Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,33

but surely they would have made something that would change the face of the land plainly enough that the old TruSite I recordings would show it, though it wouldn't be noticeable unless someone was looking for it.

So, putting his degree at risk, Kemal set aside the work he had been assigned to do and began poring over the old TruSite I recordings. He concentrated on the last century before the Red Sea flood -- there was no reason to suppose that the civilization had lasted very long before it was destroyed. And within a few months he had collected data that was irrefutable. There were no dikes and dams to prevent flooding -- that kind of structure would have been large enough that no one would have missed it on the first go-round. Instead there were seemingly random heaps of mud and earth that grew between rainy seasons, especially in the drier years when the rivers were lower than usual. To people looking only for weather patterns, these unstructured, random piles would mean nothing. But to Kemal they were obvious: In the shallowing water, the Atlanteans were dredging channels so that their boats could continue to traffic from place to place. The piles of earth were simply the dumping-places for the muck they dredged from the water, None of the boats showed up on the TruSite I, but now that Kemal knew where to look, he began to catch fleeting glimpses of reed huts. Every year when the floods came, the houses disappeared, so they were only visible for a moment or two in the Trusite I: flimsy mud-and-reed structures that must have been swept away in every flood season and rebuilt again when the waters receded. But they were there, close by the hillocks that marked the channels. Plato was right again -- Atlantis grew up around its canals. But Atlantis was the people and their boats; the buildings were washed away and built again every year.

When Kemal presented his findings to Pastwatch he was not yet twenty years old, but his evidence was impressive enough that Pastwatch immediately turned, not a Tempoview, but the stillnewer TruSite II machine to look under the waters of the Red Sea in the Massawa Channel during the hundred years before the Red Sea flood. They found that Kemal was gloriously, spectacularly right. In an era when other humans were still following game animals and gathering berries, the Atlanteans were planting amaranth and ryegrass, melons and beans in the rich wet silt of the receding rivers, and carrying food in baskets and on reed boats from place to place. The only thing that Kemal had missed was that most of the buildings weren't houses at all. They were floating silos for the storage of grain. The Atlanteans slept under the open air during the dry season, and in the rainy season they lived on their tiny reed boats.

Kemal was brought into Pastwatch and made head of the vast new, Atlantis project. At first he loved the work, because, like Schliemann, he could search for the originals of the great events.

Most important to Kemal was when he found Noah, though he had a different name -- Yewesweder when he was a child, Naog when he became an adult. For his trial of manhood, this Yewesweder, already tall for his age, made the perilous journey to the land bridge at the Bab al Mandab to see the "Heaving Sea." He saw it, all right, but also saw that this arm of the Indian Ocean was only a few meters below the level of the bench that marked the old shoreline of the Red Sea before the last ice age. Yewesweder knew nothing of ice ages, but he knew that the shelf of land was absolutely level -- he had loped along that route during his entire journey. Yet that level shelf was hundreds of meters above the plain where the "Salty Sea" -- the rump of the Red Sea -- was slowly, slowly rising. Already the Heaving Sea was cutting a channel that during the storm tides of seasonal hurricanes poured saltwater into several lakes, occasionally spilling over and sending a river of saltwater down to the Red Sea. Sometime -- the next storm, or the storm after that -- the Heaving Sea would crash through and an entire ocean would be poured in on top of Atlantis.

Yewesweder decided that he had earned his man-name, Naog, the day he made this discovery, and at once