Letter

Atlantis book – Atlantis book. What a fascinating idea! It always reminds me of the old Aelita by Alexei Tolstoy, a book which (in the Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House version) always had an incredibly magical feeling for me. In fact, recently I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to get it sent to me, as the chances of finding it here again are nil. Atlantis is great.

Did you think of using this new ‘research’ that traces Atlantis to this amazing Greek settlement on a volcanic island ringed by an outer ridge (annoyingly I can’t remember the name), which was subsequently blown up by a huge eruption? I think it’s on Crete that they discovered wall paintings under a layer of ash that had an almost map-like depiction of Atlantis, and the picture seemed to be of this ringed-island place, answering to the first major reference to Atlantis by whatever ancient writer wrote about it.

In fact, if memory serves me correctly, they reckoned that it had been the same eruption that did for the Minoan civilisation on Crete as well. They dated it by pottery-styles and stuff.

A diver went down to check the walls of the remaining hard ring (because the outer ring or another ring built up by the eruption still survives, though the island was completely destroyed), and reckoned that it was dangerously cracked and that another similarly-dangerous eruption might happen any day.

(All very inconvenient, of course, if you want to do a sort of Carl Barks lost-city-under-the-sea version of Atlantis instead, or Tolkien’s ‘Atalante’, Numinor sunk under the waves, or something).

[Loose page of an unsigned letter]