Lost Continent

Without warning Dorehill leaned across the table. ‘Close your eyes.’

I was startled into obeying.

‘Don’t think before replying. Tell me who you are.’

And, just for a second or two, nothing came. It was as if I was drifting in a fog. Who am I? Where am I from? How did I get here?

The answers quickly loomed out of that pearly fog. I saw my own face, at age six and sixteen and thirty-six; my parents, our somewhat dilapidated family house in Nantucket; my study, my books; Mary’s sweet face, the kids, our home here in Tangier. It all came together, a mosaic of images, a tidy narrative.

Too tidy? Was that Dorehill’s point?

He was watching me, those desperate eyes bright. ‘You see? You see? How do you know your past is real? How do you know that everything you think you remember wasn’t conjured into existence a couple of seconds ago, knitted into place for you, a—a tapestry to cover up the holes in the wall? Don’t you think it’s at least possible?…’

It had been nearly twenty years since I had last seen Peter Dorehill, at our graduation together. Now, in the cool brightness of a caf'e on Tangier’s beach promenade, we sipped mint tea and appraised each other, as old acquaintances will.

The years had made Dorehill gaunt, as if the softer parts of his personality had worn away. I had soon learned he was still full of words, words, words, just as he always had been. But I detected something in his eyes, about his stance, as if he was wound up to explosive tension.

Knowing his history, I thought I recognized the signs. It seemed to me he looked—as my father used to say of my uncle—‘white-knuckle sober’. Perhaps he was finding Islamic Morocco trying.

But, intense or not, I could see no chain of reasoning, no string of words which might lure a man like Peter Dorehill into the murky solipsistic waters of Lost Continent mythmaking.

‘It began with geology,’ he told me. ‘My chosen profession after Stanford, if you remember. Three decades ago—in October 1962—savage earth tremors were experienced around a great half-ring of land, from Scandinavia, down through the Russian ports of Leningrad and Lvov and Odessa, on through Alexandria and the north African coast—even as far as Tangier, where we sit. Many of these quakes were in regions far from any geological fault. All of them occurred within minutes of each other. And at the same time, tsunamis marched across the Atlantic to smash against the east coast of America.’

I nodded. I remembered all this, of course; we had both been ten years old at the time. ‘And this is what you have been working on.’

‘Not exactly.’ He grinned, rueful. ‘You know me, John: an unanswered question is an endless, nagging irritation. I’ve always been fascinated by the puzzle of that sudden chthonic jolt. How did it happen? Why then, and in those specific sites? What could have triggered it all? And so on.

‘But, after taking my master’s, I found that nobody was working seriously on the problem. This was just a dozen or so years after the event, remember. Oh, the geological records were there to inspect—there had been no fast answers; there was still work to be done—but even so, it struck me that people had turned away from the mystery, had lost interest. I couldn’t understand it. But I got nowhere fast. Forced to earn a crust, I took a job with an oil company.’

‘But you kept digging.’

‘You see, you do know me! I wondered if it might be fruitful to look a little wider. I wanted to know what else was going on in that autumn of 1962.’

I said dryly, ‘I seem to remember that the news of the period was somewhat dominated by missiles in Cuba.’

He smiled and pushed back a straggling grey hair from his startlingly high forehead. (Why are we always so shocked by the ageing of friends from youth?) ‘Correct—and maybe significant. In that month virtually every commentator was predicting nuclear war—a war which was averted only by some adroit diplomacy, and a large pinch of luck. But I went further than that. I looked at trends in other disciplines—such as yours, John. I consulted newspaper records. I even dug around in the drugstore tabloids.’

‘What were you looking for?’

‘I didn’t know—I suspected I wouldn’t know until I found it. I sensed a pattern, out there somewhere… It’s hard to be more clear than that. All I did find were more unanswered questions. For instance there was a rash of stories of UFO visitations and alien abductions.’

‘Peter, there are always UFO stories—’

‘Not in such numbers, and with such consistency. Anyhow there’s more—much of which ought to interest a historian like yourself, John.’

My smile froze a little at that, but I kept listening.

With diligent (if probably amateurish) research he had, he claimed, uncovered clusters of new folk tales.

‘Shiite imams in Algeria told me how the Trumpet of Israfil sounded over the northern ocean—how Iblis, Satan, rose and resumed his defiance of God’s great command: Be. The Orthodox Christians of the Russian coast spoke of a recent return by Satan, who they call the Murderer of the Beginning. Even modern practitioners of the old Norse religions whispered stories of an irruption of Ginnungagap, the primeval void, into the modern world.

‘These fragmentary tales were expressed in the differing mythic structures of local populations. But they were all alike. And I found them scattered in a great circle, running along the North African coast, through the Middle East and Russia, as far as Scandinavia.’

I said reluctantly, ‘The same as the 1962 quake arc.’

His eyes gleamed. ‘You see the pattern. I felt I was skirting some enormous, hidden event, revealed not so much by evidence as by a notable absence. I believe these tales are fragments of recollection—smashed, scattered, broken—like the ring of debris that surrounds an impact crater.’ He eyed me. ‘You think I’m babbling.’

I forced a smile. ‘Peter, I’m making no judgement.’ But in fact my heart was sinking.

Because we had already moved from geology to mythmaking, and I suspected I was about to be introduced to his Lost Continent theory.

I suppose I felt a lingering fondness for Dorehill. I hadn’t forgotten Stanford and our late-night bull sessions, fuelled by bad food, whiskey, dope and fellowship, when we had talked about anything and everything.

Aliens, for instance—or the lack thereof, a favourite bullshit topic.

Where is everybody? Peter would ask, lecturing as usual, younger, wispy-bearded, hairier, almost as intense. Why isn’t there evidence of extraterrestrial civilization all around us? They should be here by now. Even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their mighty ruins all around us…

Perhaps we were being anthropomorphic, we would say. Perhaps They were nothing like us—not recognizable as life forms at all—or perhaps They were pursuing projects we can’t even imagine. But even if we had no idea what Their great structures are for, we would surely recognize them as artificial. And so on.

But it was always Peter who came up with the wackiest notions. They might simply be invisible. The physicists talk of mirror matter, of an elusive unseen twin for every particle in nature. Are there mirror stars? Are there planets inhabited by mirror organisms, invisible to our senses? Do Their ships of mirror matter slide through our solar system even now?… It looked as if he hadn’t changed.

But I had. College was long ago and far away, an intense confinement where seeming friendships could be forged between basically incompatible types, friendships that fell apart pretty rapidly once we were all let out into the real world. I had kept in touch with few of my friends and acquaintances from those days—and certainly not Peter Dorehill.

So it was guilt as much as friendship, I guess, that kept me in my seat in that sunlit caf'e.

It was still harmless enough. We talked around the parameters of the mythos: of tales of rich island-nations whose powerful conquering princes became wicked and impious, until their lands were swallowed up by the sea.

The conventional explanation of Lost Continent myths is well known. Almost certainly, if there is anything in such legends at all, they stem from real events—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like—enough to shatter civilizations. Such half-memories are handed down through the ages, mutating and elaborating as they go. In later times, efforts are often made to identify the wonderful land with an actual country, to no avail, of course.

All of which is a rational, logical justification of the archetypical legends, deriving from a very human reaction to devastating, barely comprehended events.

But Peter Dorehill had another explanation.

He closed his eyes. ‘Imagine a great and ancient civilization. Its territories are encrusted with fine buildings, works of art, libraries full of learning.

‘And now, imagine a race of beings. Beings from another world.’

Though I kept carefully still, he sensed my reaction. His eyes snapped open like camera shutters.

‘This is an outrageous hypothesis,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way to express it. Just hear me out. You always were a good listener, John. And as you listen, try to imagine how you would prove me wrong.’

‘Aliens,’ I prompted. ‘Extraterrestrials.’

‘Yes. They have powers and ambitions, perhaps, far beyond human imagining—and yet They are aesthetes who share some of our own conceptions of beauty. In particular, They take great pleasure in the ancient glories of this old country.

‘But now They see that it is all soon to be destroyed. Perhaps it will be devastated by some natural disaster, a volcanic eruption, a quake or a flood. Or perhaps it is threatened by humanity—by war, or the collapse of empire. The specifics do not matter. What does matter is what They do about it.

‘They come to a decision.

‘It is an operation as simple and delicate as removing a prized vase from the grasp of a foolish child. They carefully detach the old country from the Earth, and remove it and its treasures to—another place, a museum perhaps, safe from humanity and the vagaries of our untamed planet.

‘But They face a dilemma. They will not submit Earth’s inhabitants to the trauma of such a display of power. The operation has to be performed stealthily.’

I raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Stealthily?’

‘What a tremendous, monstrous act! They must distort all records mentioning, however obliquely, the lost lands. Histories have to be truncated and rewritten—They must force entire cultures to forget their roots—They have to suppress our very memories of the place.

‘The operation itself is a—a cauterization. But it is hardly clean. Nothing is without flaw, in our mortal universe… As the amputation is made, just as the Earth shudders, so the mass psyche reacts. We are bereft, and we seek expression.’

‘Ah. Hence the volcanism and so forth associated with such events. They are a consequence, not a cause.’

‘Yes—’

‘And hence the Lost Continent legends.’

‘Yes. Hence the legends. They are memories, you see—half-erased, inchoate, seeking expression…’

As kindly as I could, I pointed out, ‘But you have no proof.’

‘It is in the nature of the event itself that proof is erased.’

‘Then the argument’s circular.’

‘Yes,’ he said, with a kind of strained patience. ‘Of course that’s true. But that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? And think about it. How would it be to live through such an event, to witness such a—a miracle? Would we even be able to perceive it? We evolved as plain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, and our sensoriums are conditioned to the hundred-mile scale of Earth landscapes. And if we aren’t programmed to register something, we simply don’t see it…’

And on, and on.

I was growing irritated, and not a little bored.

Although I couldn’t quite see where 1962 fit into all this, I had heard Dorehill’s ‘theory’ before—versions of it anyhow. As a professional historian I am pestered by believers in such tales—which often allow the marvellous inhabitants of the lost lands to live on, at the Earth’s poles or under the sea, casually meddling with history—tales usually embroidered with ‘proof’ concerning Aboriginal art or the building of South American temples—and all these believers are more or less like Dorehill: each obsessed with a single idea, seeing nothing of the greater themes of history, vague about or even ignorant of the meaning of evidence and proof.

Dorehill’s was indeed a circular argument, his ‘evidence’ nothing but a check of internal consistency. Like most such fantastic notions his claims could never be verified or debunked, for they made no predictions which could be tested against fresh data. I imagined him hawking his notions around the academic community, gradually losing whatever reputation he once had, relying on favours and debts even to get a hearing. And now he had come to me.

But he saw my scepticism, and anger flared in his eyes, startling me.

‘Okay, forget the UFOs and fairy tales,’ he snapped. ‘Let’s talk about the blindness in your own speciality.’

I prickled. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What would you say is the most fundamental question facing modern historians?’

‘I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.’

‘The emergence question. Consider the history of America. Quite suddenly, in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you have the arrival of new populations around the coastal fringes of both northern and southern continents—English-speakers in Newfoundland and Virginia, French in Canada, Spanish in Mexico, Portuguese in South America—as if from nowhere, in a moment of historical time, with distinctive skin colours, cultures, technology, blood types, even different DNA signatures.’

I shrugged. ‘Arrival surely isn’t the right word. The new groups must have been separated from their parent populations by geographical or climatic barriers, and in isolation they rapidly diverged, physically and culturally.’

‘That’s the standard line. But, come on, John—look at the holes! Why such a dramatic series of emergences occur all around the world, in such a short period of time? And how can such similar linguistic and cultural groups have developed spontaneously on different continents—English, for instance, in North America, Africa, Australia?’

I was uneasy to be under attack in an area so far from my own speciality—which was, and is, Morocco’s Almoravide Empire of the eleventh century. ‘There are theories of linguistic convergence,’ I said uneasily. ‘Common grammars reflect the underlying structure of the human brain. It is a matter of neural hard-wiring—’

‘But if you actually observe them,’ he said sharply, ‘you’ll find that languages don’t converge. In fact languages drift apart—and at a fixed, measurable rate.

‘For example: suppose you have a land colonized by a group who pronounce the vowel in “bad”—what the phoneticians call RP Vowel 4—with the mouth more closed, so it sounds like “bed”. A few decades later, a new bunch of colonists arrive, but by now they have reverted to the open pronunciation. Well, the older settlers seek a certain solidarity against the new arrivals, and they retain their closed pronunciation—in fact they close it further. But that makes for confusion with RP3, as in “bed”. So that must move over, sounding more like “bid”, RP2, which in turn becomes still more closed, sounding like “bead”, RP1. This is what the linguists call a push-chain—’

I held up my hands. ‘Enough linguistics!’

He permitted himself a fairly straightforward grin. ‘All right. But my point is, you can trace such phonetic chains in the versions of English spoken in America, Canada—the example I gave you is from Australia. We know that the divergence of the English group of languages began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—there was a divergence, you see, not a convergence—just as the new populations emerged in Australia and America. It is as if there had been influxes of new settlers, interacting with the existing stock…’

‘Influxes from where?’

He eyed me. ‘John, be honest—I think that if you had never before heard your quaint theories of emergence and convergence you would dismiss them out of hand. What we are looking at is the result of colonization—wave after wave of it…’

Which was absurd, of course. I suppose I glared at him, unsympathetic.

He smiled, but his expression was cold, his gaze directed inward. ‘We make patterns,’ he said now. ‘It’s in our nature. Scatter a handful of coloured pebbles on the ground and we make a picture out of them. That’s what you historians do. Make pretty pictures out of pebbles…’

Now I had no idea what he was talking about. I had the awful feeling he was disintegrating, right in front of me. ‘Peter—’

He looked at me. I peered into his church-window eyes. ‘You see—I think it’s happened again.’

Even at college he was always the last to nurse another shot out of a dying bottle.

And it had gone on from there. When he’d been hospitalized briefly after a thirty-fifth birthday party bender—complete with drunk-driving car crash—there had been some communication among his old college buddies. Maybe we all felt a little responsible; some of us (not me) gathered around.

Dorehill said he wasn’t an alcoholic, clinically anyhow, and refused treatment. He gave up drinking, just like that, and had been sober for seven, eight years.

Sure. Except that my uncle, a recovering alcoholic in my own family, would have summed up that behaviour in one word. Denial.

I had to agree, having seen the pattern before. Dorehill might be dry, but he was still a problem drinker, to say the least. As he hadn’t been in a programme or sought counselling, he was at risk of relapse. And now here he was, sipping iced tea, wound up as tight as he could be, obsessing about 1962.

A dry drunk. White-knuckle sober.

None of which made him wrong, of course.

‘It was the war,’ he whispered. ‘Those damn missiles in Cuba. And the cockpit of the war would have been another ancient land—the mother of the newer colony nations, perhaps…’

He talked on, rapidly, fanatically, barely coherently—of a great tongue of land sliced away, of landlocked towns suddenly becoming ports, of anomalous salt concentrations in the ocean, of how the world’s rocks and oceans juddered like a bathtub struck with a hammer, of fragments of memories transmuted into new folk tales—of the adjustment of every human mind on the planet.

Solipsistic nonsense, of course. But as I listened, in the mundanity of that bright, bustling caf'e, it suddenly seemed to me that I was huddled in a circle of light, a circle that reached only a few feet, and beyond there was nothing but darkness, unmapped, unexplored, incomprehensible.

But then a waiter moved smoothly through the caf'e and opened windows; at once a cool, salty breeze from the ocean wafted into the room, breaking up the heavy mugginess of the afternoon air.

Once again I tried to be kind. ‘Look, Peter—you must see how this looks. I mean, where are these aliens of yours?’

His face was set, composed. ‘You haven’t been listening.’

‘Well, this isn’t 4000 BC. For all the limitations of our eyes and minds, what of our records? TV, films—a billion photographs in family albums… Are you trying to tell me that they were all changed?’ I shook my head, impatient with myself. ‘And then there’s your claim that our modern nations were born of colonies of this detached place. In that case its history, its culture must be utterly intertwined with ours. How could any force, no matter how powerful, detach one from the other? And what of Occam’s razor?’ I rapped the tabletop between us. ‘It is simpler to assume that the table is real than that there is a vast invisible machine which generates the illusion of the table. Just as when I consider my own memories—’

His lips quivered oddly, and that half-suppressed anger flared again. ‘So damn smug.’ But the anger faded as rapidly. ‘Ah, but you can’t help but think that way. We are such small creatures. Well, if nothing else, you are in at the birth of a new myth structure, John. How privileged you are.’ More emotions chased across his face—resentment, baffled curiosity, confusion. ‘You know, I sometimes wonder if it was necessary.’

‘What?’

‘The amputation. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to war after all.’

I felt awkward, remorseful. ‘Look, Peter, I’m sorry if—’

‘We might have muddled through, without Their interference. Maybe that was how it turned out, in some other universe.’ He abruptly drained his cup. ‘More tea?’

I’d had enough, of the tea and of Peter Dorehill. I got up to leave.

But his voice pursued me, out into the shining air of the beach front. ‘You and I were just ten years old,’ he said. ‘Ten years old, John, when They stuck Their fingers in our heads. What do you think about that?…’

A year after that last brief meeting, Peter Dorehill disappeared from view, theories and all, sliding off the face of the Earth like his purloined continent, presumed lost in a fog of alcohol. According to my uncle, dry drunks invariably lapse—and when they do, the fall is spectacular and destructive.

Still, the news saddened me.

On the day I heard about it I took a walk through Old Tangier, which is the medina, a walled Arab town, a maze of narrow alleys. I climbed to the Bordj el Marsa, the port battery which offers some of the best views of the city and its harbour. From there I followed the Bab el Bahr steps out of the old city to the port gates, and the beach promenade.

Well, how could I tell if anything I remembered corresponded to the truth? Occam’s razor is only a philosophical principle—a guideline, not a law. Was I an arrogant plains ape, assuming that what I was capable of seeing comprised everything there was to see—making up comforting stories from patterns in scattered bits of historical wreckage—clinging to simplistic principles to convince me the stories were true—complacently judging a theory by the theorist who delivered it?

But even if it was true—even if nothing anybody remembered before October 1962 was real—what was there to be done about it? That was the essential futility of Peter’s solipsism. He may have been right, but we must continue to behave as if it were not so. What else is there to do?

…Of course, I thought, that might be what They want me to think.

I smiled. I stared out over the enormous greyness of the ocean—the huge, misnamed Mediterranean, which stretches unbroken from North Africa to Scandinavia—and then I turned away and walked back into the bright, noisy clutter of Tangier.