“Two mighty meteors — of sun- and moon-like apparent size and shape — appear threateningly with their accompaniments. The star-world falls into turmoil, and the actual war begins: the Morning Star (Venus) opens it, standing on the back of Leo. Seven months later a new heaven results, as the Sun moves from about mid-Virgo to mid-Aries. The stars that ruled the dawning morning sky plunge at last into Okeanos and set the earth afire. Such is the fundamental thought — recognized only once facts beneath poetry’s veil are laid bare.”
The discovery forced a rewrite of what archaeologists thought they knew about underground construction in the ancient world. Before 1963, the largest known subterranean complexes were the Roman catacombs and the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul. Derinkuyu alone could hold twenty thousand people. Kaymaklı, nine kilometres away, was larger still. The two were probably connected by a tunnel whose ventilation shafts have since been filled with rubble.
The drift is a remarkable stratum of clay, sand, gravel, and far-from-source boulders seemingly flung by some careless hand over the northern portions of Europe and North America. Some of this debris has been moulded into distinctive ridges (moraines), rounded hills (drumlins), and long sinuous ridges (eskers). Any theory of drift formation must account for these singular accumulations as well as an immense family of scratches, lake basins, and sundry gougings.
“Just as in the case of all other countries, the earliest pages in the Geological Record of South Africa are most fragmentary and utterly confusing; much remains to be done before even the outlines can be reconstructed. It must suffice to remark that at some extremely remote date, possibly more than 1000 million years ago, basic lavas—seemingly the earliest known of the rocks—were being poured out over several large sections of this country, in many places sub-aqueously—probably upon the ocean floor—that they were accompanied and followed by tuffs, slates, limestones, and the remarkable group of the banded ironstones, jaspilites, and cherts, and by quartzites, grits, and conglomerates.”
The first obstruction to knowledge is often not the world itself, but the human instrument by which the world is received.
A people who saw the sea arrive where no sea belonged would not leave behind a peer-reviewed monograph. They would leave a story. And the descendants of that story would eventually be mocked by men who mistake their own notation for reality.
