WHERE IS ATLANTIS?

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4813, 25 February 1936, Page 2

WHERE IS ATLANTIS?

WHAT RECORDS SHOW. To-day no scientist supports the belief in a universal Deluge, but all agree that some appalling catastrophe must have given rise to the Flood legends common to both sides of the Atlantic, and that the Biblical account of Noah and his ark is based upon a historical occurrence, writes Dennis Wheatley in the “Daily Mail.” In 1819 volcanic eruptions and tidal waves devastated the eastern arm of the Indus, submerged 2000 miles of territory, and in 1775 half Lisbon was engulfed. It slid with the roar of thunder into the Atlantic, so that 60,000 people perished in six minutes.

Doubtless the Flood was some even greater tragedy of antiquity whereby, in one terrible day and night of earthquakes and tempest, a whole continent sank into the ocean and all but a few survivors of • a mighty race were swept into oblivion. Much evidence goes to show that this was Atlantis, an island as large as France and Germany together, which is said, until its destruction about 9500 8.C., to have occupied the centre of the North Atlantic.

Plato, writing about 400 8.C., gives a very circumstantial and detailed account of Atlantis as preserved in the archives of Ancient Egypt. He speaks of it as the cradle of civilisation where a great race protected from barbarian invaders by their natural ocean barriers, lived in peace and security for countless generations, developing from rude husbandmen to a state of culture surpassing even that of Greece in his own time.

Support is given to Plato’s story by the striking similarity of religions, social customs, and architecture of the ancient peoples living on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Central America and the Mediterranean basin are separated by 3500 miles of ocean, yet the cultures of Egypt and Peru, Phoenicia and Mexico unquestionably had a common origin. Race memory dies hard. The American Indians believed the gods inhabited an island in the open ocean to the east; the Mediterranean peoples believed the Island of the Blessed to be in the great ocean to the west. To-day “to go west” is still a European synonym for death.

That the golden temples of lost Atlantis still lie 1000 fathoms down somewhere south of the Azores .is a very real probabality, and now that Dr. William Beebe’s bathysphere has made descents to great ocean depths possibly their ruins may be discovered in our lifetime.