Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,34
he set out for home. He had married a wife from among the tribe that lived at the Bab al Mandab, and it was only with great difficulty that she followed him so far that he was given no choice but to bring her home with him. When he reached the land of the Derku, as the Atlanteans called themselves, he learned that what had seemed plain to him at the shores of the Heaving Sea sounded like a far-fetched lie to the elders of his clan, and of all the clans. A huge flood? They had a flood every year, and simply rode it out on their boats. If Naog's flood actually happened, they'd ride it out, too.
But Naog knew that they would not. So he began experimenting with logs lashed together, and within a few years had learned how to build a boxy, watertight house-on-a-raft that might withstand the pressures of the flood that only he believed in. Others realized after the normal seasonal floods that his tight, dry wooden box was a superior seedboat, and eventually half of his clan's stored grain and beans ended up in his ark for safekeeping. Other clans also built wooden seedboats, but not to Naog's exacting specifications for strength and watertightness. In the meantime Naog was ridiculed and threatened because of his constant warnings that the whole land would be covered in water.
When the flood came, Naog had a little advance notice: The first torrent to break through the Bab al Mandab caused the Salty Sea to rise rapidly, backing up in the canals of the Derku people for several hours before the pressure of the ocean burst through in earnest, sending a wall of water dozens of meters high scouring the entire width of the Red Sea basin. By the time the flood reached Naog's boat, it was sealed tight, bearing a cargo of seed and food, along with his two wives, their small children, the three slaves that had helped him with the construction of the boat, and the slaves' families. They were tossed unmercifully in the turbulent waves, and the ark was often immersed, but it held, and eventually they came to shore not far frorn Gibeil on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula.
They set up farming for a brief time in the El Qa' Valley in the shadows of the mountains of Sinai, telling all comers of the flood sent by God to destroy the unworthy Derku people, and how this handful of people alone had been saved because God had shown Naog what he intended to do. Eventually, though, Naog became a wandering herdsman, spreading his story wherever he went. As Kemal had expected, Naog's story, with his anti-urban interpretation, had enormous influence in stopping people from gathering together in large communities that might become cities.
There was also a strong element of opposition to human sacrifice in his story, for Naog's own father had been sacrificed to the crocodile god of the Derku people while he was gone on his manhood journey, and Naog believed that the main reason the powerful god of storms and seas had destroyed the Derku was their practice of offering living victims to the large crocodile they penned up to represent their god every year after the flood season. In a way this linkage between human sacrifice and city-building was unfortunate, because when city-building was resumed by deliberate heretics rejecting the old wisdom of Naog many generations later, human sacrifice came along as part of the package. In the long run, though, Naog got his way, for even those societies that gave human offerings to their gods felt they were doing something dark and dangerous, and eventually human sacrifice became regarded first as barbaric, then as an unspeakable atrocity throughout the lands touched by the story of Naog.
Kemal had found Atlantis; he had found the original of Noah and Utnapishtim and Ziusudra. His childhood dream had been fulfilled; he had played the Schliemann role and made the greatest discovery of them all. What remained now seemed to him to be clerical work.
He withdrew from the project, but not from Pastwatch. At first he simply dabbled at whatever work he fitfully began; mostly he concentrated on raising a family. But gradually, as his children grew up, his desultory efforts took shape and became more intense. He had found an even greater project: discovering why civilization arose in the first place. As far as he was concerned, all old-world civilizations after Atlantis