, “wake up, there’s adventure out there, waiting for us.”

 

“What is it grandpa?” I’d ask.

 

“I’ve just found a rock that looks just like the face of Buzz Aldrin,” he’d say, “you must come down to the bay to see it.”  Or, another time, he woke me with the announcement that he’d seen a whale that had just swallowed whole 15 people and a car jack.

 

“How do you know?” I said, horrified at the barely credible loss of life. “Did you see it eat them? Did you hear them scream out in terror?”

 

“No, Jed,” he said, “but the whale’s so fat he must’ve eaten about 15 people.”

 

“And a car jack?”

 

“Yes, Jed, definitely a car jack, you can tell be the speed and trajectory of its spume.”

 

“Cor, you really know your whales,” I said. However, by the time I’d managed to get dressed and run down to the beach, the whale was gone and we were never able to verify the contents of its stomach.

 

However, one morning in particular stands out. I was not inconsiderably surprised to be woken by a figure in a frogman costume.

 

“Is that you, grandfather?” I asked.

 

“Yes Jed. It’s the lost city of Atlantis,” he said. “I’ve discovered it just offshore.”

 

“Are you sure?” I said. It seemed highly unlikely.

 

“Yes Jed. I’ve found the secret coordinates of Atlantis hidden amongst the island’s historic records. If you quickly get into your diving gear, we’ll run down to meet the boatman and get him to take us there.”

 

“What crazy scheme is it this time?” the boatman asked when he saw us.

 

“We’re going to visit the underwater kingdom of Atlantis,” my grandfather said.

“Nice day for it.”

 

“If you could take us to these coordinates and wait for us, I’ll make it worth your while.”

 

Despite mumbling that “I have a schedule, you know,” the boatman turned the boat round to the coordinates written in the historic document. “I’ll give you half an hour, no more, I run an essential ferry service, if you want to dash off to Atlantis every morning you’ll need to get your own private yacht.”

 

As an off-mainlander, I have always appreciated the joys of the sea. In the separate universe that exists beneath the waves, there are no schools, no councils, no governance, there are no memorandums, no regulations. The rules, such as they are, predate those of the jungle. The big fish eat the little fish, life continues much as it did long before man’s ancestor’s decided to stretch their legs down the evolutionary road.

 

On this occasion, however, I paid little attention to the beauty and dexterity of the underwater fauna and flora, I swam fast and deep and, after just a few minutes, I arrived in an underwater city, just as my grandfather had predicted. Unable to speak in our diving outfits, my grandpa gave me a thumbs up sign, as if to counter any doubts I might have that we’d ended up in the wrong place. If this wasn’t Atlantis it was certainly Atlantis’ twin town, as it was a huge expanse of long-abandoned buildings, clearly the drowned debris of what was once a great city. Nay, not just a city, a lost world, a civilisation with not a sole survivor, the great palaces now home to fishes, seaweed and a billion nameless underwater creatures.

 

The buildings were like none I have ever seen, great palaces, still standing despite many thousands of years of underwater burial. It was, I realised with a shock, the first city I’d ever visited and it was dead, dead for over 1,000 years, a ruin of a civilisation, an entire race of humanity literally swimming with the fishes.

 

In the centre of the city, rising high, high, high above the rest of the debris below, was a great temple, so big it took ten minutes to swim around, its crumbling walls carved with the faces of a million long-forgotten gods.

 

What became of these gods? I wondered. Did they die with their believers, or are they up there in Atlantis heaven, wondering why the prayers have dried up. Perhaps the new gods have moved in, our gods, the mainland gods, disrespecting all that came before, forcing the Atlantis into heaven’s basement, where they sit, without believers, in a damp, squalid bedsit, neither believed nor even thought about, even the credit for the universe they created seized by the new intake of assorted all-powerfuls.

 

I digress, but such is the nature of the memory, still all-consuming all these years later.

 

Eventually our time was up and we reluctantly swam back to the surface, where the boatman was tapping his watch and swearing. We changed into our land-attire as the boatman took us home, neither of us able to find so much as a word to describe what we had just experienced.

 

“Remember the temple, Jed?” was all grandpa managed to say, still breathless with excitement nearly an hour later.

 

“Yes,” I said.

 

“It’s where I want to be buried.  Will you make sure that when I die they bury me there Jed.”

 

“Yes grandpa,” I said. As a youth, though my head was full of words, my tongue tended to the monosyllabic.

 

It seemed a reasonable request to grant at the time, but a few years’ later when the time came for my grandfather’s request to be fulfilled I realised what I’d committed to.

 

When grandpa became ill, it was Alun’s father I ran to that morning whenI discovered his dead body, still and cold in bed, for once not waking me up with a mad scheme.

 

“Where should we bury him, Jed?” Alun’s father asked. As Priest of All Faith’s he was responsible for all burials that took place on the island, as well as any weddings, christenings and theoretically presiding over the coronation of any kings that happened to pass this way wanting to be crowned, although in truth kings tended to give our island a wide berth. 

 

“He wants to be buried in the temple at the centre of the lost city of Atlantis,” I said.

 

Alun’s father stared at me, as if not comprehending.  I detailed our previous adventure.

 

“We’ll never get that authorised, Jed,” Alun’s father said. “The mainland council take a dim view of burying people in lost underwater kingdoms. I’ve seen the minutes of council meetings, it’s practically all they talk about. Even the Transport Committee can’t keep focussed on building new roads, they’re constantly distracted by rumours of unwarranted burials in underwater worlds. ”

 

“Maybe we could win over a key member of the council to our side,” I said.

 

“How do you mean?” Alun senior asked.

 

I explained thus:

 

It so happened at around that time, that the island was being visited daily by a mainland councillor. Councillor Canute, who had been behind the council’s Turn Back the Tide Bill, was using the island as the base for his experiment to overcome the might of the ocean using purely the power of officialdom. Every day he would visit the island while the tide was out, leave an Order of Requisition on the beach, which commanded the sea to remain where it was and not intrude upon the beach.

 

“It’s a scheme that could be worth hundreds of billions of mainland pounds,” he boasted, when we approached him later that day. “The sea takes up too much room, all this straying back and forth with the tide. If the ocean would just keep still we could reclaim hundreds of miles of coastland and use it for building council houses, nuclear power plants, anything really. If I can persuade the ocean to obey council orders, think of what it would mean. I would become rich, rich beyond the dreams of man.”

 

“It can never work,” Alun’s father said. “The sea is a law unto herself, she cares little for the whims and rules of man. Why, the very mountains of the earth become nothing more than sand when the ocean is granted the luxury of time.”

 

“But we have learnt to tame the tide with dykes, dams, ditches, it is merely one more step to govern the ocean with rules and authority. If this works it could be the beginning of a new science: first the waves, then fire, then the very Earth itself. Legislators would literally become the gods we have always desired to be.

 

“So why, if you expect the ocean to obey the orders you’ve written down, are you standing here with a bucket?”

 

“Well so far the tide has come in so quickly that the sea hasn’t had time to read the Order of Requisition, let alone obey it. If I can delay the tide’s progress sufficiently for the sea to read the Order.”

 

“For the sea to ‘read’ the Order?” Alun’s father, it has to be said, sounded somewhat sceptical.

 

“Well, ‘read’ is a strong word. Perhaps ‘soak up its meaning’ would be better.”

 

Alun’s father was silent in response.

 

“Of course,” I said, “if there were more than one person delaying the tide with a bucket, the sea would have longer to ‘soak up’ the meaning of the order.”

 

“You’d help me?” said Councillor Canute. “Why, everyone else I’ve asked has laughed and called me a fool. Even my wife is refusing to so much as speak to me until I have ‘abandoned this foolish venture’. Indeed, it’s my wife that makes me come out here, to this little island, because she won’t let me try my scheme on the mainland. And yet here are you, a group of total strangers to me, offering to help me out.”

 

“Well, that’s what people do,” Alun’s father said, catching on to my idea, “help each other out. It’s like, if for example, we needed your help to authorise the burial of one of our islanders in an abandoned underwater kingdom …”

 

“Oh, that’s nothing, consider it done, consider it done. Look, we can’t stop to talk about underwater burials in mythical worlds now, the tide’s about to come in. Everybody fetch a bucket.”

 

Everybody fetched a bucket.

 

“On the order ‘bail’, I want everyone to start bailing out the beach.”

 

“Bail?” I asked. “I hadn’t come across the term before.”

 

“Scoop out the water.”

 

“The water? You mean the ocean?”

 

“Yes, scoop the ocean off the beach.”

 

I bailed a bucket of water. It was so full I could barely lift it.

 

“What do I do with it?”

 

“Throw it back in the ocean.”

 

“You want us to bail out the beach by scooping up the ocean, and then throwing it back in the ocean?”

 

“Of course,” the councillor said, “how else will the sea manage to soak up the Orders?”

 

“Just do what he say’s Jed,” Alun said, “he is an adult after all.”

 

Alun was right, of course. There’s never any point a child questioning the wisdom of an adult’s latest mad idea. You’d have more luck holding back the tide itself with nothing more than half a dozen buckets and an official piece of paper.

 

The team of bucketeers worked hard and gutsily, but in no time at all the sea was up to my waist and showed no sign of stopping to read the Order of Requisition.

 

“We’ll have to give up,” Alun’s father said. “Look, the two lads are nearly drowned.”

 

Reluctantly the councillor conceded defeat.

 

“Thanks for your efforts,” he said. He was, in spite of the great failure of everything he’d aspired to, in seemingly good cheer, perhaps happy to have failed as a team, rather than on his own. He merrily signed the paper authorising grandpa’s burial and we rushed down to meet the boatman.

 

“Atlantis again!” was his only reaction. I was worried that I had misremembered the coordinates, but of course the boatman remembers every journey.

 

On that particular day, alas, my mother was unwell and though she came with us this far, she stayed on the boat, feeling that she was ‘not up to an underwater kingdom.’ Alun’s father performed a short service on the boat, before myself, Alun, his father and the boatman all donned diving gear and swam down into the water with the coffin.

 

As before we were in awe at the beauty of the lost kingdom, but with oxygen short and a funeral to get through, we dallied not, heading straight for the temple. We found a suitable tomb, empty bar for a few fish, which we shooed away, and lay my grandpa inside.

 

Alun’s father mimed a brief service and, with oxygen running short, we returned to the surface.

 

I visit his grave when I can, though of course it isn’t straightforward, the boatman complains at any alteration to his schedule and I know I must retain the secret of the kingdom’s location less it become nothing more than a tourist attraction for mainlanders with nothing better to do that swim about its ruins, annoying the local fishes.