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Michael Kokkinaris
ATLANTIS
The Lost Kingdoms
The last days of the legendary Atlantis
Novel
* * *
Daniel Aurteuil
I met Daniel Aurteuil quite by chance.
That summer, at the beginning of June, I had been appointed local doctor at a village up in North Euboea, Greece, when Daniel came to see me for a bee sting.
What attracted my attention since the first moment I saw him was neither his stature nor his rather arrogant style but his unbelievable eye for detail and scrutiny of whatever he saw, heard or thought of as hovering between the realm of fact or fiction.
From the half-opened door of the examination room, for example, he had managed to see all the book titles in the bookcase his field of vision allowed him to, and the first question he asked me was not about the sting but whether the books he saw belonged to me or not…
I nodded…and Daniel became a different man.
Daniel Aurteuil…
He was a sixty-year old Frenchman from Brittany, who had so much to tell me about a world that was lost in the wet oblivion of the sea, many thousands of years ago, but whose roots had still remained on the land that was offering us a place to stay. But up to that point much had to precede than a simple observation that my bookcase included ‘Homer’ and the ‘Torah’[1] together on the same shelf, as if it were something completely natural for any reader to have…
So, I prescribed the medicine and treatment directions to Daniel, and I suggested seeing him again, if something changed, when he politely insisted that he return to the village the same afternoon for a coffee with me.
I had no reasons to turn down his offer and so, I accepted.
Besides, during the first days I had taken up my commission, I had been feeling a bit strange.
I had been appointed local doctor to a small village, without being fully aware either of what that meant for me nor what it meant for all those who had been convinced that whatever happened to them they would be safe…just as long as a local doctor would be around! Yet, one would rarely feel the need to rationalize the ‘certainties’ supporting his way of life…until…and if…a particular turn of events put them to the test.
But it is important to accept that almost everything is based on certainties that function like an adhesive, bonding the parts of a piece of furniture. Particularly in cases when the furniture maker no longer remembers either the bonding or the adhesive used!
Those certainties are so deep-rooted in human conscience that in the end, they merge with it and become part of its heritability.
So, that ‘coffee’ with Daniel Aurteuil was his first attempt to get to know me better. He of course had his reasons, while I had none that important, except of course my natural need to feel that I could actually talk to someone…But I felt as if Aurteuil was examining me as if I were a student…at High school. He wanted me know that he owned a pub in Brittany and for a month each year he travelled across Europe, following his instinct, as he told me, to find what he had been looking for.
What he had been looking for…
We are all looking for something until the last moment of our lives. It’s just that it gets really hard to recognize it, even if we come across it… It is for that reason that I envy everyone able to live the passion of their illusion that at long last, they have touched what they had been searching for. If on top of that, they also bear witness to that certainty of theirs, then they almost approach bliss. But in that afternoon, I could not figure out what it was that Daniel had been looking for in his travels across Europe.
As far as I was concerned, and my personal certainties aside, it was certain that I could read both Homer and the Torah from the Hebrew original, as the… examination had demonstrated. The only hitch was that I did not speak French and that made it hard for Daniel to verbalize what he was thinking.
You see, everyone at the local café was curious about a tourist who was talking with the doctor about issues about which they were totally indifferent, yet they got interested from the moment their own doctor was talking to a Frenchman, answering his questions!
But that was not exactly how the game was being played.
Aurteuil was mainly interested in giving rather than getting information…
He was interested in imparting whatever he knew or at least was able to ‘read’ on the hundreds of stelas that he had inherited from his parents.
What were those stelas?
They were the upturning of everything that had comprised our historical certainties…
An unending story about a world that was lost, leaving no trace about its presence on earth.
And what of those stelas?
What can I say?
A farce, maybe?
Perhaps!
Daniel Aurteuil could very well be a mythomaniac or a megalomaniac who may have ‘concocted’ a story to make an impression on people.
Yet, he had made sure his story ‘tied up’ well with the history of the stelas.
When he had gone past the stage of spelling out the primeval writing and dawned on him that he was standing before a humungous discovery, he smartly made sure he ‘dated’ his texts.
He simply had to ‘sacrifice’ a large piece of the stela that he presented to the Bordeaux Regional Archeological Council as a random find.
His dating was impressive…
‘It is an engraved limestone stela bearing an unknown alphabet, possibly of a linear script that must be at least 12,000 years old!’
From that point onwards, he should have expected the ‘story’ to have died down.
It was his discovery. The stelas were his.
But the story nevertheless belonged to everyone and it was a thing Aurteuil…could not care less about.
I just sat listening to him telling me all that, still trying to figure out why he was telling it to me…
12,000 years ago, no one knew what had happened and how the world was.
So, if back then there were some people who knew how to write and had the foresight of engraving on stone slabs the chronicles of their time, then that would change a lot...
Daniel looked at me aggressively and said:
‘Nothing would have changed, doc…the world would have remained the same…avaricious, full of pettiness…even if they had known that they would cease to exist in a few moments…’
‘And what do you want from me, Daniel Aurteuil?’
‘I want you to read the stelas, too…They are inscribed in the original alphabet of your native tongue…you won’t find it hard to figure out the key to that language…’
‘And what then?’
‘Come up with a story…I will allow you that much…’
‘It won’t be a story, just a fairyTalé…’
‘There you go…hadn’t thought of that…A fairyTalé then…
My friend, some may believe it then…
It’s only fairyTalés that people believe in…
They’re scared of the truth…they evade it…’
Aurteuil left for France a few days later, and I was left with the impression that everything was nothing but a well-planned hoax…until the parcel arrived…
That was the parcel with the ‘snapshots’ of an unbelievable story that took years off my life to ‘read’…
But it was worth it…
And it was that simple…all I had to do was to go beyond my cognitive certainties which made up the strongest hindrance to my seeing through the fact that the history had not started at the time we had been told it had started…
So, if you really want to learn the beginning of history, then you should read all that follows…
What Allodorus, son of Alkinoos from Tritonian Taloh that also perished like thousands of other cities and countless people, sacrifice to Poseidon’s wrath, when Oceanus swallowed the land of Atlantis forever…
(In the excerpts that follow, the elderly Apollodorus has decided to record on stone slabs the history of Idas, the eleventh King of Atlantis, also comprising the history of a magnificent world that perished unexpectedly at a moment’s notice, falling victim to the inscrutable wrath of Poseidon).
Memory and oblivion
‘Μan’s greatest enemy is oblivion.
Oblivion about those who lived before us, similar mortals like ourselves who refuse to accept whatever the gods have ordained for mankind.
And I wonder, as the courses of the celestial bodies are counting my waning life, if there is any point for me to inscribe on stone or terracotta whatever my eyes have seen, that certainly no other mortal could have ever imagined even in his wildest and most elusive images the dream weavers may have fashioned for him!
And another thing is how much a mortal’s mind, who has certainly learned to think guided by his senses but also by what he has devised, based on what the gods have permitted mortals to perceive, can take. Yet I am afraid that if I die or lose my mind, all that which no mortal can ever again live through will be forever lost, as the vultures would be tasting my skinny corpse.
But even if, at long last, were I to decide to let memory guide my hand, I truly wonder whether anyone else could ever decipher my script, if one day other men came to live up in the mountains that were spared from the wrath of Poseidon!
But no one should be unbending in his judgment because life has the power to get reborn out of the stone that will once become men and then they should acknowledge the extent of their magnificence!
I, Apollodorus, son of Alkinoos from Tritonia Taloh, mortal and expendable must come to the decision to narrate the history of a King, King Idas, the eleventh King of Atlantis, whom I accidently joined in a voyage to the edge of the Eastern Sea of Middle Earth…where no Atlas had ever dared tread, guided by Fate.
And as my hand engraves his history on the stone slabs, bringing back images of my life, what saddens me most of all is the inscrutable cruelty of Poseidon to obliterate so many proud generations of men!
And I, stranger among strangers, am doomed to live with the memory of my past life that, alas, bears no resemblance nor relationship to the present one.
So, if someone sometime in the future managed to spell and figure out the meaning of the words engraved on those stone slabs, he should know that nothing from what he will read is an exaggeration about a world that was lost in a moment’s notice from the inscrutable wrath of Poseidon! ’
The Succession
Τhe day that Cleito gave birth to Kourites and Idas, King Euaimon could never have imagined that he should have sowed discord between his two twin sons, offering the scepter to the firstborn, who had inherited, as custom had it, from progenitor Atlas[2].
And were he to unfold the story from the start, he would have killed the maids attending to Cleito, who was in labor, with his bare hands, so that they would take their witness that one of his two sons had first seen the light of life-giving sun, down to the dark kingdom of Hades.
And now, as the time for the Assembly of the Kings comes near, he is forced by the circumstances to sow hatred between his offspring whom he had never set apart on account of who had been born first.
And this time, he would have to make a decision and confer his god-given authority to his firstborn son, unable and feeble from old age to board the seafaring ships and fight the Celts who were looting the country of Iberians, shamelessly reaching the coastal cities of the Ocean, only to disappear afterwards in the black forests they inhabited, dragging along the best of the sons and daughters of Atlantis.
Yet, none of the other kings could understand his dilemma.
Law is law, and he who violates it is guilty of death.
Power rightly belonged to Kourites, who was the firstborn.
But such a case would be unfair to Idas whom Fate had endowed with all the gifts of men put together.
And he would have to remain forever in the shadow of his brother, becoming perhaps a general, if the Royal Assembly decided so.
When the heavy gate of the Temple clang shut, the voice of King Mistor, second in order in the Kingdom of Atlas, resembled the metallic sound of the waves that roll the pebbles across the coasts that Poseidon rests:
‘King Euaimon, know that we all honor you and understand your dilemma. If perhaps I had to take the same decision, that is how I would have been tortured, considering the prowess and potential of my twin saplings.
Yet, law is law, and that is what we should uphold, if we wish not to provoke the wrath of the sea-ruler Poseidon.
Let then the gate of the Temple open for the bulls to enter, and when we sacrifice the one that shall be shown to us, we shall rule on your behalf, reaching a verdict that would be final and irrevocable’.
King Euaimon seemed powerless before what appeared to be inexorable and if someone could read the fears of his soul, he would have been terrified with what thoughts tortured the old King.
He was almost certain that the Royal Assembly, even before the blood of the bull, sacrificed in honor of Poseidon to preserve Kourites’ succession undisturbed, clotted, he would also have to sacrifice, one way or another, Idas as well, sending him into exile to the lands where Oceanus rests when returning from his long trips.
Right after King Elasippus, who was well-known for his sharp judgment and his gift at foretelling things to come, spoke:
‘Kings of Atlantis, sons of Great Poseidon, if the Kingdom of Atlas commands the territory extending all the way to where the sea of Middle Earth gives way to the uncharted territory east of the Nile River, know that this has not have come as a result of the might of our arms that the other peoples do not possess and who have for a long time now succumbed to the might of Poseidonia, but to the unfaltering adherence to the laws that have been engraved on the bronze column of the God.
And if you want our empire to preserve its domination, you should never forget that…
As regards the successor to the throne of King Euaimon, perhaps the only thing that you should consider when the time of your decision comes, is that at the time of Idas’ birth, during the thousandth summer equinox since the founding of Poseidonia, the eoa epitoli[3] of the star of the Dog, which is portentous of the coming of a great King in Atlantis.
And that should have been in the final analysis our dilemma that for the first time forces us to stand before whatever the law has irrevocably stipulated for the succession of a King!’
It must have been just a few fractions of the time after the light of the sun had completely gone and the flame on the altar of the god flickered, disturbed by the typhoon that seemed to have sprang from the feet of the six winged horses of Poseidon, causing the hundred Nereids that were standing motionless under the statue of the sea-ruler, each on her own bronze dolphin, to shut their eyes fearful of the wrath of their father, that would certainly bring calamity to the foolish mortals.
Then everything seemed to be lighted up by a thousand bolts of lightning that sought to animate the copper shapes of the statues, that, one would think, wished to leave their altars that they had been fitted to so skillfully around the palisade of the temple.
At the same time, in barged the bulls through the heavy half-opened gate like a nightmare, freed, as custom had it, to sharpen their hoofs on the bronze floor of the temple, until one of them would be selected as the sacrificial bull for the sea-ruler Poseidon.
Yet, the animals succumbed to the fear that had possessed the Kings of Atlantis as well, and they did not put up a fight with whomever approached them bringing death.
So, when King Gadeirus, the youngest of all, raised his well-sharpened knife on the first bull that came before him, the animal just accepted its fate.
The golden cylices were filled with red wine and blood from the sacrificial bull, and all the sacrificial altars were alight as the parts of the bull were readied to receive their omnivorous flame.
And when everything was done as prescribed by custom, sipping down wine and sacrificial blood, each of the Kings took oaths before the law-giving column of Poseidon that they would uphold upon their own blood everything that would be ordained to be irrevocable before sunrise.
Only King Euaimon lost his nerve when he had to utter the heavy oath under the statue of the god, having the certainty that nothing could have escaped his divine law.
When all the oath-taking was concluded, they all donned the blue robe of judgement, had the fires on the altars extinguished and each King took turns in unfolding his thoughts that guided him to his decision as concerns King Euaimon’s successor.
Last of all Euinor spoke, master of the eastern land where the seafaring ships sailed, bound for the oceanic Tartissus, having under his command those ships guarding the seaways leading to the sea of Middle Earth, a cruel man, just like his father, Oceanus and his god, Poseidon.
Euinor’s heavy voice mercilessly whipped the last second thoughts of the Kings:
‘Come dawn, Kourites should receive the scepter from the hands of King Euaimon as he had received it from his father, and Idas should leave this land forever…
This is my decision, and whoever does not have the strength to tell the truth before Euaimon out of feelings of sympathy, may bring upon great sorrows to the land of Atlas.
Our empire has been based on what the laws of the god irrevocably stipulate about the successor, rejecting any other way of remaining in power provided by the royal scepter. Those who temporarily attempted otherwise met either a cruel death or exile beyond the land of the Iberians, over the dark forests of the northern Land.
Idas has in his eyes the power of those born to rule over others.
If he remains in Poseidonia, he will sooner or later refuse to obey what Kourites would command him to do…
And then we would have to sacrifice many of our people before the god-given order returns again.
It is clear that old Euaimon will no longer have the strength to part from his son. No one in this Assembly would be in a position to take up responsibility for the future acts of a person, even if that person were his own son.
Human nature is unpredictable and the strength hidden in him indeterminate.
If one should be afraid of a wild animal, it should not be the one that roams around trying to sate its hunger but the one nesting in one’s soul and woe on those unlucky souls that would meet such an animal freely roaming the streets.
***
The silence that reigned was the blatantly unspoken decision of the Royal Assembly of Atlantis to proclaim Kourites the successor to the scepter inherited by Euaimon.
As the first rays of the sun ignited Poseidon’s forlorn face, walking slowly and for the last time, old King Euaimon left his blue robe of judgment before the statue of the god and found his way back to hand over the scepter of power to his firstborn son, Kourites, and await the decision of the Royal Assembly about Idas, who happened to be delivered second out of the womb, following his brother
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[1] The Old Testament
[2] Άτλαντος δη πολύ μεν άλλο και τίμιον γίγνεται γένος,βασιλεύς δε ο πρεσβύτατος αεί τω πρεσβυτάτω των εκγόνων παραδιδούς επί γενεάς πολλάς την βασιλείαν διέσωζον (Πλάτωνος Κριτίας,114d)
From Atlas a great generation was created with significant descendants. The eldest, who always became king would pass the sceptre to his first child and so, their power was preserved for many generations...)
[3] It refers to the simultaneous rise of the Sun and of Sirius.