Free Beneath the Dark Ice by Greig Beck Page B

“I think this here represents thousands dead. No, that can’t be possible, I must be mistranslating.”
    Matt paused and screwed up his face. “Odd, this last bit looks to have been written later. Even the glyph style is slightly different. I think it just says: ‘We are lost,
Qwotoan
comes!’ ”
    Matt knelt down among the debris and sorted through flat pieces of stone that had onioned off the face of the wall. Discarding some and selecting others, his lips moved as he tried to tell himself the story of the ancient civilisation. He was running his hands over a piece of flat stone with faint upraised markings when Monica touched him on the shoulder. He turned and held the small stone tablet out for her to see. It showed a number of small symbols in the ancient icon-imagery of the long dead culture depicting what looked like a warrior tangled in some sort of rope or tentacles. Another smaller image showed aneye looking over a city surrounded by a lot of dots and squiggles.
    “What’s it say?” said Monica, kneeling down next to him and squinting at the carved rock.
    Matt was looking at the stone and
hmmd
to himself before speaking. “It’s a little more about the warrior brother’s descent to find
Qwotoan
and slay what looks like the ‘Devourer’ or ‘Deceiver.’ Why does that name
Qwotoan
ring a bell? Damn, I can’t make out all of these pictoglyphs without some more work. This language has some characters that could be Olmec, some Mayan, Aztec, even what looks like some Egyptian hieroglyphs; and this bit here could even be Sumerian. It’s all mixed together. This could be some form of root language. But why is it here? Why were they here?”
    “And where are they now?” asked Monica. “They all seem to have disappeared.”
    “This spot is probably just an outpost, but this symbol represents a reference to the ‘City’; and this here looks like the Mayan root word for water—‘
Atl
,’ and the Olmec word for surrounding land. No wait, that could be land surrounded by water.” He rocked back on his heels. “You know there are plenty of ancient stories with tales of a lost continent. Antarctica wasn’t always frozen under a mile of ice, you know, and many people speculate about what may lie undiscovered beneath this continent’s deep ice mantle. Like, just how did fifteenth-century cartographers manage to get hold of maps of the actual coastline of Antarctica which exists under the ice, when our modern cartographers could only achieve this a few decades ago by seismographic means? A lot of these ancient races have legends about their forefathers arriving from the sea after a great catastrophe in their homeland. Their legends talk about their homeland sinking, or ‘going below’ as it’sbeen interpreted; but what if that didn’t mean sinking under water, but going below ice?”
    “Dr. Matthew Kerns, you are not going to tell me this is Atlantis, are you?” Monica asked incredulously.
    “I didn’t say that. Atlantis was Plato’s allegorical story; however, in Mayan and Olmec and even Aztec legends, they directly refer to a place called ‘Aztlan.’ The Mayans originally believed they came to the Americas from an overseas paradise called Aztlan which sank away from sight.” Matt gathered his thoughts. “Look, hear me out, there’s a section of an ancient Mayan codex called the Troano Manuscript that to this day is still defying a full translation. However, in the 1800s a classical archaeologist by the name of Augustus le Plongeon attempted a partial interpretation. His reconstruction recounted a legend passed down for hundreds of generations about the tragedy of a ‘Great Golden City,’ which was swallowed in a terrible cataclysm that took place nearly 10,000 years before the writing of that codex.”
    “Uh, and he said the Mayans knew about this place, did he? What happened to him?” Monica gave Matt a look that radiated a mixture of disbelief and mock gravitas.
    “Not exactly. He