Atlantis 
By Orson Scott Card

Kemal Akyazi grew up within a few miles of the ruins of Troy; from 
his boyhood home above Kumkale he could see the waters of the 
Dardanelles, the narrow strait that connects the waters of the Black 
Sea with the Aegean. Many a war had been fought on both sides of 
that strait, one of which had produced the great epic of Homer's 
ILIAD. 
This pressure of history had a strange influence on Kemal as a 
child. He learned all the tales of the place, of course, but he also 
knew that the tales were Greek, and the place was of the Greek 
Aegean world. Kemal was a Turk; his own ancestors had not come to 
the Dardanelles until the fifteenth century. He felt that it was a 
powerful place, but it did not belong to him. So the ILIAD was not 
the story that spoke to Kemal's soul. Rather it was the story of 
Heinrich Schliemann, the German explorer who, in an era when Troy 
had been regarded as a mere legend, a myth, a fiction, had been sure 
not only that Troy was real but also where it was. Despite all 
scoffers, he mounted an expedition and found it and unburied it. The 
old stories turned out to be true. 
In his teens Kemal thought it was the greatest tragedy of his life 
that Pastwatch had to use machines to look through the the millennia 
of human history. There would be no more Schliemanns, studying and 
pondering and guessing until they found some artifact, some ruin of 
a long-lost city, some remnant of a legend made true again. Thus 
Kemal had no interest in joining Pastwatch. It was not history that 
he hungered for--it was exploration and discovery that he wanted, 
and what was the glory in finding the truth through a machine? 
So, after an abortive try at physics, he studied to become a 
meteorologist. At the age of eighteen, heavily immersed in the study 
of climate and weather, he touched again on the findings of 
Pastwatch. No longer did meteorologists have to depend on only a few 
centuries of weather measurements and fragmentary fossil evidence to 
determine long-range patterns. Now they had accurate accounts of 
storm patterns for millions of years. Indeed, in the earliest years 
of Pastwatch, the machinery had been so coarse that individual 
humans could not be seen. It was like time-lapse photography in 
which people don't remain in place long enough to be on more than a 
single frame of the film, making them invisible. So in those days 
Pastwatch recorded the weather of the past, erosion patterns, 
volcanic eruptions, ice ages, climatic shifts. 
All that data was the bedrock on which modern weather prediction and 
control rested. Meteorologists could see developing patterns and, 
without disrupting the overall pattern, could make tiny changes that 
prevented any one area from going completely rainless during a time 
of drought, or sunless during a wet growing season. They had taken 
the sharp edge off the relentless scythe of climate, and now the 
great project was to determine how they might make a more serious 
change, to bring a steady pattern of light rain to the desert 
regions of the world, to restore the prairies and savannahs that 
they once had been. That was the work that Kemal wanted to be a part 
of. 
Yet he could not bring himself out from the shadow of Troy, the 
memory of Schliemann. Even as he studied the climatic shifts 
involved with the waxing and waning of the ice ages, his mind 
contained fleeting images of lost civilizations, legendary places 
that waited for a Schliemann to uncover them. 
His project for his degree in meteorology was part of the effort to 
determine how the Red Sea might be exploited to develop dependable 
rains for either the Sudan or central Arabia; Kemal's immediate 
target was to study thedifference between weather patterns during 
the last ice age, when the Red Sea had all but disappeared, and the 
present, with the Red Sea at its fullest. Back and forth he went 
through the coarse old Pastwatch recordings, gathering data on sea 
level and on precipitation at selected points inland. The old 
TruSite I had been imprecise at best, but good enough for counting 
rainstorms. 
Time after time Kemal would cycle through the up-and-down 
fluctuations of the Red Sea, watching as the average sea level 
gradually rose toward the end of the Ice Age. He always stopped, of 
course, at the abrupt jump in sea level that marked the rejoining of 
the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After that, the Red Sea was 
useless for his purposes, since its sea level was tied to that of 
the great world ocean. 
But the echo of Schliemann inside Kemal's mind made him think: What 
a flood that must have been. 
What a flood. The Ice Age had locked up so much water in glaciers 
and ice sheets that the sea level of the whole world fell. It 
eventually reached a low enough point that land bridges arose out of 
the sea. In the north Pacific, the Bering land bridge allowed the 
ancestors of the Indies to cross on foot into their great empty 
homeland. Britain and Flanders were joined. The Dardanelles were 
closed and the Black Sea became a salty lake. The Persian Gulf 
disappeared and became a great plain cut by the Euphrates. And the 
Bab al Mandab, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, became a land 
bridge. 
But a land bridge is also a dam. As the world climate warmed and the 
glaciers began to release their pent-up water, the rains fell 
heavily everywhere; rivers swelled and the seas rose. The great 
south-flowing rivers of Europe, which had been mostly dry during the 
peak of glaciation, now were massive torrents. The Rhone, the Po, 
the Strimon, the Danube poured so much water into the Mediterranean 
and the Black Sea that their water level rose at about the same rate 
as that of the great world ocean. 
The Red Sea had no great rivers, however. It was a new sea, formed 
by rifting between the new Arabian plate and the African, which 
meant it had uplift ridges on both coasts. Many rivers and streams 
flowed from those ridges down into the Red Sea, but none of them 
carried much water compared to the rivers that drained vast basins 
and carried the melt-off of the glaciers of the north. So, while the 
Red Sea gradually rose during this time, it lagged far, far behind 
the great world ocean. Its water level responded to the immediate 
local weather patterns rather than to worldwide weather. 
Then one day the Indian Ocean rose so high that tides began to spill 
over the Bab al Mandab. The water cut new channels in the grassland 
there. Over a period of several years, the leakage grew, creating a 
series of large new tidal lakes on the Hanish Plain. And then one 
day, some fourteen thousand years ago, the flow cut a channel so 
deep that it didn't dry up at low tide, and the water kept flowing, 
cutting the channel deeper and deeper, until those tidal lakes were 
full, and brimmed over. With the weight of the Indian Ocean behind 
it the water gushed into the basin of the Red Sea in a vast flood 
that in a few days brought the Red Sea up to the level of the world 
ocean. 
This isn't just the boundary marker between useful and useless water 
level data, thought Kemal. This is a cataclysm, one of the rare 
times when a single event changes vast reaches of land in a period 
of time short enough that human beings could notice it. And, for 
once, this cataclysm happened in an era when human beings were 
there. It was not only possible but likely that someone saw this 
flood--indeed, that it killed many, for the southern end of the Red 
Sea basin was rich savannah and marshes up to the moment when the 
ocean broke through, and surely the humans of fourteen thousand 
years ago would have hunted there. Would have gathered seeds and 
fruits and berries there. Some hunting party must have seen, from 
the peaks of the Dehalak mountains, the great walls of water that 
roared up the plain, breaking and parting around the slopes of the 
Dehalaks, making islands of them. 
Such a hunting party would have known that their families had been 
killed by this water. What would they have thought? Surely that some 
god was angry with them. That the world had been done away, buried 
under the sea. And if they survived, if they found a way to the 
Eritrean shore after the great turbulent waves settled down to the 
more placid waters of the new, deeper sea, they would tell the tale 
to anyone who would listen. And for a few years they could take 
their hearers to the water's edge, show them the treetops barely 
rising above the surface of the sea, and tell them tales of all that 
had been buried under the waves. 
    

Noah, thought Kemal. Gilgamesh. Atlantis. The stories were believed. 
The stories were remembered. Of course they forgot where it 
happened--the civilizations that learned to write their stories 
naturally transposed the events to locations that they knew. But 
they remembered the things that mattered. What did the flood story 
of Noah say? Not just rain, no, it wasn't a flood caused by rain 
alone. The "fountains of the great deep" broke open. No local flood 
on the Mesopotamian plain would cause that image to be part of the 
story. But the great wall of water from the Indian Ocean, coming on 
the heels of years of steadily increasing rain--THAT would bring 
those words to the storytellers' lips, generation after generation, 
for ten thousand years until they could be written down. 
As for Atlantis, everyone was so sure they had found it years ago. 
Santorini--Thios--the Aegean island that blew up. But the oldest 
stories of Atlantis said nothing of blowing up in a volcano. They 
spoke only of the great civilization sinking into the sea. The 
supposition was that later visitors came to Santorini and, seeing 
water where an island city used to be, assumed that it had sunk, 
knowing nothing of the volcanic eruption. To Kemal, however, this 
now seemed far-fetched indeed, compared to the way it would have 
looked to the people of Atlantis themselves, somewhere on the 
Mits'iwa Plain, when the Red Sea seemed to leap up in its bed, 
engulfing the city. THAT would be sinking into the sea! No 
explosion, just water. And if the city were in the marshes of what 
was now the Mits'iwa Channel, the water would have come, not just 
from the southeast, but from the northeast and the north as well, 
flowing among and around the Dehalak mountains, making islands of 
them and swallowing up the marshes and the city with them. 
Atlantis. Not beyond the pillars of Hercules, but Plato was right to 
associate the city with a strait. He, or whoever told the tale to 
him, simply replaced the Bab al Mandab with the greatest strait that 
he had heard of. The story might well have reached him by way of 
Phoenicia, where Mediterranean sailors would have made the story fit 
the sea they knew. They learned it from Egyptians, perhaps, or nomad 
wanderers from the hinterlands of Arabia, and "within the straits of 
Mandab" would quickly have become "within the pillars of Hercules," 
and then, because the Mediterranean itself was not strange and 
exotic enough, the locale was moved outside the pillars of Hercules. 

All these suppositions came to Kemal with absolute certainty that 
they were true, or nearly true. He rejoiced at the thought of it: 
There was still an ancient civilization left to discover. 
Everyone knew that Naog of the Derku People was going to be a tall 
man when he grew up, because his father and mother were both tall 
and he was an unusually large baby. He was born in floodwater 
season, when all the Engu clan lived on reed boats. Their food 
supply, including the precious seed for next year's planting, was 
kept dry in the seedboats, which were like floating huts of plaited 
reeds. The people themselves, though, rode out the flood on the open 
dragonboats, bundles of reeds which they straddled as if they were 
riding a crocodile--which, according to legend, was how the 
dragonboats began, when the first Derku woman, Gweia, saved herself 
and her baby from the flood by climbing onto the back of a huge 
crocodile. The crocodile--the first Great Derku, or dragon--endured 
their weight until they reached a tree they could climb, whereupon 
the dragon swam away. So when the Derku people plaited reeds into 
long thick bundles and climbed aboard, they believed that secret of 
the dragonboats had been given to them by the Great Derku, and in a 
sense they were riding on his back. 
During the raiding season, other nearby tribes had soon learned to 
fear the coming of the dragonboats, for they always carried off 
captives who, in those early days, were never seen again. In other 
tribes when someone was said to have been carried off by the 
crocodiles, it was the Derku people they meant, for it was well know 
that all the clans of the Derku worshipped the crocodile as their 
savior and god, and fed their captives to a dragon that lived in the 
center of their city. 
At Naog's birthtime, the Engu clan were nestled among their tether 
trees as the flooding Selud River flowed mudbrown underneath them. 
If Naog had pushed his way out of the womb a few weeks later, as the 
waters were receding, his mother would have given birth in one of 
the seedboats. But Naog came early, before highwater, and so the 
seedboats were still full of grain. During floodwater, they could 
neither grind the grain into flour nor build cooking fires, and thus 
had to eat the seeds in raw handfuls. Thus it was forbidden to spill 
blood on the grain, even birthblood; no one would touch grain that 
had human blood on it, for that was the juice of the forbidden 
fruit. 
This was why Naog's mother, Lewik, could not hide alone in an 
enclosed seedboat for the birthing. Instead she had to give birth 
out in the open, on one of the dragonboats. She clung to a branch of 
a tether tree as two women on their own dragonboats held hers 
steady. From a near distance Naog's father, Twerk, could not hide 
his mortification that his new young wife was giving birth in full 
view, not only of the women, but of the men and boys of the tribe. 
Not that any but the youngest and stupidest of the men was overtly 
looking. Partly because of respect for the event of birth itself, 
and partly because of a keen awareness that Twerk could cripple any 
man of the Engu that he wanted to, the men paddled their boats 
toward the farthest tether trees, herding the boys along with them. 
There they busied themselves with the work of floodwater 
season--twining ropes and weaving baskets. 
Twerk himself, however, could not keep from looking. He finally left 
his dragonboat and climbed his tree and watched. The women had 
brought their dragonboats in a large circle around the woman in 
travail. Those with children clinging to them or bound to them kept 
their boats on the fringes--they would be little help, with their 
hands full already. It was the older women and the young girls who 
were in close, the older women to help, the younger ones to learn. 
But Twerk had no eyes for the other women today. It was his 
wide-eyed, sweating wife that he watched. It frightened him to see 
her in such pain, for Lewik was usually the healer, giving herbs and 
ground-up roots to others to take away pain or cure a sickness. It 
also bothered him to see that as she squatted on her dragonboat, 
clinging with both hands to the branch above her head, neither she 
nor any of the other women was in position to catch the baby when it 
dropped out. It would fall into the water, he knew, and it would 
die, and then he and everyone else would know that it had been wrong 
of him to marry this woman who should have been a servant of the 
crocodile god, the Great Derku. 
When he could not contain himself a moment longer, Twerk shouted to 
the women: "Who will catch the baby?" 
Oh, how they laughed at him, when at last they understood what he 
was saying. "Derku will catch him!" they retorted, jeering, and the 
men around him also laughed, for that could mean several things. It 
could mean that the god would provide for the child's safety, or it 
could mean that the flood would catch the child, for the flood was 
also called derkuwed, or dragonwater, partly because it was aswarm 
with crocodiles swept away from their usual lairs, and partly 
because the floodwater slithered down from the mountains like a 
crocodile sliding down into the water, quick and powerful and 
strong, ready to sweep away and swallow up the unwary. Derku will 
catch him indeed! 
    

The men began predicting what the child would be named. "He will be 
Rogogu, because we all laughed," said one. Another said, "It will be 
a girl and she will be named Mehug, because she will be spilled into 
the water as she plops out!" They guessed that the child would be 
named for the fact that Twerk watched the birth; for the branch that 
Lewik clung to or the tree that Twerk climbed; or for the 
dragonwater itself, into which they imagined the child spilling and 
then being drawn out with the embrace of the god still dripping from 
him. Indeed, because of this notion Derkuwed became a childhood 
nickname for Lewik's and Twerk's baby, and later it was one of the 
names by which his story was told over and over again in faraway 
lands that had never heard of dragonwater or seen a crocodile, but 
it was not his real name, not what his father gave him to be his 
man-name when he came of age. 
After much pushing, Lewik's baby finally emerged. First came the 
head, dangling between her ankles like the fruit of a tree--that was 
why the word for HEAD and was the same as the word for FRUIT in the 
language of the Derku people. Then as the newborn's head touched the 
bound reeds of the dragonboat, Lewik rolled her eyes in pain and 
waddled slowly backward, so that the baby flopped out of her body 
stretched along the length of the boat. He did not fall into the 
water, because his mother had made sure of it. 
"Little man!" cried all the women as soon as they saw the sex of the 
child. 
Lewik grunted out her firstborn's baby-name. "Glogmeriss," she said. 
GLOG meant "thorn" and MERISS meant "trouble"; together, they made 
the term that the Derku used for annoyances that turned out all 
right in the end, but which were quite painful at the time. There 
were some who thought that she wasn't naming the baby at all, but 
simply commenting on the situation, but it was the first thing she 
said and so it would be his name until he left the company of women 
and joined the men. 
As soon as the afterbirth dropped onto the dragonboat, all the other 
women paddled nearer--like a swarm of gnats, thought Twerk, still 
watching. Some helped Lewik pry her hands loose from the tree branch 
and lie down on her dragonboat. Others took the baby and passed it 
from hand to hand, each one washing a bit of the blood from the 
baby. The afterbirth got passed with the baby at first, often 
dropping into the floodwater, until at last it reached the cutting 
woman, who severed the umbilical cord with a flint blade. Twerk, 
seeing this for the first time, realized that this might be how he 
got his name, which meant "cutting" or "breaking." Had his father 
seen this remarkable thing, too, the women cutting a baby off from 
this strange belly-tail? No wonder he named him for it. 
But the thing that Twerk could not get out of his mind was the fact 
that his Lewik had taken off her napron in full view of the clan, 
and all the men had seen her nakedness, despite their efforts to 
pretend that they had not. Twerk knew that this would become a joke 
among the men, a story talked about whenever he was not with them, 
and this would weaken him and mean that he would never be the clan 
leader, for one can never give such respect to a man that one laughs 
about behind his back. 
Twerk could think of only one way to keep this from having the power 
to hurt him, and that was to confront it openly so that no one would 
laugh behind his back. "His name is Naog!" cried Twerk decisively, 
almost as soon as the baby was fully washed in river water and the 
placenta set loose to float away on the flood. 
"You are such a stupid man!" cried Lewik from her dragonboat. 
Everyone laughed, but in this case it was all right. Everyone knew 
Lewik was a bold woman who said whatever she liked to any man. That 
was why it was such a mark of honor that Twerk had chosen to take 
her as wife and she had taken him for husband--it took a strong man 
to laugh when his wife said disrespectful things to him. "Of course 
he's naog," she said. "All babies are born naked." 
"I call him Naog because YOU were naked in front of all the clan," 
answered Twerk. "Yes, I know you all looked when you thought I 
couldn't see," he chided the men. "I don't mind a bit. You all saw 
my Lewik naked when the baby came out of her--but what matters is 
that only I saw her naked when I put the baby in!" 
That made them all laugh, even Lewik, and the story was often 
repeated. Even before he became a man and gave up the baby-name 
Glogmeriss, Naog had often heard the tale of why he would have such 
a silly name--so often, in fact, that he determined that one day he 
would do such great deeds that when the people heard the word NAOG 
they would think first of him and his accomplishments, before they 
remembered that the name was also the word for the tabu condition of 
taking the napron off one's secret parts in public. 
As he grew up, he knew that the water of derkuwed on him as a baby 
had touched him with greatness. It seemed he was always taller than 
the other boys, and he reached puberty first, his young body 
powerfully muscled by the labor of dredging the canals right among 
the slaves of the dragon during mudwater season. He wasn't much more 
than twelve floodwaters old when the grown men began clamoring for 
him to be given his manhood journey early so that he could join them 
in slave raids--his sheer size would dishearten many an enemy, 
making them despair and throw down his club or his spear. But Twerk 
was adamant. He would not tempt Great Derku to devour his son by 
letting the boy get ahead of himself. Naog might be large of body, 
but that didn't mean that he could get away with taking a man's role 
before he had learned all the skills and lore that a man had to 
acquire in order to survive. 
This was all fine with Naog. He knew that he would have his place in 
the clan in due time. He worked hard to learn all the skills of 
manhood--how to fight with any weapon; how to paddle his dragonboat 
straight on course, yet silently; how to recognize the signs of the 
seasons and the directions of the stars at different hours of the 
night and times of the year; which wild herbs were good to eat, and 
which deadly; how to kill an animal and dress it so it would keep 
long enough to bring home for a wife to eat. Twerk often said that 
his son was as quick to learn things requiring wit and memory as to 
learn skills that depended only on size and strength and quickness. 
What Twerk did not know, what no one even guessed, was that these 
tasks barely occupied Naog's mind. What he dreamed of, what he 
thought of constantly, was how to become a great man so that his 
name could be spoken with solemn honor instead of a smile or 
laughter. 
One of Naog's strongest memories was a visit to the Great Derku in 
the holy pond at the very center of the great circular canals that 
linked all the Derku people together. Every year during the mud 
season, the first dredging was the holy pond, and no slaves were 
used for THAT. No, the Derku men and women, the great and the 
obscure, dredged the mud out of the holy pond, carried it away in 
baskets, and heap it up in piles that formed a round lumpen wall 
around the pond. As the dry season came, crocodiles a-wandering in 
search of water would smell the pond and come through the gaps in 
the wall to drink it and bathe in it. The crocodiles knew nothing of 
danger from coming within walls. Why would they have learned to fear 
the works of humans? What other people in all the world had ever 
built such a thing? So the crocodiles came and wallowed in the 
water, heedless of the men watching from trees. At the first full 
moon of the dry season, as the crocodiles lay stupidly in the water 
during the cool of night, the men dropped from the trees and quietly 
filled the gaps in the walls with earth. At dawn, the largest 
crocodile in the pond was hailed as Great Derku for the year. The 
rest were killed with spears in the bloodiest most wonderful 
festival of the year. 
The year that Naog turned six, the Great Derku was the largest 
crocodile that anyone could remember ever seeing. It was a dragon 
indeed, and after the men of raiding age came home from the blood 
moon festival full of stories about this extraordinary Great Derku, 
all the families in all the clans began bringing their children to 
see it. 
    

"They say it's a crocodile who was Great Derku many years ago," said 
Naog's mother. "He has returned to our pond in hopes of the 
offerings of manfruit that we used to give to the dragon. But some 
say he's the very one who was Great Derku the year of the 
forbidding, when he refused to eat any of the captives we offered 
him." 
"And how would they know?" said Twerk, ridiculing the idea. "Is 
there anyone alive now who was alive then, to recognize him? And how 
could a crocodile live so long?" 
"The Great Derku lives forever," said Lewik. 
"Yes, but the true dragon is the derkuwed, the water in flood," said 
Twerk, "and the crocodiles are only its children." 
To the child, Naog, these words had another meaning, for he had 
heard the word DERKUWED far more often in reference to himself, as 
his nickname, than in reference to the great annual flood. So to him 
it sounded as though his father was saying that HE was the true 
dragon, and the crocodiles were his children. Almost at once he 
realized what was actually meant, but the impression lingered in the 
back of his mind. 
"And couldn't the derkuwed preserve one of its children to come back 
to us to be our god a second time?" said Lewik. "Or are you suddenly 
a holy man who knows what the dragon is saying?" 
"All this talk about this Great Derku being one of the ancient ones 
brought back to us is dangerous," said Twerk. "Do you want us to 
return to the terrible days when we fed manfruit to the Great Derku? 
When our captives were all torn to pieces by the god, while WE, men 
and women alike, had to dig out all the canals without slaves?" 
"There weren't so many canals then," said Lewik. "Father said." 
"Then it must be true," said Twerk, "if your old father said it. So 
think about it. Why are there so many canals now, and why are they 
so long and deep? Because we put our captives to work dredging our 
canals and making our boats. What if the Great Derku had never 
refused to eat manfruit? We would not have such a great city here, 
and other tribes would not bring us gifts and even their own 
children as slaves. They can come and visit our captives, and even 
buy them back from us. That's why we're not hated and feared, but 
rather 
LOVED and feared in all the lands from the Nile to the Salty Sea." 
Naog knew that his father's manhood journey had been from the Salty 
Sea all the way up the mountains and across endless grasslands to 
the great river of the west. It was a legendary journey, fitting for 
such a large man. So Naog knew that he would have to undertake an 
even greater journey. But of that he said nothing. 
"But these people talking stupidly about this being that same Great 
Derku returned to us again--don't you realize that they will want to 
put it to the test again, and offer it manfruit? And what if the 
Great Derku EATS it this time? What do we do then, go back to doing 
all the dredging ourselves? Or let the canals fill in so we can't 
float the seedboats from village to village during the dry season, 
and so we have no defense from our enemies and no way to ride our 
dragonboats all year?" 
Others in the clan were listening to this argument, since there was 
little enough privacy under normal circumstances, and none at all 
when you spoke with a raised voice. So it was no surprise when they 
chimed in. One offered the opinion that the reason no manfruit 
should be offered to this Great Derku was because the eating of 
manfruit would give the Great Derku knowledge of all the thoughts of 
the people they ate. Another was afraid that the sight of a powerful 
creature eating the flesh of men would lead some of the young people 
to want to commit the unpardonable sin of eating that forbidden 
fruit themselves, and in that case all the Derku people would be 
destroyed. 
What no one pointed out was that in the old days, when they fed 
manfruit to the Great Derku, it wasn't JUST captives that were 
offered. During years of little rain or too much rain, the leader of 
each clan always offered his own eldest son as the first fruit, or, 
if he could not bear to see his son devoured, he would offer himself 
in his son's place--though some said that in the earliest times it 
was always the leader himself who was eaten, and they only started 
offering their sons as a cowardly substitute. By now everyone 
expected Twerk to be the next clan leader, and everyone knew that he 
doted on his Glogmeriss, his Naog-to-be, his Derkuwed, and that he 
would never throw his son to the crocodile god. Nor did any of them 
wish him to do so. A few people in the other clans might urge the 
test of offering manfruit to the Great Derku, but most of the people 
in all of the tribes, and all of the people in Engu clan, would 
oppose it, and so it would not happen. 
So it was with an assurance of personal safety that Twerk brought 
his firstborn son with him to see the Great Derku in the holy pond. 
But six-year- old Glogmeriss, oblivious to the personal danger that 
would come from the return of human sacrifice, was terrified at the 
sight of the holy pond itself. It was surrounded by a low wall of 
dried mud, for once the crocodile had found its way to the water 
inside, the gaps in the wall were closed. But what kept the Great 
Derku inside was not just the mud wall. It was the row on row of 
sharpened horizontal stakes pointing straight inward, set into the 
mud and lashed to sharp vertical stakes about a hand's-breadth back 
from the point. The captive dragon could neither push the stakes out 
of the way nor break them off. Only when the floodwater came and the 
river spilled over the top of the mud wall and swept it away, stakes 
and all, would that year's Great Derku be set free. Only rarely did 
the Great Derku get caught on the stakes and die, and when it 
happened it was regarded as a very bad omen. 
This year, though, the wall of stakes was not widely regarded as 
enough assurance that the dragon could not force his way out, he was 
so huge and clever and strong. So men stood guard constantly, spears 
in hand, ready to prod the Great Derku and herd it back into place, 
should it come dangerously close to escaping. 
The sight of spikes and spears was alarming enough, for it looked 
like war to young Glogmeriss. But he soon forgot those puny sticks 
when he caught sight of the Great Derku himself, as he shambled up 
on the muddy, grassy shore of the pond. Of course Glogmeriss had 
seen crocodiles all his life; one of the first skills any child, 
male or female, had to learn was how to use a spear to poke a 
crocodile so it would leave one's dragonboat--and therefore one's 
arms and legs--in peace. This crocodile, though, this dragon, this 
god, was so huge that Glogmeriss could easily imagine it swallowing 
him whole without having to bite him in half or even chew. 
Glogmeriss gasped and clung to his father's hand. 
"A giant indeed," said his father. "Look at those legs, that 
powerful tail. But remember that the Great Derku is but a weak child 
compared to the power of the flood." 
Perhaps because human sacrifice was still on his mind, Twerk then 
told his son how it had been in the old days. "When it was a captive 
we offered as manfruit, there was always a chance that the god would 
let him live. Of course, if he clung to the stakes and refused to go 
into the pond, we would never let him out alive--we poked him with 
our spears. But if he went boldly into the water so far that it 
covered his head completely, and then came back out alive and made 
it back to the stakes without the Great Derku taking him and eating 
him, well, then, we brought him out in great honor. We said that his 
old life ended in that water, that the man we had captured had been 
buried in the holy pond, and now he was born again out of the flood. 
He was a full member of the tribe then, of the same clan as the man 
who had captured him. But of course the Great Derku almost never let 
anyone out alive, because we always kept him hungry." 
"YOU poked him with your spear?" asked Glogmeriss. 
    

"Well, not me personally. When I said that WE did it, I meant of 
course the men of the Derku. But it was long before I was born. It 
was in my grandfather's time, when he was a young man, that there 
came a Great Derku who wouldn't eat any of the captives who were 
offered to him. No one knew what it meant, of course, but all the 
captives were coming out and expecting to be adopted into the tribe. 
But if THAT had happened, the captives would have been the largest 
clan of all, and where would we have found wives for them all? So 
the holy men and the clan leaders realized that the old way was 
over, that the god no longer wanted manfruit, and therefore those 
who survived after being buried in the water of the holy pond were 
NOT adopted into the Derku people. But we did keep them alive and 
set them to work on the canals. That year, with the captives working 
alongside us, we dredged the canals deeper than ever, and we were 
able to draw twice the water from the canals into the fields of 
grain during the dry season, and when we had a bigger harvest than 
ever before, we had hands enough to weave more seedboats to contain 
it. Then we realized what the god had meant by refusing to eat the 
manfruit. Instead of swallowing our captives into the belly of the 
water where the god lives, the god was giving them all back to us, 
to make us rich and strong. So from that day on we have fed no 
captives to the Great Derku. Instead we hunt for meat and bring it 
back, while the women and old men make the captives do the labor of 
the city. In those days we had one large canal. Now we have three 
great canals encircling each other, and several other canals cutting 
across them, so that even in the dryest season a Derku man can glide 
on his dragonboat like a crocodile from any part of our land to any 
other, and never have to drag it across dry earth. This is the 
greatest gift of the dragon to us, that we can have the labor of our 
captives instead of the Great Derku devouring them himself." 
"It's not a bad gift to the captives, either," said Glogmeriss. "Not 
to die." 
Twerk laughed and rubbed his son's hair. "Not a bad gift at that," 
he said. 
"Of course, if the Great Derku really loved the captives he would 
let them go home to their families." 
Twerk laughed even louder. "They have no families, foolish boy," he 
said. "When a man is captured, he is dead as far as his family is 
concerned. His woman marries someone else, his children forget him 
and call another man father. He has no more home to return to." 
"Don't some of the ugly-noise people buy captives back?" 
"The weak and foolish ones do. The gold ring on my arm was the price 
of a captive. The father-of-all priest wears a cape of bright 
feathers that was the ransom of a boy not much older than you, not 
long after you were born. But most captives know better than to hope 
for ransom. What does THEIR tribe have that we want?" 
"I would hate to be a captive, then," said Glogmeriss. "Or would YOU 
be weak and foolish enough to ransom me?" 
"You?" Twerk laughed out loud. "You're a Derku man, or will be. We 
take captives wherever we want, but where is the tribe so bold that 
it dares to take one of US? No, we are never captives. And the 
captives we take are lucky to be brought out of their poor, 
miserable tribes of wandering hunters or berry-pickers and allowed 
to live here among wall-building men, among canal- digging people, 
where they don't have to wander in search of food every day, where 
they get plenty to eat all year long, twice as much as they ever ate 
before." 
"I would still hate to be one of them," said Glogmeriss. "Because 
how could you ever do great things that everyone will talk about and 
tell stories about and remember, if you're a captive?" 
All this time that they stood on the wall and talked, Glogmeriss 
never took his eyes off the Great Derku. It was a terrible creature, 
and when it yawned it seemed its mouth was large enough to swallow a 
tree. Ten grown men could ride on its back like a dragonboat. Worst 
of all were the eyes, which seemed to stare into a man's heart. It 
was probably the eyes of the dragon that gave it its name, for DERKU 
could easily have originated as a shortened form of DERK-UNT, which 
meant "one who sees." When the ancient ancestors of the Derku people 
first came to this floodplain, the crocodiles floating like logs on 
the water must have fooled them. They must have learned to look for 
eyes on the logs. "Look!" the watcher would cry. "There's one with 
eyes! Derk-unt!" They said that if you looked in the dragon's eyes, 
he would draw you toward him, within reach of his huge jaws, within 
reach of his curling tail, and you would never even notice your 
danger, because his eyes held you. Even when the jaws opened to show 
the pink mouth, the teeth like rows of bright flame ready to burn 
you, you would look at that steady, all-knowing, wise, amused, and 
coolly angry eye. 
That was the fear that filled Glogmeriss the whole time he stood on 
the wall beside his father. For a moment, though, just after he 
spoke of doing great things, a curious change came over him. For a 
moment Glogmeriss stopped fearing the Great Derku, and instead 
imagined that he WAS the giant crocodile. Didn't a man paddle his 
dragonboat by lying on his belly straddling the bundled reeds, 
paddling with his hands and kicking with his feet just as a 
crocodile did under the water? So all men became dragons, in a way. 
And Glogmeriss would grow up to be a large man, everyone said so. 
Among men he would be as extraordinary as the Great Derku was among 
crocodiles. Like the god, he would seem dangerous and strike fear 
into the hearts of smaller people. And, again like the god, he would 
actually be kind, and not destroy them, but instead help them and do 
good for them. 
Like the river in flood. A frightening thing, to have the water rise 
so high, sweeping away the mud hills on which they had built the 
seedboats, smearing the outsides of them with sun-heated tar so they 
would be watertight when the flood came. Like the Great Derku, the 
flood seemed to be a destroyer. And yet when the water receded, the 
land was wet and rich, ready to receive the seed and give back huge 
harvests. The land farther up the slopesof the mountains was salty 
and stony and all that could grow on it was grass. It was here in 
the flatlands where the flood tore through like a mad dragon that 
the soil was rich and trees could grow. 
I will BE the Derkuwed. Not as a destroyer, but as a lifebringer. 
The real Derku, the true dragon, could never be trapped in a cage as 
this poor crocodile has been. The true dragon comes like the flood 
and tears away the walls and sets the Great Derku crocodile free and 
makes the soil wet and black and rich. Like the river, I will be 
another tool of the god, another manifestation of the power of the 
god in the world. If that was not what the dragon of the deep heaven 
of the sea intended, why would he have make Glogmeriss so tall and 
strong? 
This was still the belief in his heart when Glogmeriss set out on 
his manhood journey at the age of fourteen. He was already the 
tallest man in his clan and one of the tallest among all the Derku 
people. He was a giant, and yet well-liked because he never used his 
strength and size to frighten other people into doing what he 
wanted; on the contrary, he seemed always to protect the weaker 
boys. Many people felt that it was a shame that when he returned 
from his manhood journey, the name he would be given was a silly one 
like Naog. But when they said as much in Glogmeriss's hearing, he 
only laughed at them and said, "The name will only be silly if it is 
borne by a silly man. I hope not to be a silly man." 
Glogmeriss's father had made his fame by taking his manhood journey 
from the Salty Sea to the Nile. Glogmeriss's journey therefore had 
to be even more challenging and more glorious. He would go south and 
east, along the crest of the plateau until he reached the legendary 
place called the Heaving Sea, where the gods that dwelt in its deep 
heaven were so restless that the water splashed onto the shore in 
great waves all the time, even when there was no wind. If there was 
such a sea, Glogmeriss would find it. When he came back as a man 
with such a tale, they would call him Naog and none of them would 
laugh. 
    

Kemal Akyazi knew that Atlantis had to be there under the waters of 
the Red Sea; but why hadn't Pastwatch found it? The answer was 
simple enough. The past was huge, and while the TruSite I had been 
used to collect climatalogical information, the new machines that 
were precise enough that could track individual human beings would 
never have been used to look at oceans where nobody lived. Yes, the 
Tempoview had explored the Bering Strait and the English Channel, 
but that was to track long-known-of migrations. There was no such 
migration in the Red Sea. Pastwatch had simply never looked through 
their precise new machines to see what was under the water of the 
Red Sea in the waning centuries of the last Ice Age. And they never 
WOULD look, either, unless someone gave them a compelling reason. 
Kemal understood bureaucracy enough to know that he, a student 
meteorologist, would hardly be taken seriously if he brought an 
Atlantis theory to Pastwatch--particularly a theory that put 
Atlantis in the Red Sea of all places, and fourteen thousand years 
ago, no less, long before civilizations arose in Sumeria or Egypt, 
let alone China or the Indus Valley or among the swamps of 
Tehuantapec. 
Yet Kemal also knew that the setting would have been right for a 
civilization to grow in the marshy land of the Mits'iwa Channel. 
Though there weren't enough rivers flowing into the Red Sea to fill 
it at the same rate as the world ocean, there were still rivers. For 
instance, the Zula, which still had enough water to flow even today, 
watered the whole length of the Mits'iwa Plain and flowed down into 
the rump of the Red Sea near Mersa Mubarek. And, because of the 
different rainfall patterns of that time, there was a large and 
dependable river flowing out of the Assahara basin. Assahara was now 
a dry valley below sea level, but then would have been a freshwater 
lake fed by many rivers and spilling over the lowest point into the 
Mits'iwa Channel. The river meandered along the nearly level 
Mits'iwa Plain, with some branches of it joining the Zula River, and 
some wandering east and north to form several mouths in the Red Sea. 

Thus dependable sources of fresh water fed the area, and in rainy 
season the Zula, at least, would have brought new silt to freshen 
the soil, and in all seasons the wandering flatwater rivers would 
have provided a means of transportation through the marshes. The 
climate was also dependably warm, with plenty of sunlight and a long 
growing season. There was no early civilization that did not grow up 
in such a setting. There was no reason such a civilization might not 
have grown up then. 
Yes, it was six or seven thousand years too early. But couldn't it 
be that it was the very destruction of Atlantis that convinced the 
survivors that the gods did not want human beings to gather together 
in cities? Weren't there hints of that anti-civilization bias 
lingering in many of the ancient religions of the Middle East? What 
was the story of Cain and Abel, if not a metaphorical expression of 
the evil of the city-dweller, the farmer, the brother-killer who is 
judged unworthy by the gods because he does not wander with his 
sheep? Couldn't such stories have circulated widely in those ancient 
times? That would explain why the survivors of Atlantis hadn't 
immediately begun to rebuild their civilization at another site: 
They knew that the gods forbade it, that if they built again their 
city would be destroyed again. So they remembered the stories of 
their glorious past, and at the same time condemned their ancestors 
and warned everyone they met against people gathering together to 
build a city, making people yearn for such a place and fear it, both 
at once. 
Not until a Nimrod came, a tower-builder, a Babel-maker who defied 
the old religion, would the ancient proscription be overcome at last 
and another city rise up, in another river valley far in time and 
space from Atlantis, but remembering the old ways that had been 
memorialized in the stories of warning and, as far as possible, 
replicating them. We will build a tower so high that it CAN'T be 
immersed. Didn't Genesis link the flood with Babel in just that way, 
complete with the nomad's stern disapproval of the city? This was 
the story that survived in Mesopotamia--the tale of the beginning of 
city life there, but with clear memories of a more ancient 
civilization that had been destroyed in a flood. 
A more ancient civilization. The golden age. The giants who once 
walked the earth. Why couldn't all these stories be remembering the 
first human civilization, the place where the city was invented? 
Atlantis, the city of the Mits'iwa plain. 
But how could he prove it without using the Tempoview? And how could 
he get access to one of those machines without first convincing 
Pastwatch that Atlantis was really in the Red Sea? It was circular, 
with no way out. 
Until he thought: Why do large cities form in the first place? 
Because there are public works to do that require more than a few 
people to accomplish them. Kemal wasn't sure what form the public 
works might take, but surely they would have been something that 
would change the face of the land obviously 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 was 
assigned to do and began poring over the old TruSite I recordings. 
He concentrated on the last few centuries 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. 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 houses. 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 one of the Tempoviews, but the still-newer 
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 the reed buildings weren't 
houses at all. They were silos for the storage of grain, built 
watertight so that they would float during the flood season. The 
Atlanteans slept under the open air during the dry season, and in 
the flood season they slept on their tiny reed boats. 
Kemal was brought into Pastwatch and made head of the vast new 
Atlantis project. This was the seminal culture of all cultures in 
the old world, and a hundred researchers examined every stage of its 
development. This methodical work, however, was not for Kemal. As 
always, it was the grand legend that drew him. He spent every moment 
he could spare away from the management of the project and devoted 
it to the search for Noah, for Gilgamesh, for the great man who rode 
out the flood and whose story lived in memory for thousands of 
years. There had to be a real original, and Kemal would find him. 
    

The flood season was almost due when Glogmeriss took his journey 
that would make him into a man named Naog. It was a little early for 
him, since he was born during the peak of the flood, but everyone in 
the clan agreed with Twerk that it was better for a manling so 
well-favored to be early than late, and if he wasn't already up and 
out of the flood plain before the rains came, then he'd have to wait 
months before he could safely go. And besides, as Twerk pointed out, 
why have a big eater like Glogmeriss waiting out the flood season, 
eating huge handfuls of grain. People listened happily to Twerk's 
argument, because he was known to be a generous, wise, good-humored 
man, and everyone expected him to be named clan leader when sweet 
old ailing Dheub finally died. 
Getting above the flood meant walking up the series of slight 
inclines leading to the last sandy shoulder, where the land began to 
rise more steeply. Glogmeriss had no intention of climbing any 
higher than that. His father's journey had taken him over those 
ridges and on to the great river Nile, but there was no reason for 
Glogmeriss to clamber through rocks when he could follow the edge of 
the smooth, grassy savannah. He was high enough to see the vast 
plain of the Derku lands stretching out before him, and the land was 
open enough that no cat or pack of dogs could creep up on him 
unnoticed, let alone some hunter of another tribe. 
How far to the Heaving Sea? Far enough that no one of the Derku 
tribe had ever seen it. But they knew it existed, because when they 
brought home captives from tribes to the south, they heard tales of 
such a place, and the farther south the captives came from, the more 
vivid and convincing the tales became. Still, none of them had ever 
seen it with their own eyes. So it would be a long journey, 
Glogmeriss knew that. And all the longer because it would be on 
foot, and not on his dragonboat. Not that Derku men were any weaker 
or slower afoot than men who lived above the flood--on the contrary, 
they had to be fleet indeed, as well as stealthy, to bring home 
either captives or meat. So the boys' games included footracing, and 
while Glogmeriss was not the fastest sprinter, no one could match 
his long-legged stride for sheer endurance, for covering ground 
quickly, on and on, hour after hour. 
What set the bodies of the Derku people apart from other tribes, 
what made them recognizable in an instant, was the massive 
development of their upper bodies from paddling dragonboats hour 
after hour along the canals or through the floods. It wasn't just 
paddling, either. It was the heavy armwork of cutting reeds and 
binding them into great sheaves to be floated home for making boats 
and ropes and baskets. And in older times, they would also have 
developed strong arms and backs from dredging the canals that 
surrounded and connected all the villages of the great Derku city. 
Slaves did most of that now, but the Derku took great pride in never 
letting their slaves be stronger than they were. Their shoulders and 
chests and arms and backs were almost monstrous compared to those of 
the men and women of other tribes. And since the Derku ate better 
all year round than people of other tribes, they tended to be 
taller, too. Many tribes called them giants, and others called them 
the sons and daughters of the gods, they looked so healthy and 
strong. And of all the young Derku men, there was none so tall and 
strong and healthy as Glogmeriss, the boy they called Derkuwed, the 
man who would be Naog. 
So as Glogmeriss loped along the grassy rim of the great plain, he 
knew he was in little danger from human enemies. Anyone who saw him 
would think: There is one of the giants, one of the sons of the 
crocodile god. Hide, for he might be with a party of raiders. Don't 
let him see you, or he'll take a report back to his people. Perhaps 
one man in a pack of hunters might say, "He's alone, we can kill 
him," but the other hunters would jeer at the one who spoke so 
rashly. "Look, fool, he a javelin in his hands and three tied to his 
back. Look at his arms, his shoulders--do you think he can't put his 
javelin through your heart before you got close enough to throw a 
rock at him? Let him be. Pray for a great cat to find him in the 
night." 
That was Glogmeriss's only real danger. He was too high into the dry 
lands for crocodiles, and he could run fast enough to climb a tree 
before any pack of dogs or wolves could bring him down. But there 
was no tree that would give a moment's pause to one of the big cats. 
No, if one of THEM took after him, it would be a fight. But 
Glogmeriss had fought cats before, on guard duty. Not the giants 
that could knock a man's head off with one blow of its paw, or take 
his whole belly with one bite of its jaws, but still, they were big 
enough, prowling around the outside of the clan lands, and 
Glogmeriss had fought them with a hand javelin and brought them down 
alone. He knew something of the way they moved and thought, and he 
had no doubt that in a contest with one of the big cats, he would at 
least cause it grave injury before it killed him. 
Better not to meet one of them, though. Which meant staying well 
clear of any of the herds of bison or oxen, antelope or horses that 
the big cats stalked. Those cats would never have got so big waiting 
around for lone humans--it was herds they needed, and so it was 
herds that Glogmeriss did NOT need. 
To his annoyance, though, one came to HIM. He had climbed a tree to 
sleep the night, tying himself to the trunk so he wouldn't fall out 
in his sleep. He awoke to the sound of nervous lowing and a few 
higher-pitched, anxious moos. Below him, milling around in the first 
grey light of the coming dawn, he could make out the shadowy shapes 
of oxen. He knew at once what had happened. They caught scent of a 
cat and began to move away in the darkness, shambling in fear and 
confusion in the near darkness. They had not run because the cat 
wasn't close enough to cause a panic in the herd. With luck it would 
be one of the smaller cats, and when it saw that they knew it was 
there, it would give up and go away. 
But the cat had not given up and gone away, or they wouldn't still 
be so frightened. Soon the herd would have enough light to see the 
cat that must be stalking them, and then they WOULD run, leaving 
Glogmeriss behind in a tree. Maybe the cat would go in full pursuit 
of the running oxen, or maybe it would notice the lone man trapped 
in a tree and decide to go for the easier, smaller meal. 
I wish I were part of this herd, thought Glogmeriss. Then there'd be 
a chance. I would be one of many, and even if the cat brought one of 
us down, it might not be me. As a man alone, it's me or the cat. 
Kill or die. I will fight bravely, but in this light I might not get 
a clear sight of the cat, might not be able to see in the rippling 
of its muscles where it will move next. And what if it isn't alone? 
What if the reason these oxen are so frightened yet unwilling to 
move is that they know there's more than one cat and they have no 
idea in which direction safety can be found? 
Again he thought, I wish I were part of this herd. And then he 
thought, Why should I think such a foolish thought twice, unless the 
god is telling me what to do? Isn't that what this journey is for, 
to find out if there is a god who will lead me, who will protect me, 
who will make me great? There's no greatness in having a cat 
eviscerate you in one bite. Only if you live do you become a man of 
stories. Like Gweia--if she had mounted the crocodile and it had 
thrown her off and devoured her, who would ever have heard her name? 

There was no time to form a plan, except the plan that formed so 
quickly that it might have been the god putting it there. He would 
ride one of these oxen as Gweia rode the crocodile. It would be easy 
enough to drop out of the tree onto an ox's back--hadn't he played 
with the other boys, year after year, jumping from higher and higher 
branches to land on a dragonboat that was drifting under the tree? 
An ox was scarcely less predictable than a dragonboat on a current. 
The only difference was that when he landed on the ox's back, it 
would not bear him as willingly as a dragonboat. Glogmeriss had to 
hope that, like Gweia's crocodile frightened of the flood, the ox he 
landed on would be more frightened of the cat than of the sudden 
burden on his back. 
    

He tried to pick well among the oxen within reach of the branches of 
the tree. He didn't want a cow with a calf running alongside--that 
would be like begging the cats to come after him, since such cows 
were already the most tempting targets. But he didn't want a bull, 
either, for he doubted it would have the patience to bear him. 
And there was his target, a fullsized cow but with no calf leaning 
against it, under a fairly sturdy branch. Slowly, methodically, 
Glogmeriss untied himself from the tree, cinched the bindings of his 
javelins and his flintsack and his grainsack, and drew his loincloth 
up to hold his genitals tight against his body, and then crept out 
along the branch until he was as nearly over the back of the cow he 
had chosen as possible. The cow was stamping and snorting now--they 
all were, and in a moment they would bolt, he knew it--but it held 
still as well as a bobbing dragonboat, and so Glogmeriss took aim 
and jumped, spreading his legs to embrace the animal's back, but not 
SO wide that he would slam his crotch against the bony ridge of its 
spine. 
He landed with a grunt and immediately lunged forward to get his 
arms around the ox's neck, just like gripping the stem of the 
dragonboat. The beast immediately snorted and bucked, but its 
bobbing was no worse than the dragonboat ducking under the water at 
the impact of a boy on its back. Of course, the dragonboat stopped 
bobbing after a moment, while this ox would no doubt keep trying to 
be rid of him until he was gone, bucking and turning, bashing its 
sides into other oxen. 
But the other animals were already so nervous that the sudden panic 
of Glogmeriss's mount was the trigger that set off the stampede. 
Almost at once the herd mentality took over, and the oxen set out in 
a headlong rush all in the same direction. Glogmeriss's cow didn't 
forget the burden on her back, but now she responded to her fear by 
staying with the herd. It came as a great relief to Glogmeriss when 
she leapt out and ran among the other oxen, in part because it meant 
that she was no longer trying to get him off her back, and in part 
because she was a good runner and he knew that unless she swerved to 
the edge of the herd where a cat could pick her off, both she and he 
would be safe. 
Until the panic stopped, of course, and then Glogmeriss would have 
to figure out a way to get OFF the cow and move away without being 
gored or trampled to death. Well, one danger at a time. And as they 
ran, he couldn't help but feel the sensations of the moment: The 
prickly hair of the ox's back against his belly and legs, the way 
her muscles rippled between his legs and within the embrace of his 
arms, and above all the sheer exhilaration of moving through the air 
at such a speed. Has any man ever moved as fast over the ground as I 
am moving now? he wondered. No dragonboat has ever found a current 
so swift. 
It seemed that they ran for hours and hours, though when they 
finally came to a stop the sun was still only a palm's height above 
the mountains far across the plain to the east. As the running 
slowed to a jolting jog, and then to a walk, Glogmeriss kept waiting 
for his mount to remember that he was on her back and to start 
trying to get him off. But if she remembered, she must have decided 
she didn't mind, because when she finally came to a stop, still in 
the midst of the herd, she simply dropped her head and began to 
graze, making no effort to get Glogmeriss off her back. 
She was so calm--or perhaps like the others was simply so 
exhausted--that Glogmeriss decided that as long as he moved slowly 
and calmly he might be able to walk on out of the herd, or at least 
climb a tree and wait for them to move on. He knew from the roaring 
and screaming sounds he had heard near the beginning of the stampede 
that the cats--more than one--had found their meal, so the survivors 
were safe enough for now. 
Glogmeriss carefully let one leg slide down until he touched the 
ground. Then, smoothly as possible, he slipped off the cow's back 
until he was crouched beside her. She turned her head slightly, 
chewing a mouthful of grass. Her great brown eye regarded him 
calmly. 
"Thank you for carrying me," said Glogmeriss softly. 
She moved her head away, as if to deny that she had done anything 
special for him. 
"You carried me like a dragonboat through the flood," he said, and 
he realized that this was exactly right, for hadn't the stampede of 
oxen been as dangerous and powerful as any flood of water? And she 
had borne him up, smooth and safe, carrying him safely to the far 
shore. "The best of dragonboats." 
She lowed softly, and for a moment Glogmeriss began to think of her 
as being somehow the embodiment of the god--though it could not be 
the crocodile god that took this form, could it? But all thoughts of 
the animal's godhood were shattered when it started to urinate. The 
thick stream of ropey piss splashed into the grass not a span away 
from Glogmeriss's shoulder, and as the urine spattered him he could 
not help but jump away. Other nearby oxen mooed complainingly about 
his sudden movement, but his own cow seemed not to notice. The urine 
stank hotly, and Glogmeriss was annoyed that the stink would stay 
with him for days, probably. 
Then he realized that no COW could put a stream of urine between her 
forelegs. This animal was a bull after all. Yet it was scarcely 
larger than the normal cow, not bull-like at all. Squatting down, he 
looked closely, and realized that the animal had lost its testicles 
somehow. Was it a freak, born without them? No, there was a scar, a 
ragged sign of old injury. While still a calf, this animal had had 
its bullhood torn away. Then it grew to adulthood, neither cow nor 
bull. What purpose was there in life for such a creature as that? 
And yet if it had not lived, it could not have carried him through 
the stampede. A cow would have had a calf to slow it down; a bull 
would have flung him off easily. The god had prepared this creature 
to save him. It was not itself a god, of course, for such an 
imperfect animal could hardly be divine. But it was a god's tool. 
"Thank you," said Glogmeriss, to whatever god it was. "I hope to 
know you and serve you," he said. Whoever the god was must have 
known him for a long time, must have planned this moment for years. 
There was a plan, a destiny for him. Glogmeriss felt himself thrill 
inside with the certainty of this. 
I could turn back now, he thought, and I would have had the greatest 
manhood journey of anyone in the tribe for generations. They would 
regard me as a holy man, when they learned that a god had prepared 
such a beast as this to be my dragonboat on dry land. No one would 
say I was unworthy to be Naog, and no more Glogmeriss. 
But even as he thought this, Glogmeriss knew that it would be wrong 
to go back. The god had prepared this animal, not to make his 
manhood journey easy and short, but to make his long journey 
possible. Hadn't the ox carried him southeast, the direction he was 
already heading? Hadn't it brought him right along the very shelf of 
smooth grassland that he had already been running on? No, the god 
meant to speed him on his way, not to end his journey. When he came 
back, the story of the unmanned ox that carried him like a boat 
would be merely the first part of his story. They would laugh when 
he told them about the beast peeing on him. They would nod and 
murmur in awe as he told them that he realized that the god was 
helping him to go on, that the god had chosen him years before in 
order to prepare the calf that would be his mount. Yet this would 
all be the opening, leading to the main point of the story, the 
climax. And what that climax would be, what he would accomplish that 
would let him take on his manly name, Glogmeriss could hardly bear 
to wait to find out. 
Unless, of course, the god was preparing him to be a sacrifice. But 
the god could have killed him at any time. It could have killed him 
when he was born, dropping him into the water as everyone said his 
father had feared might happen. It could have let him die there at 
the tree, taken by a cat or trampled under the feet of the oxen. No, 
the god was keeping him alive for a purpose, for a great task. His 
triumph lay ahead, and whatever it was, it would be greater than his 
ride on the back of an ox. 
    

The rains came the next day, but Glogmeriss pressed on. The rain 
made it hard to see far ahead, but most of the animals stopped 
moving in the rain and so there wasn't as much danger to look out 
for. Sometimes the rain came down so thick and hard that Glogmeriss 
could hardly see a dozen steps ahead. But he ran on, unhindered. The 
shelf of land that he ran along was perfectly flat, neither uphill 
nor downhill, as level as water, and so he could lope along without 
wearying. Even when the thunder roared in the sky and lightning 
seemed to flash all around him, Glogmeriss did not stop, for he knew 
that the god that watched over him was powerful indeed. He had 
nothing to fear. And since he passed two burning trees, he knew that 
lightning could have struck him at any time, and yet did not, and so 
it was a second sign that a great god was with him. 
During the rains he cross many swollen streams, just by walking. 
Only once did he have to cross a river that was far too wide and 
deep and swift in flood for him to cross. But he plunged right in, 
for the god was with him. Almost at once he was swept off his feet, 
but he swam strongly across the current. Yet even a strong Derku man 
cannot swim forever, and it began to seem to Glogmeriss that he 
would never reach the other side, but rather would be swept down to 
the salt sea, where one day his body would wash to shore near a 
party of Derku raiders who would recognize from the size of his body 
that it was him. So, this is what happened to Twerk's son 
Glogmeriss. The flood took him after all. 
Then he bumped against a log that was also floating on the current, 
and took hold of it, and rolled up onto the top of it like a 
dragonboat. Now he could use all his strength for paddling, and soon 
he was across the current. He drew the log from the water and 
embraced it like a brother, lying beside it, holding it in the wet 
grass until the rising water began to lick at his feet again. Then 
he dragged the log with him to higher ground and placed it up in the 
notch of a tree where no flood would dislodge it. One does not 
abandon a brother to the flood. 
Three times the god has saved me, he thought as he climbed back up 
to the level shelf that was his path. From the tooth of the cat, 
from the fire of heaven, from the water of the flood. Each time a 
tree was part of it: The tree around which the herd of oxen gathered 
and from which I dropped onto the ox's back; the trees that died in 
flames from taking to themselves the bolts of lightning meant for 
me; and finally this log of a fallen tree that died in its home far 
up in the mountains in order to be my brother in the water of the 
flood. Is it a god of trees, then, that leads me on? But how can a 
god of trees be more powerful than the god of lightning or the god 
of the floods or even the god of sharp-toothed cats? No, trees are 
simply tools the god has used. The god flings trees about as easily 
as I fling a javelin. 
Gradually, over many days, the rains eased a bit, falling in steady 
showers instead of sheets. Off to his left, he could see that the 
plain was rising upcloser and closer to the smooth shelf along which 
he ran. On the first clear morning he saw that there was no more 
distant shining on the still waters of the Salty Sea--the plain was 
now higher than the level of that water; he had behind the only sea 
that the Derku people had ever seen. The Heaving Sea lay yet ahead, 
and so he ran on. 
The plain was quite high, but he was still far enough above it that 
he could see the shining when it came again on a clear morning. He 
had left one sea behind, and now, with the ground much higher, there 
was another sea. Could this be it, the Heaving Sea? 
He left the shelf and headed across the savannah toward the water. 
He did not reach it that day, but on the next afternoon he stood on 
the shore and knew that this was not the place he had been looking 
for. The water was far smaller than the Salty Sea, smaller even than 
the Sweetwater Sea up in the mountains from which the Selud River 
flowed. And yet when he dipped his finger into the water and tasted 
it, it WAS a little salty. Almost sweet, but salty nonetheless. Not 
good for drinking. That was obvious from the lack of animal tracks 
around the water. It must usually be saltier than this, thought 
Glogmeriss. It must have been freshened somewhat by the rains. 
Instead of returning to his path along the shelf by the route he had 
followed to get to this small sea, Glogmeriss struck out due south. 
He could see the shelf in the distance, and could see that by 
running south he would rejoin the level path a good way farther 
along. 
As he crossed a small stream, he saw animal prints again, and among 
them the prints of human feet. Many feet, and they were fresher than 
any of the animal prints. So fresh, in fact, that for all Glogmeriss 
knew they could be watching him right now. If he stumbled on them 
suddenly, they might panic, seeing a man as large as he was. And in 
this place what would they know of the Derku people? No raiders had 
ever come this far in search of captives, he was sure. That meant 
that they wouldn't necessarily hate him--but they wouldn't fear 
retribution from his tribe, either. No, the best course was for him 
to turn back and avoid them. 
But a god was protecting him, and besides, he had been without the 
sound of a human voice for so many days. If he did not carry any of 
his javelins, but left them all slung on his back, they would know 
he meant no harm and they would not fear him. So there at the 
stream, he bent over, slipped off the rope holding his javelins, and 
untied them to bind them all together. 
As he was working, he heard a sound and knew without looking that he 
had been found. Perhaps they HAD been watching him all along. His 
first thought was to pick up his javelins and prepare for battle. 
But he did not know how many they were, or whether they were all 
around him, and in the dense brush near the river he might be 
surrounded by so many that they could overwhelm him easily, even if 
he killed one or two. For a moment he thought, The god protects me, 
I could kill them all. But then he rejected that idea. He had killed 
nothing on this journey, not even for meat, eating only the grain he 
carried with him and such berries and fruits and roots and greens 
and mushrooms as he found along the way. Should he begin now, 
killing when he knew nothing about these people? Perhaps meeting 
them was what the god had brought him here to do. 
So a slowly, carefully finished binding the javelins and then slung 
them up onto his shoulder, being careful never to hold the javelins 
in a way that might make his watcher or watchers think that he was 
making them ready for battle. Then, his hands empty and his weapons 
bound to his back, he splashed through the stream and followed the 
many footprints on the far side. 
He could hear feet padding along behind him--more than one person, 
too, from the sound. They might be coming up behind him to kill him, 
but it didn't sound as if they were trying to overtake him, or to be 
stealthy, either. They must know that he could hear them. But 
perhaps they thought he was very stupid. He had to show them that he 
did not turn to fight them because he did not want to fight, and not 
because he was stupid or afraid. 
To show them he was not afraid, he began to sing the song of the dog 
who danced with a man, which was funny and had a jaunty tune. And to 
show them he knew they were there, he bent over as he walked, 
scooped up a handful of damp soil, and flung it lightly over his 
shoulder. 
The sound of sputtering outrage told him that the god had guided his 
lump of mud right to its target. He stopped and turned to find four 
men following him, one of whom was brushing dirt out of his face, 
cursing loudly. The others looked uncertain whether to be angry at 
Glogmeriss for flinging dirt at them or afraid of him because he was 
so large and strange and unafraid. 
Glogmeriss didn't want them to be either afraid or angry. So he let 
a slow smile come to his face, not a smile of derision, but rather a 
friendly smile that said, I mean no harm. To reinforce this idea, he 
held his hands out wide, palms facing the strangers. 
    

They understood him, and perhaps because of his smile began to see 
the humor in the situation. They smiled, too, and then, because the 
one who was hit with dirt was still complaining and trying to get it 
out of his eyes, they began to laugh at him. Glogmeriss laughed with 
them, but then walked slowly toward his victim and, carefully 
letting them all see what he was doing, took his waterbag from his 
waist and untied it a little, showing them that water dropped from 
it. They uttered something in an ugly-sounding language and the one 
with dirt in his eyes stopped, leaned his head back, and stoically 
allowed Glogmeriss to bathe his eyes with water. 
When at last, dripping and chagrined, the man could see again, 
Glogmeriss flung an arm across his shoulder like a comrade, and then 
reached out for the man who seemed to be the leader. After a 
moment's hesitation, the man allowed Glogmeriss the easy embrace, 
and together they walked toward the main body of the tribe, the 
other two walking as closely as possible, behind and ahead, talking 
to Glogmeriss even though he made it plain that he did not 
understand. 
When they reached the others they were busy building a cookfire. All 
who could, left their tasks and came to gawk at the giant stranger. 
While the men who had found him recounted the tale, others came and 
touched Glogmeriss, especially his strong arms and chest, and his 
loincloth as well, since none of the men wore any kind of clothing. 
Glogmeriss viewed this with disgust. It was one thing for little 
boys to run around naked, but he knew that men should keep their 
privates covered so they wouldn't get dirty. What woman would let 
her husband couple with her, if he let any kind of filth get on his 
javelin? 
Of course, these men were all so ugly that no woman would want them 
anyway, and the women were so ugly that the only men who would want 
them would be these. Perhaps ugly people don't care about keeping 
themselves clean, thought Glogmeriss. But the women wore naprons 
made of woven grass, which looked softer than the beaten reeds that 
the Derku wove. So it wasn't that these people didn't know how to 
make cloth, or that the idea of wearing clothing had never occurred 
to them. The men were simply filthy and stupid, Glogmeriss decided. 
And the women, while not as filthy, must be just as stupid or they 
wouldn't let the men come near them. 
Glogmeriss tried to explain to them that he was looking for the 
Heaving Sea, and ask them where it was. But they couldn't understand 
any of the gestures and handsigns he tried, and his best efforts 
merely left them laughing to the point of helplessness. He gave up 
and made as if to leave, which immediately brought protests and an 
obvious invitation to dinner. 
It was a welcome thought, and their chief seemed quite anxious for 
him to stay. A meal would only make him stronger for the rest of his 
journey. 
He stayed for the meal, which was strange but good. And then, wooed 
by more pleas from the chief and many others, he agreed to sleep the 
night with them, though he halfway feared that in his sleep they 
planned to kill him or at least rob him. In the event, it turned out 
that they DID have plans for him, but it had nothing to do with 
killing. By morning the chief's prettiest daughter was Glogmeriss's 
bride, and even though she was as ugly as any of the others, she had 
done a good enough job of initiating him into the pleasures of men 
and women that he could overlook her thin lips and beakish nose. 
This was not supposed to happen on a manhood journey. He was 
expected to come home and marry one of the pretty girls from one of 
the other clans of the Derku people. Many a father had already been 
negotiating with Twerk or old Dheub with an eye toward getting 
Glogmeriss as a son-in-law. But what harm would it do if Glogmeriss 
had a bride for a few days with these people, and then slipped away 
and went home? No one among the Derku would ever meet any of these 
ugly people, and even if they did, who would care? You could do what 
you wanted with strangers. It wasn't as if they were people, like 
the Derku. 
But the days came and went, and Glogmeriss could not bring himself 
to leave. He was still enjoying his nights with Zawada--as near as 
he could come to pronouncing her name, which had a strange click in 
the middle of it. And as he began to learn to understand something 
of their language, he harbored a hope that they could tell him about 
the Heaving Sea and, in the long run, save him time. 
Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and Zawada's blood-days 
didn't come and so they knew she was pregnant, and then Glogmeriss 
didn't want to leave, because he had to see the child he had put 
into her. So he stayed, and learned to help with the work of this 
tribe. They found his size and prodigious strength very helpful, and 
Zawada was comically boastful about her husband's prowess--marrying 
him had brought her great prestige, even more than being the chief's 
daughter. And it gradually came to Glogmeriss's mind that if he 
stayed he would probably be chief of these people himself someday. 
At times when he thought of that, he felt a strange sadness, for 
what did it mean to be chief of these miserable ugly people, 
compared to the honor of being the most ordinary of the Derku 
people? How could being chief of these grub-eaters and gatherers 
compare to eating the common bread of the Derku and riding on a 
dragonboat through the flood or on raids? He enjoyed Zawada, he 
enjoyed the people of this tribe, but they were not his people, and 
he knew that he would leave. Eventually. 
Zawada's belly was beginning to swell when the tribe suddenly 
gathered their tools and baskets and formed up to begin another 
trek. They didn't move back north, however, the direction they had 
come from when Glogmeriss found them. Rather their migration was due 
south, and soon, to his surprise, he found that they were hiking 
along the very shelf of land that had been his path in coming to 
this place. 
It occurred to him that perhaps the god had spoken to the chief in 
the night, warning him to get Glogmeriss back on his abandoned 
journey. But no, the chief denied any dream. Rather he pointed to 
the sky and said it was time to go get--something. A word Glogmeriss 
had never heard before. But it was clearly some kind of food, 
because the adults nearby began laughing with anticipatory delight 
and pantomiming eating copious amounts of--something. 
Off to the northeast, they passed along the shores of another small 
sea. Glogmeriss asked if the water was sweet and if it had fish in 
it, but Zawada told him, sadly, that the sea was spoiled. "It used 
to be good," she said. "The people drank from it and swam in it and 
trapped fish in it, but it got poisoned." 
"How?" asked Glogmeriss. 
"The god vomited into it." 
"What god did that?" 
"The great god," she said, looking mysterious and amused. 
"How do you know he did?" asked Glogmeriss. 
"We saw," she said. "There was a terrible storm, with winds so 
strong they tore babies from their mothers' arms and carried them 
away and they were never seen again. My own mother and father held 
me between them and I wasn't carried off--I was scarcely more than a 
baby then, and I remember how scared I was, to have my parents 
crushing me between them while the wind screamed through the trees." 

"But a rainstorm would sweeten the water," said Glogmeriss. "Not 
make it salty." 
"I told you," said Zawada. "The god vomited into it." 
"But if you don't mean the rain, then what do you mean?" 
To which her only answer was a mysterious smile and a giggle. 
"You'll see," she said. 
And in the end, he did. Two days after leaving this second small sea 
behind, they rounded a bend and some of the men began to shinny up 
trees, looking off to the east as if they knew exactly what they'd 
see. "There it is!" they cried. "We can see it!" 
    

Glogmeriss lost no time in climbing up after them, but it took a 
while for him to know what it was they had seen. It wasn't till he 
climbed another tree the next morning, when they were closer and 
when the sun was shining in the east, that he realized that the vast 
plain opening out before them to the east wasn't a plain at all. It 
was water, shimmering strangely in the sunlight of morning. More 
water than Glogmeriss had ever imagined. And the reason the light 
shimmered that way was because the water was moving. It was the 
Heaving Sea. 
He came down from tree in awe, only to find the whole tribe watching 
him. When they saw his face, they burst into hysterical laughter, 
including even Zawada. Only now did it occur to him that they had 
understood him perfectly well on his first day with them, when he 
described the Heaving Sea. They had known where he was headed, but 
they hadn't told him. 
"There's the joke back on you!" cried the man in whose face 
Glogmeriss had thrown dirt on that first day. And now it seemed like 
perfect justice to Glogmeriss. He had played a joke, and they had 
played one back, an elaborate jest that required even his wife to 
keep the secret of the Heaving Sea from him. 
Zawada's father, the chief, now explained that it was more than a 
joke. "Waiting to show you the Heaving Sea meant that you would stay 
and marry Zawada and give her giant babies. A dozen giants like 
you!" 
Zawada grinned cheerfully. "If they don't kill me coming out, it'll 
be fine to have sons like yours will be!" 
Next day's journey took them far enough that they didn't have to 
climb trees to see the Heaving Sea, and it was larger than 
Glogmeriss had ever imagined. He couldn't see the end of it. And it 
moved all the time. There were more surprises when they got to the 
shore that night, however. For the sea was noisy, a great roaring, 
and it kept throwing itself at the shore and then retreating, 
heaving up and down. Yet the children were fearless--they ran right 
into the water and let the waves chase them to shore. The men and 
women soon joined them, for a little while, and Glogmeriss himself 
finally worked up the courage to let the water touch him, let the 
waves chase him. He tasted the water, and while it was saltier than 
the small seas to the northwest, it was nowhere near as salty as the 
Salt Sea. 
"This is the god that poisoned the little seas," Zawad explained to 
him. "This is the god that vomited into them." 
But Glogmeriss looked at how far the waves came onto the shore and 
laughed at her. "How could these heavings of the sea reach all the 
way to those small seas? It took days to get here from there." 
She grimaced at him. "What do you know, giant man? These waves are 
not the reason why this is called the Heaving Sea by those who call 
it that. These are like little butterfly flutters compared to the 
true heaving of the sea." 
Glogmeriss didn't understand until later in the day, as he realized 
that the waves weren't reaching as high as they had earlier. The 
beach sand was wet much higher up the shore than the waves could get 
to now. Zawada was delighted to explain the tides to him, how the 
sea heaved upward and downward, twice a day or so. "The sea is 
calling to the moon," she said, but could not explain what that 
meant, except that the tides were linked to the passages of the moon 
rather than the passages of the sun. 
As the tide ebbed, the tribe stopped playing and ran out onto the 
sand. With digging stones they began scooping madly at the sand. Now 
and then one of them would shout in triumph and hold up some ugly, 
stony, dripping object for admiration before dropping it into a 
basket. Glogmeriss examined them and knew at once that these things 
could not be stones--they were too regular, too symmetrical. It 
wasn't till one of the men showed him the knack of prying them open 
by hammering on a sharp wedgestone that he really understood, for 
inside the hard stony surface there was a soft, pliable animal that 
could draw its shell closed around it. 
"That's how it lives under the water," explained the man. "It's 
watertight as a mud-covered basket, only all the way around. Tight 
all the way around. So it keeps the water out!" 
Like the perfect seedboat, thought Glogmeriss. Only no boat of reeds 
could ever be made THAT watertight, not so it could be plunged 
underwater and stay dry inside. 
That night they built a fire and roasted the clams and mussels and 
oysters on the ends of sticks. They were tough and rubbery and they 
tasted salty--but Glogmeriss soon discovered that the very saltiness 
was the reason this was such a treat, that and the juices they 
released when you first chewed on them. Zawada laughed at him for 
chewing his first bite so long. "Cut it off in smaller bits," she 
said, "and then chew it till it stops tasting good and then swallow 
it whole." The first time he tried, it took a bit of doing to 
swallow it without gagging, but he soon got used to it and it WAS 
delicious. 
"Don't drink so much of your water," said Zawada. 
"I'm thirsty," said Glogmeriss. 
"Of course you are," she said. "But when we run out of fresh water, 
we have to leave. There's nothing to drink in this place. So drink 
only a little at a time, so we can stay another day." 
The next morning he helped with the clam-digging, and his powerful 
shoulders and arms allowed him to excel at this task, just as with 
so many others. But he didn't have the appetite for roasting them, 
and wandered off alone while the others feasted on the shore. They 
did their digging in a narrow inlet of the sea, where a long thin 
finger of water surged inward at high tide and then retreated almost 
completely at low tide. The finger of the sea seemed to point 
straight toward the land of the Derku, and it made Glogmeriss think 
of home. 
Why did I come here? Why did the god go to so much trouble to bring 
me? Why was I saved from the cats and the lightning and the flood? 
Was it just to see this great water and taste the salty meat of the 
clams? These are marvels, it's true, but no greater than the marvel 
of the castrated bull-ox that I rode, or the lightning fires, or the 
log that was my brother in the flood. Why would it please the god to 
bring me here? 
He heard footsteps and knew at once that it was Zawada. He did not 
look up. Soon he felt her arms come around him from behind, her 
swelling breasts pressed against his back. 
"Why do you look toward your home?" she asked softly. "Haven't I 
made you happy?" 
"You've made me happy," he said. 
"But you look sad." 
He nodded. 
"The gods trouble you," she said. "I know that look on your face. 
You never speak of it, but I know at such times you are thinking of 
the god who brought you here and wondering if she loved you or hated 
you." 
He laughed aloud. "Do you see inside my skin, Zawada?" 
"Not your skin," she said. "But I could see inside your loincloth 
when you first arrived, which is why I told my father to let me be 
the one to marry you. I had to beat up my sister before she would 
let me be the one to share your sleeping mat that night. She has 
never forgiven me. But I wanted your babies." 
Glogmeriss grunted. He had known about the sister's jealousy, but 
since she was ugly and he had never slept with her, her jealousy was 
never important to him. 
"Maybe the god brought you here to see where she vomited." 
That again. 
"It was in a terrible storm." 
"You told me about the storm," said Glogmeriss, not wanting to hear 
it all again. 
    

"When the storms are strong, the sea rises higher than usual. It 
heaved its way far up this channel. Much farther than this tongue of 
the sea reaches now. It flowed so far that it reached the first of 
the small seas and made it flow over and then it reached the second 
one and that, too, flowed over. But then the storm ceased and the 
water flowed back to where it was before, only so much salt water 
had gone into the small seas that they were poisoned." 
"So long ago, and yet the salt remains?" 
"Oh, I think the sea has vomited into them a couple more times 
sincethen. Never as strongly as that first time, though. You can see 
this channel--so much of the seawater flowed through here that it 
cut a channel in the sand. This finger of the sea is all that's left 
of it, but you can see the banks of it--like a dried-up river, you 
see? That was cut then, the ground used to be at the level of the 
rest of the valley there. The sea still reaches into that new 
channel, as if it remembered. Before, the shore used to be clear out 
there, where the waves are high. It's much better for clam-digging 
now, though, because this whole channel gets filled with clams and 
we can get them easily." 
Glogmeriss felt something stirring inside him. Something in what she 
had just said was very, very important, but he didn't know what it 
was. 
He cast his gaze off to the left, to the shelf of land that he had 
walked along all the way on his manhood journey, that this tribe had 
followed in coming here. The absolutely level path. 
Absolutely level. And yet the path was not more than three or four 
man-heights above the level of the Heaving Sea, while back in the 
lands of the Derku, the shelf was so far above the level of the Salt 
Sea that it felt as though you were looking down from a mountain. 
The whole plain was enormously wide, and yet it went so deep before 
reaching the water of the Salt Sea that you could see for miles and 
miles, all the way across. It was deep, that plain, a valley, 
really. A deep gouge cut into the earth. And if this shelf of land 
was truly level, the Heaving Sea was far, far higher. 
He thought of the floods. Thought of the powerful current of the 
flooding river that had snagged him and swept him downward. And then 
he thought of a storm that lifted the water of the Heaving Sea and 
sent it crashing along this valley floor, cutting a new channel 
until it reached those smaller seas, filling them with saltwater, 
causing THEM to flood and spill over. Spill over where? Where did 
their water flow? He already knew--they emptied down into the Salt 
Sea. Down and down and down. 
It will happen again, thought Glogmeriss. There will be another 
storm, and this time the channel will be cut deeper, and when the 
storm subsides the water will still flow, because now the channel 
will be below the level of the Heaving Sea at high tide. And at each 
high tide, more water will flow and the channel will get deeper and 
deeper, till it's deep enough that even at low tide the water will 
still flow through it, cutting the channel more and more, and the 
water will come faster and faster, and then the Heaving Sea will 
spill over into the great valley, faster and faster and faster. 
All this water then will spill out of the Heaving Sea and go down 
into the plain until the two seas are the same level. And once that 
happens, it will never go back. 
The lands of the Derku are far below the level of the new sea, even 
if it's only half as high as the waters of the Heaving Sea are now. 
Our city will be covered. The whole land. And it won't be a trickle. 
It will be a great bursting of water, a huge wave of water, like the 
first gush of the floodwater down the Selud River from the 
Sweetwater Sea. Just like that, only the Heaving Sea is far larger 
than the Sweetwater Sea, and its water is angry and poisonous. 
"Yes," said Glogmeriss. "I see what you brought me here to show me." 

"Don't be silly," said Zawada. "I brought you here to have you eat 
clams!" 
"I wasn't talking to you," said Glogmeriss. He stood up and left 
her, walking down the finger of the sea, where the tide was rising 
again, bringing the water lunging back up the channel, pointing like 
a javelin toward the heart of the Derku people. Zawada followed 
behind him. He didn't mind. 
Glogmeriss reached the waves of the rising tide and plunged in. He 
knelt down in the water and let a wave crash over him. The force of 
the water toppled him, twisted him until he couldn't tell which was 
was up and he thought he would drown under the water. But then the 
wave retreated again,leaving him in the shallow water on the shore. 
He crawled back out stayed there, the taste of salt on his lips, 
gasping for air, and then cried out, "Why are you doing this! Why 
are you doing this to my people!" 
Zawada stood watching him, and others of the tribe came to join her, 
to find out what the strange giant man was doing in the sea. 
Angry, thought Glogmeriss. The god is angry with my people. And I 
have been brought here to see just what terrible punishment the god 
has prepared for them. "Why?" he cried again. "Why not just break 
through this channel and send the flood and bury the Derku people in 
poisonous water? Why must I be shown this first? So I can save 
myself by staying high out of the flood's way? Why should I be saved 
alive, and all my family, all my friends be destroyed? What is their 
crime that I am not also guilty of? If you brought me here to save 
me, then you failed, God, because I refuse to stay, I will go back 
to my people and warn them all, I'll tell them what you're planning. 
You can't save me alone. When the flood comes I'll be right there 
with the rest of them. So to save me, you must save them all. If you 
don't like THAT, then you should have drowned me just now when you 
had the chance!" 
Glogmeriss rose dripping from the beach and began to walk, past the 
people, up toward the shelf of land that made the level highway back 
home to the Derku people. The tribe understood at once that he was 
leaving, and they began calling out to him, begging him to stay. 
"I can't," he said. "Don't try to stop me. Even the god can't stop 
me." 
They didn't try to stop him, not by force. But the chief ran after 
him, walked beside him--ran beside him, really, for that was the 
only way he could keep up with Glogmeriss's long-legged stride. 
"Friend, Son," said the chief. "Don't you know that you will be king 
of these people after me?" 
"A people should have a king who is one of their own." 
"But you ARE one of us now," said the chief. "The mightiest of us. 
You will make us a great people! The god has chosen you, do you 
think we can't see that? This is why the god brought you here, to 
lead us and make us great!" 
"No," said Glogmeriss. "I'm a man of the Derku people." 
"Where are they? Far from here. And there is my daughter with your 
first child in her womb. What do they have in Derku lands that can 
compare to that?" 
"They have the womb where I was formed," said Glogmeriss. "They have 
the man who put me there. They have the others who came from that 
woman and that man. They are my people." 
"Then go back, but not today! Wait till you see your child born. 
Decide then!" 
Glogmeriss stopped so abruptly that the chief almost fell over, 
trying to stop running and stay with him. "Listen to me, father of 
my wife. If you were up in the mountain hunting, and you looked down 
and saw a dozen huge cats heading toward the place where your people 
were living, would say to yourself, Oh, I suppose the god brought me 
here to save me? Or would you run down the mountain and warn them, 
and do all you could to fight off the cats and save your people?" 
"What is this story?" asked the chief. "There are no cats. You've 
seen no cats." 
"I've seen the god heaving in his anger," said Glogmeriss. "I've 
seen how he looms over my people, ready to destroy them all. A flood 
that will tear their flimsy reed boats to pieces. A flood that will 
come in a single great wave and then will never go away. Do you 
think I shouldn't warn my mother and father, my brothers and 
sisters, the friends of my childhood?" 
    

"I think you have new brothers and sisters, a new father and mother. 
The god isn't angry with US. The god isn't angry with you. We should 
stay together. Don't you WANT to stay with us and live and rule over 
us? You can be our king now, today. You can be king over me, I give 
you my place!" 
"Keep your place," said Glogmeriss. "Yes, a part of me wants to 
stay. A part of me is afraid. But that is the part of me that is 
Glogmeriss, and still a boy. If I don't go home and warn my people 
and show them how to save themselves from the god, then I will 
always be a boy, nothing but a boy, call me a king if you want, but 
I will be a boy-king, a coward, a child until the day I die. So I 
tell you now, it is the child who dies in this place, not the man. 
It was the child Glogmeriss who married Zawada. Tell her that a 
strange man named Naog killed her husband. Let her marry someone 
else, someone of her own tribe, and never think of Glogmeriss 
again." Glogmeriss kissed his father- in-law and embraced him. Then 
he turned away, and with his first step along the path leading back 
to the Derku people, he knew that he was truly Naog now, the man who 
would save the Derku people from the fury of the god. 
Kemal watched the lone man of the Engu clan as he walked away from 
the beach, as he conversed with his father-in-law, as he turned his 
face again away from the Gulf of Aden, toward the land of the doomed 
crocodile- worshippers whose god was no match for the forces about 
to be unleashed on them. This was the one, Kemal knew, for he had 
seen the wooden boat--more of a watertight cabin on a raft, 
actually, with none of this nonsense about taking animals two by 
two. This was the man of legends, but seeing his face, hearing his 
voice, Kemal was no closer to understanding him than he had been 
before. What can we see, using the TruSite II? Only what is visible. 
We may be able to range through time, to see the most intimate, the 
most terrible, the most horrifying, the most inspiring moments of 
human history, but we only see them, we only hear them, we are 
witnesses but we know nothing of the thing that matters most: 
motive. 
Why didn't you stay with your new tribe, Naog? They heeded your 
warning, and camped always on higher ground during the monsoon 
season. They lived through the flood, all of them. And when you went 
home and no one listened to your warnings, why did you stay? What 
was it that made you remain among them, enduring their ridicule as 
you built your watertight seedboat? You could have left at any 
time--there were others who cut themselves loose from their birth 
tribe and wandered through the world until they found a new home. 
The Nile was waiting for you. The grasslands of Arabia. They were 
already there, calling to you, even as your own homeland became 
poisonous to you. Yet you remained among the Engu, and by doing so, 
you not only gave the world an unforgettable story, you also changed 
the course of history. What kind of being is it who can change the 
course of history, just because he follows his own unbending will? 
***
It was on his third morning that Naog realized that he was not alone 
on his return journey. He awoke in his tree because he heard 
shuffling footsteps through the grass nearby. Or perhaps it was 
something else that woke him--some unhearable yearning that he 
nevertheless heard. He looked, and saw in the faint light of the 
thinnest crescent moon that a lone baboon was shambling along, lazy, 
staggering. No doubt an old male, thought Naog, who will soon be 
meat for some predator. 
Then his eyes adjusted and he realized that this lone baboon was not 
as close as he had thought, that in fact it was much bigger, much 
TALLER than he had thought. It was not male, either, but female, and 
far from being a baboon, it was a human, a pregnant woman, and he 
knew her now and shuddered at his own thought of her becoming the 
meal for some cat, some crocodile, some pack of dogs. 
Silently he unfastened himself from his sleeping tree and dropped to 
the ground. In moments he was beside her. 
"Zawada," he said. 
She didn't turn to look at him. 
"Zawada, what are you doing?" 
Now she stopped. "Walking," she said. 
"You're asleep," he said. "You're in a dream." 
"No, YOU'RE asleep," she said, giggling madly in her weariness. 
"Why have you come? I left you." 
"I know," she said. 
"I'm returning to my own people. You have to stay with yours." But 
he knew even as he said it that she could not go back there, not 
unless he went with her. Physically she was unable to go on by 
herself--clearly she had eaten nothing and slept little in three 
days. Why she had not died already, taken by some beast, he could 
not guess. But if she was to return to her people, he would have to 
take her, and he did not want to go back there. It made him very 
angry, and so his voice burned when he spoke to her. 
"I wanted to," she said. "I wanted to weep for a year and then make 
an image of you out of sticks and burn it." 
"You should have," he said. 
"Your son wouldn't let me." As she spoke, she touched her belly. 
"Son? Has some god told you who he is?" 
"He came to me himself in a dream, and he said, 'Don't let my father 
go without me.' So I brought him to you." 
"I don't want him, son OR daughter." But he knew even as he said it 
that it wasn't true. 
She didn't know it, though. Her eyes welled with tears and she sank 
down into the grass. "Good, then," she said. "Go on with your 
journey. I'm sorry the god led me near you, so you had to be 
bothered." She sank back in the grass. Seeing the faint gleam of 
light reflected from her skin awoke feelings that Naog was now 
ashamed of, memories of how she had taught him the easing of a man's 
passion. 
"I can't walk off and leave you." 
"You already did," she said. "So do it again. I need to sleep now." 
"You'll be torn by animals and eaten." 
"Let them," she said. "You never chose me, Derku man, I chose YOU. I 
invited this baby into my body. Now if we die here in the grass, 
what is that to you? All you care about is not having to watch. So 
don't watch. Go. The sky is getting light. Run on ahead. If we die, 
we die. We're nothing to you anyway." 
Her words made him ashamed. "I left you knowing you and the baby 
would be safe, at home. Now you're here and you aren't safe, and I 
can't walk away from you." 
"So run," she said. "I was your wife, and this was your son, but in 
your heart we're already dead anyway." 
"I didn't bring you because you'd have to learn the Derku language. 
It's much harder than your language." 
"I would have had to learn it anyway, you fool," she said. "The baby 
inside me is a Derku man like you. How would I get him to understand 
me, if I didn't learn Derku talk?" 
Naog wanted to laugh aloud at her hopeless ignorance. But then, how 
would she know? Naog had seen the children of captives and knew that 
in Derku lands they grew up speaking the Derku language, even when 
both parents were from another tribe that had not one word of Derku 
language in it. But Zawada had never seen the babies of strangers; 
her tribe captured no one, went on no raids, but rather lived at 
peace, moving from place to place, gathering whatever the earth or 
the sea had to offer them. How could she match even a small part of 
the great knowledge of the Derku, who brought the whole world within 
their city? 
    

He wanted to laugh, but he did not laugh. Instead he watched over 
her as she slept, as the day waxed and waned. As the sun rose he 
carried her to the tree to sleep in the shade. Keeping his eye open 
for animals prowling near her, he gathered such leaves and seeds and 
roots as the ground offered the traveler at this time of year. Twice 
he came back and found her breath rasping and noisy; then he made 
her wake enough to drink a little of his water, but she was soon 
asleep, water glistening on her chin. 
At last in the late afternoon, with the air was hot and still, he 
squatted down in the grass beside her and woke her for good, showing 
her the food. She ate ravenously, and when she was done, she 
embraced him and called him the best of the gods because he didn't 
leave her to die after all. 
"I'm not a god," he said, baffled. 
"All my people know you are a god, from a land of gods. So large, so 
powerful, so good. You came us so you could have a human baby. But 
this baby is only half human. How will he ever be happy, living 
among US, never knowing the gods?" 
"You've seen the Heaving Sea, and you call ME a god?" 
"Take me with you to the land of the Derku. Let me give birth to 
your baby there. I will leave it with your mother and your sisters, 
and I will go home. I know I don't belong among the gods, but my 
baby does." 
In his heart, Naog wanted to say yes, you'll stay only till the baby 
is born, and then you'll go home. But he remembered her patience as 
he learned the language of her people. He remembered the sweet 
language of the night, and the way he had to laugh at how she tried 
to act like a grown woman when she was only a child, and yet she 
couldn't act like a child because she was, after all, now a woman. 
Because of me she is a woman, thought Naog, and because of her and 
her people I will come home a man. Do I tell her she must go away, 
even though I know that the others will think she's ugly as I 
thought she was ugly? 
And she IS ugly, thought Naog. Our son, if he IS a son, will be ugly 
like her people, too. I will be ashamed of him. I will be ashamed of 
her. 
Is a man ashamed of his firstborn son? 
"Come home with me to the land of the Derku," said Naog. "We will 
tell them together about the Heaving Sea, and how one day soon it 
will leap over the low walls of sand and pour into this great plain 
in a flood that will cover the Derku lands forever. There will be a 
great migration. We will move, all of us, to the land my father 
found. The crocodiles live there also, along the banks of the Nile." 

"Then you will truly be the greatest among the gods," she said, and 
the worship in her eyes made him proud and ill-at-ease, both at 
once. Yet how could he deny that the Derku were gods? Compared to 
her poor tribe, they would seem so. Thousands of people living in 
the midst of their own canals; the great fields of planted grain 
stretching far in every direction; the great wall of earth 
surrounding the Great Derku; the seedboats scattered like strange 
soft boulders; the children riding their dragonboats through the 
canals; a land of miracles to her. Where else in all the world had 
so many people learned to live together, making great wealth where 
once there had been only savannah and floodplain? 
We live like gods, compared to other people. We come like gods out 
of nowhere, to carry off captives the way death carries people off. 
Perhaps that is what the life after death is like--the REAL gods 
using us to dredge their canals. Perhaps that is what all of human 
life is for, to create slaves for the gods. And what if the gods 
themselves are also raided by some greater beings yet, carrying THEM 
off to raise grain in some unimaginable garden? Is there no end to 
the capturing? 
There are many strange and ugly captives in Derku, thought Naog. Who 
will doubt me if I say that this woman is my captive? She doesn't 
speak the language, and soon enough she would be used to the life. I 
would be kind to her, and would treat her son well--I would hardly 
be the first man to father a child on a captive woman. 
The thought made him blush with shame. 
"Zawada, when you come to the Derku lands, you will come as my 
wife," he said. "And you will not have to leave. Our son will know 
his mother as well as his father." 
Her eyes glowed. "You are the greatest and kindest of the gods." 
"No," he said, angry now, because he knew very well just exactly how 
far from "great" and "kind" he really was, having just imagined 
bringing this sweet, stubborn, brave girl into captivity. "You must 
never call me a god again. Ever. There is only one god, do you 
understand me? And it is that god that lives inside the Heaving Sea, 
the one that brought me to see him and sent me back here to warn my 
people. Call no one else a god, or you can't stay with me." 
Her eyes went wide. "Is there room in the world for only one god?" 
"When did a crocodile ever bury a whole land under water forever?" 
Naog laughed scornfully. "All my life I have thought of the Great 
Derku as a terrible god, worthy of the worship of brave and terrible 
men. But the Great Derku is just a crocodile. It can be killed with 
a spear. Imagine stabbing the Heaving Sea. We can't even touch it. 
And yet the god can lift up that whole sea and pour it over the wall 
into this plain. THAT isn't just a god. That is GOD." 
She looked at him in awe; he wondered whether she understood. And 
then realized that she could not possibly have understood, because 
half of what he said was in the Derku language, since he didn't even 
know enough words in HER language to think of these thoughts, let 
alone say them. 
Her body was young and strong, even with a baby inside it, and the 
next morning she was ready to travel. He did not run now, but even 
so they covered ground quickly, for she was a sturdy walker. He 
began teaching her the Derku language as they walked, and she 
learned well, though she made the words sound funny, as so many 
captives did, never able to let go of the sounds of their native 
tongue, never able to pronounce the new ones. 
Finally he saw the mountains that separated the Derku lands from the 
Salty Sea, rising from the plain. "Those will be islands," said 
Naog, realizing it for the first time. "The highest ones. See? 
They're higher than the shelf of land we're walking on." 
Zawada nodded wisely, but he knew that she didn't really understand 
what he was talking about. 
"Those are the Derku lands," said Naog. "See the canals and the 
fields?" 
She looked, but seemed to see nothing unusual at all. "Forgive me," 
she said, "but all I see are streams and grassland." 
"But that's what I meant," said Naog. "Except that the grasses grow 
where we plant them, and all we plant is the grass whose seed we 
grind into meal. And the streams you see--they go where we want them 
to go. Vast circles surrounding the heart of the Derku lands. And 
there in the middle, do you see that hill?" 
"I think so," she said. 
"We build that hill every year, after the floodwater." 
She laughed. "You tell me that you aren't gods, and yet you make 
hills and streams and meadows wherever you want them!" 
Naog set his face toward the Engu portion of the great city. "Come 
home with me," he said. 
Since Zawada's people were so small, Naog had not realized that he 
had grown even taller during his manhood journey, but now as he led 
his ugly wife through the outskirts of the city, he realized that he 
was taller than everyone. It took him by surprise, and at first he 
was disturbed because it seemed to him that everyone had grown 
smaller. He even said as much to Zawada--"They're all so small"--but 
she laughed as if it were a joke. Nothing about the place or the 
people seemed small to HER. 
    

At the edge of the Engu lands, Naog hailed the boys who were on 
watch. "Hai!" 
"Hai!" they called back. 
"I've come back from my journey!" he called. 
It took a moment for them to answer. "What journey was this, tall 
man?" 
"My manhood journey. Don't you know me? Can't you see that I'm 
Naog?" 
The boys hooted at that. "How can you be naked when you have your 
napron on?" 
"Naog is my manhood name," said Naog, quite annoyed now, for he had 
not expected to be treated with such disrespect on his return. "You 
probably know of my by my baby name. They called me Glogmeriss." 
They hooted again. "You used to be trouble, and now you're naked!" 
cried the bold one. "And your wife is ugly, too!" 
But now Naog was close enough that the boys could see how very tall 
he was. Their faces grew solemn. 
"My father is Twerk," said Naog. "I return from my manhood journey 
with the greatest tale ever told. But more important than that, I 
have a message from the god who lives in the Heaving Sea. When I 
have given my message, people will include you in my story. They 
will say, 'Who were the five fools who joked about Naog's name, when 
he came to save us from the angry god?'" 
"Twerk is dead," said one of the boys. 
"The Dragon took him," said another. 
"He was head of the clan, and then the Great Derku began eating 
human flesh again, and your father gave himself to the Dragon for 
the clan's sake." 
"Are you truly his son?" 
Naog felt a gnawing pain that he did not recognize. He would soon 
learn to call it grief, but it was not too different from rage. "Is 
this another jest of yours? I'll break your heads if it is." 
"By the blood of your father in the mouth of the beast, I swear that 
it's true!" said the boy who had earlier been the boldest in his 
teasing. "If you're his son, then you're the son of a great man!" 
The emotion welled up inside him. "What does this mean?" cried Naog. 
"The Great Derku does not eat the flesh of men! Someone has murdered 
my father! He would never allow such a thing!" Whether he meant his 
father or the Great Derku who would never allow it even Naog did not 
know. 
The boys ran off then, before he could strike out at them for being 
the tellers of such an unbearable tale. Zawada was the only one 
left, to pat at him, embrace him, try to soothe him with her voice. 
She abandoned the language of the Derku and spoke to him soothingly 
in her own language. But all Naog could hear was the news that his 
father had been fed to the Great Derku as a sacrifice for the clan. 
The old days were back again, and they had killed his father. His 
father, and not even a captive! 
Others of the Engu, hearing what the boys were shouting about, 
brought him to his mother. Then he began to calm down, hearing her 
voice, the gentle reassurance of the old sound. She, at least, was 
unchanged. Except that she looked older, yes, and tired. "It was 
your father's own choice," she explained to him. "After floodwater 
this year the Great Derku came into the pen with a human baby in its 
jaws. It was a two-year-old boy of the Ko clan, and it happened he 
was the firstborn of his parents." 
"This means only that Ko clan wasn't watchful enough," said Naog. 
"Perhaps," said his mother. "But the holy men saw it as a sign from 
the god. Just as we stopped giving human flesh to the Great Derku 
when he refused it, so now when he claimed a human victim, what else 
were we to think?" 
"Captives, then. Why not captives?" 
"It was your own father who said that if the Great Derku had taken a 
child from the families of the captives, then we would sacrifice 
captives. But he took a child from one of our clans. What kind of 
sacrifice is it, to offer strangers when the Great Derku demanded 
the meat of the Derku people?" 
"Don't you see, Mother? Father was trying to keep them from 
sacrificing anybody at all, by making them choose something so 
painful that no one would do it." 
She shook her head. "How do you know what my Twerk was trying to do? 
He was trying to save YOU." 
"Me?" 
"Your father was clan leader by then. The holy men said, 'Let each 
clan give the firstborn son of the clan leader.'" 
"But I was gone." 
"Your father insisted on the ancient privilege, that a father may go 
in place of his son." 
"So he died in my place, because I was gone." 
"If you had been here, Glogmeriss, he would have done the same." 
He thought about this for a few moments, and then answered only, "My 
name is Naog now."
"We thought you were dead, Naked One, Stirrer of Troubles," said 
Mother. 
"I found a wife." 
"I saw her. Ugly." 
"Brave and strong and smart," said Naog. 
"Born to be a captive. I chose a different wife for you." 
"Zawada is my wife." 
Even though Naog had returned from his journey as a man and not a 
boy, he soon learned that even a man can be bent by the pressure of 
others. This far he did NOT bend: Zawada remained his wife. But he 
also took the wife his mother had chosen for him, a beautiful girl 
named Kormo. Naog was not sure what was worse about the new 
arrangement--that everyone else treated Kormo as Naog's real wife 
and Zawada as barely a wife at all, or that when Naog was hungry 
with passion, it was always Kormo he thought of. But he remembered 
Zawada at such times, how she bore him his first child, the boy 
Moiro; how she followed him with such fierce courage; how good she 
was to him when he was a stranger. And when he remembered, he 
followed his duty to her rather than his natural desire. This 
happened so often that Kormo complained about it. This made Naog 
feel somehow righteous, for the truth was that his first inclination 
had been right. Zawada should have stayed with her own tribe. She 
was unhappy most of the time, and kept to herself and her baby, and 
as years passed, her babies. She was never accepted by the other 
women of the Derku. Only the captive women became friends with her, 
which caused even more talk and criticism. 
Years passed, yes, and where was Naog's great message, the one the 
god had gone to such great trouble to give him? He tried to tell it. 
First to the leaders of the Engu clan, the whole story of his 
journey, and how the Heaving Sea was far higher than the Salty Sea 
and would soon break through and cover all the land with water. They 
listened to him gravely, and then one by one they counseled with him 
that when the gods wish to speak to the Derku people, they will do 
as they did when the Great Derku ate a human baby. "Why would a god 
who wished to send a message to the Derku people choose a mere BOY 
as messenger?" 
"Because I was the one who was taking the journey," he said. 
"What will you have us do? Abandon our lands? Leave our canals 
behind, and our boats?" 
"The Nile has fresh water and a flood season, my father saw it." 
    

"But the Nile also has strong tribes living up and down its shores. 
Here we are masters of the world. No, we're not leaving on the word 
of a boy." 
They insisted that he tell no one else, but he didn't obey them. In 
fact he told anyone who would listen, but the result was the same. 
For his father's memory or for his mother's sake, or perhaps just 
because he was so tall and strong, people listened politely--but 
Naog knew at the end of each telling of his tale that nothing had 
changed. No one believed him. And when he wasn't there, they 
repeated his stories as if they were jokes, laughing about riding a 
castrated bull ox, about calling a tree branch his brother, and most 
of all about the idea of a great flood that would never go away. 
Poor Naog, they said. He clearly lost his mind on his manhood 
journey, coming home with impossible stories that he obviously 
believes and an ugly woman that he dotes on. 
Zawada urged him to leave. "You know that the flood is coming," she 
said. "Why not take your family up and out of here? Go to the Nile 
ourselves, or return to my father's tribe." 
But he wouldn't hear of it. "I would go if I could bring my people 
with me. But what kind of man am I, to leave behind my mother and my 
brothers and sisters, my clan and all my kin?" 
"You would have left me behind," she said once. He didn't answer 
her. He also didn't go. 
In the third year after his return, when he had three sons to take 
riding on his dragonboat, he began the strangest project anyone had 
ever seen. No one was surprised, though, that crazy Naog would do 
something like this. He began to take several captives with him 
upriver to a place where tall, heavy trees grew. There they would 
wear out stone axes cutting down trees, then shape them into logs 
and ride them down the river. Some people complained that the 
captives belonged to everybody and it was wrong for Naog to have 
their exclusive use for so many days, but Naog was such a large and 
strange man that no one wanted to push the matter. 
One or two at a time, they came to see what Naog was doing with the 
logs. They found that he had taught his captives to notch them and 
lash them together into a huge square platform, a dozen strides on a 
side. Then they made a second platform crossways to the first and on 
top of it, lashing every log to ever other log, or so it seemed. 
Between the two layers he smeared pitch, and then on the top of the 
raft he built a dozen reed structures like the tops of seedboats. 
Before floodwater he urged his neighbors to bring him their grain, 
and he would keep it all dry. A few of them did, and when the rivers 
rose during floodwater, everyone saw that his huge seedboat floated, 
and no water seeped up from below into the seedhouses. More to the 
point, Naog's wives and children also lived on the raft, dry all the 
time, sleeping easily through the night instead of having to remain 
constantly wakeful, watching to make sure the children didn't fall 
into the water. 
The next year, Engu clan built several more platforms following 
Naog's pattern. They didn't always lash them as well as he had, and 
during the next flood several of their rafts came apart--but 
gradually, so they had time to move the seeds. Engu clan had far 
more seed make it through to planting season than any of the other 
tribes, and soon the men had to range farther and farther upriver, 
because all the nearer trees of suitable size had been harvested. 
Naog himself, though, wasn't satisfied. It was Zawada who pointed 
out that when the great flood came, the water wouldn't rise 
gradually as it did in the river floods. "It'll be like the waves 
against the shore, crashing with such force ... and these reed 
shelters will never hold against such a wave." 
For several years Naog experimented with logs until at last he had 
the largest movable structure ever built by human hands. The raft 
was as long as ever, but somewhat narrower. Rising from notches 
between logs in the upper platform were sturdy vertical posts, and 
these were bridged and roofed with wood. But instead of using logs 
for the planking and the roofing, Naog and the captives who served 
him split the logs carefully into planks, and these were smeared 
inside and out with pitch, and then another wall and ceiling were 
built inside, sandwiching the tar between them. People were amused 
to see Naog's captives hoisting dripping baskets of water to the 
roof of this giant seedboat and pouring them out onto it. "What, 
does he think that if he waters these trees, they'll grow like 
grass?" Naog heard them, but he cared not at all, for when they 
spoke he was inside his boat, seeing that not a drop of water made 
it inside. 
The doorway was the hardest part, because it, too, had to be able to 
be sealed against the flood. Many nights Naog lay awake worrying 
about it before building this last and largest and tightest 
seedboat. The answer came to him in a dream. It was a memory of the 
little crabs that lived in the sand on the shore of the Heaving Sea. 
They dug holes in the sand and then when the water washed over them, 
their holes filled in above their heads, keeping out the water. Naog 
awoke knowing that he must put the door in the roof of his seedboat, 
and arrange a way to lash it from the inside. 
"How will you see to lash it?" said Zawada. "There's no light 
inside." 
So Naog and his three captives learned to lash the door in place in 
utter darkness. 
When they tested it, water leaked through the edges of the door. The 
solution was to smear more pitch, fresh pitch, around the edges of 
the openingand lay the door into it so that when they lashed it the 
seal was tight. It was very hard to open the door again after that, 
but they got it open from the inside--and when they could see again 
they found that not a drop of water had got inside. "No more 
trials," said Naog. 
Their work then was to gather seeds--and more than seeds this time. 
Water, too. The seeds went into baskets with lids that were lashed 
down, and the water went into many, many flasks. Naog and his 
captives and their wives worked hard during every moment of daylight 
to make the waterbags and seedbaskets and fill them. The Engu didn't 
mind at all storing more and more of their grain in Naog's 
boat--after all, it was ludicrously watertight, so that it was sure 
to make it through the flood season in fine form. They didn't have 
to believe in his nonsense about a god in the Heaving Sea that was 
angry with the Derku people in order to recognize a good seedboat 
when they saw it. 
His boat was nearly full when word spread that a group of new 
captives from the southeast were telling tales of a new river of 
saltwater that had flowed into the Salty Sea from the direction of 
the Heaving Sea. When Naog heard the news, he immediately climbed a 
tree so he could look toward the southeast. "Don't be silly," they 
said to him. "You can't see the Salty Shore from here, even if you 
climb the tallest tree." 
"I was looking for the flood," said Naog. "Don't you see that the 
Heaving Sea must have broken through again, when a storm whipped the 
water into madness. Then the storm subsided, and the sea stopped 
flowing over the top. But the channel must be wider and longer and 
deeper now. Next time it won't end when the storm ends. Next time it 
will be the great flood." 
"How do you know these things, Naog? You're a man like the rest of 
us. Just because you're taller doesn't mean you can see the future." 

"The god is angry," said Naog. "The true god, not this silly 
crocodile god that you feed on human flesh." And now, in the urgency 
of knowing the imminence of the flood, he said what he had said to 
no one but Zawada. "Why do you think the true god is so angry with 
us? Because of the crocodile! Because we feed human flesh to the 
Dragon! The true god doesn't want offerings of human flesh. It's an 
abomination. It's as forbidden as the forbidden fruit. The crocodile 
god is not a god at all, it's just a wild animal, one that crawls on 
its belly, and yet we bow down to it. We bow down to the enemy of 
the true god!" 
    

Hearing him say this made the people angry. Some were so furious 
they wanted to feed him to the Great Derku at once, but Naog only 
laughed at them. "If the Great Derku is such a wonderful god, let 
HIM come and get me, instead of you taking me! But no, you don't 
believe for a moment that he CAN do it. Yet the TRUE god had the 
power to send me a castrated bull to ride, and a log to save me from 
a flood, and trees to catch the lightning so it wouldn't strike me. 
When has the Dragon ever had the power to do THAT?" 
His ridicule of the Great Derku infuriated them, and violence might 
have resulted, had Naog not had such physical presence, and had his 
father not been a noble sacrifice to the Dragon. Over the next 
weeks, though, it became clear that Naog was now regarded by all as 
something between an enemy and a stranger. No one came to speak to 
him, or to Zawada, either. Only Kormo continued to have contact with 
the rest of the Derku people. 
"They want me to leave you," she told him. "They want me to come 
back to my family, because you are the enemy of the god." 
"And will you go?" he said. 
She fixed her sternest gaze on him. "You are my family now," she 
said. "Even when you prefer this ugly woman to me, you are still my 
husband." 
Naog's mother came to him once, to warn him. "They have decided 
tokill you. They're simply biding their time, waiting for the right 
moment." 
"Waiting for the courage to fight me, you mean," said Naog. 
"Tell them that a madness came upon you, but it's over," she said. 
"Tell them that it was the influence of this ugly foreign wife of 
yours, and then they'll kill her and not you." 
Naog didn't bother to answer her. 
His mother burst into tears. "Was this what I bore you for? I named 
you very well, Glogmeriss, my son of trouble and anguish!" 
"Listen to me, Mother. The flood is coming. We may have very little 
warning when it actually comes, very little time to get into my 
seedboat. Stay near, and when you hear us calling--" 
"I'm glad your father is dead rather than to see his firstborn son 
so gone in madness." 
"Tell all the others, too, Mother. I'll take as many into my 
seedboat as will fit. But once the door in the roof is closed, I 
can't open it again. Anyone who isn't inside when we close it will 
never get inside, and they will die."
She burst into tears and left. 
Not far from the seedboat was a high hill. As the rainy season 
neared, Naog took to sending one of his servants to the top of the 
hill several times a day, to watch toward the southeast. "What 
should we look for?" they asked. "I don't know," he answered. "A new 
river. A wall of water. A dark streak in the distance. It will be 
something that you've never seen before." 
The sky filled with clouds, dark and threatening. The heart of the 
storm was to the south and east. Naog made sure that his wives and 
children and the wives and children of his servants didn't stray far 
from the seedboat. They freshened the water in the waterbags, to 
stay busy. A few raindrops fell, and then the rain stopped, and then 
a few more raindrops. But far to the south and east it was raining 
heavily. And the wind--the wind kept rising higher and higher, and 
it was out of the east. Naog could imagine it whipping the waves 
higher and farther into the deep channel that the last storm had 
opened. He imagined the water spilling over into the salty riverbed. 
He imagined it tearing deeper and deeper into the sand, more and 
more of it tearing away under the force of the torrent. Until 
finally it was no longer the force of the storm driving the water 
through the channel, but the weight of the whole sea, because at 
last it had been cut down below the level of low tide. And then the 
sea tearing deeper and deeper. 
"Naog." It was the head of the Engu clan, and a dozen men with him. 
"The god is ready for you." 
Naog looked at them as if they were foolish children. "This is the 
storm," he said. "Go home and bring your families to my seedboat, so 
they can come through the flood alive." 
"This is no storm," said the head of the clan. "Hardly any rain has 
fallen." 
The servant who was on watch came running, out of breath, his arms 
bleeding where he had skidded on the ground as he fell more than 
once in his haste. "Naog, master!" he cried. "It's plain to see--the 
Salty Shore is nearer. The Salty Sea is rising, and fast." 
What a torrent of water it would take, to make the Salty Sea rise in 
its bed. Naog covered his face with his hands. "You're right," said 
Naog. "The god is ready for me. The true god. It was for this hour 
that I was born. As for YOUR god--the true god will drown him as 
surely as he will drown anyone who doesn't come to my seedboat." 
"Come with us now," said the head of the clan. But his voice was not 
so certain now. 
To his servants and his wives, Naog said, "Inside the seedboat. When 
all are in, smear on the pitch, leaving only one side where I can 
slide down." 
"You come too, husband," said Zawada. 
"I can't," he said. "I have to give warning one last time." 
"Too late!" cried the servant with the bleeding arms. "Come now." 
"You go now," said Naog. "I'll be back soon. But if I'm not back, 
seal the door and open it for no man, not even me." 
"When will I know to do that?" he asked in anguish. 
"Zawada will tell you," said Naog. "She'll know." Then he turned to 
the head of the clan. "Come with me," he said. "Let's give the 
warning." Then Naog strode off toward the bank of the canal where 
his mother and brothers and sisters kept their dragonboats. The men 
who had come to capture him followed him, unsure who had captured 
whom. 
It was raining again, a steady rainfall whipped by an ever-stronger 
wind. Naog stood on the bank of the canal and shouted against the 
wind, crying out for his family to join him. "There's not much 
time!" he cried. "Hurry, come to my seedboat!" 
"Don't listen to the enemy of the god!" cried the head of the clan. 
Naog looked down into the water of the canal. "Look, you fools! 
Can't you see that the canal is rising?" 
"The canal always rises in a storm." 
Naog knelt down and dipped his hand into the canal and tasted the 
water. "Salt," he said. "Salt!" he shouted. "This isn't rising 
because of rain in the mountains! The water is rising because the 
Salty Sea is filling with the water of the Heaving Sea. It's rising 
to cover us! Come with me now, or not at all! When the door of my 
seedboat closes, we'll open it for no one." Then he turned and loped 
off toward the seedboat. 
By the time he got there, the water was spilling over the banks of 
the canals, and he had to splash through several shallow streams 
where there had been no streams before. Zawada was standing on top 
of the roof, and screamed at him to hurry as he clambered onto the 
top of it. He looked in the direction she had been watching, and saw 
what she had seen. In the distance, but not so very far away, a dark 
wall rushing toward them. A plug of earth must have broken loose, 
and a fist of the sea hundreds of feet high was slamming through the 
gap. It spread at once, of course, and as it spread the wave dropped 
until it was only fifteen or twenty feet high. But that was high 
enough. It would do. 
"You fool!" cried Zawada. "Do you want to watch it or be saved from 
it?" 
Naog followed Zawada down into the boat. Two of the servants smeared 
on a thick swatch of tar on the fourth side of the doorway. Then 
Naog, who was the only one tall enough to reach outside the hole, 
drew the door into place, snugging it down tight. At once it became 
perfectly dark inside the seedboat, and silent, too, except for the 
breathing. "This time for real," said Naog softly. He could hear the 
other men working at the lashings. They could feel the floor moving 
under them--the canals had spilled over so far now that the raft was 
rising and floating. 
    

Suddenly they heard a noise. Someone was pounding on the wall of the 
seedboat. And there was shouting. They couldn't hear the words, the 
walls were too thick. But they knew what was being said all the 
same. Save us. Let us in. Save us. 
Kormo's voice was filled with anguish. "Naog, can't we--" 
"If we open it now we'll never close it again in time. We'd all die. 
They had every chance and every warning. My lashing is done." 
"Mine too," answered one of the servants. 
The silence of the others said they were still working hard. 
"Everyone hold onto the side posts," said Naog. "There's so much 
room here. We could have taken on so many more." 
The pounding outside was in earnest now. They were using axes to 
hack at the wood. Or at the lashings. And someone was on top of the 
seedboat now, many someones, trying to pry at the door. 
"Now, O God, if you mean to save us at all, send the water now." 
"Done," said another of the servants. So three of the four corners 
were fully lashed. 
Suddenly the boat lurched and rocked upward, then spun crazily in 
every direction at once. Everyone screamed, and few were able to 
keep their handhold, such was the force of the flood. They plunged 
to one side of the seedboat, a jumble of humans and spilling baskets 
and water bottles. Then they struck something--a tree? The side of a 
mountain?--and lurched in another direction entirely, and in the 
darkness it was impossible to tell anymore whether they were on the 
floor or the roof or one of the walls. 
Did it go on for days, or merely hours? Finally the awful turbulence 
gave way to a spinning all in one plane. The flood was still rising; 
they were still caught in the twisting currents; but they were no 
longer caught in that wall of water, in the great wave that the god 
had sent. They were on top of the flood. 
Gradually they sorted themselves out. Mothers found their children, 
husbands found their wives. Many were crying, but as the fear 
subsided they were able to find the ones who were genuinely in pain. 
But what could they do in the darkness to deal with bleeding 
injuries, or possible broken bones? They could only plead with the 
god to be merciful and let them know when it was safe to open the 
door. 
After a while, though, it became plain that it wasn't safe NOT to 
open it. The air was musty and hot and they were beginning to pant. 
"I can't breathe," said Zawada. "Open the door," said Kormo. 
Naog spoke aloud to the god. "We have no air in here," he said. "I 
have to open the door. Make it safe. Let no other wave wash over us 
with the door open." 
But when he went to open the door, he couldn't find it in the 
darkness. For a sickening moment he thought: What if we turned 
completely upside down, and the door is now under us? I never 
thought of that. We'll die in here. 
Then he found it, and began fussing with the lashings. But it was 
hard in the darkness. They had tied so hurriedly, and he wasn't 
thinking all that well. But soon he heard the servants also at work, 
muttering softly, and one by one they got their lashings loose and 
Naog shoved upward on the door. 
It took forever before the door budged, or so it seemed, but when at 
last it rocked upward, a bit of faint light and a rush of air came 
into the boat and everyone cried out at once in relief and 
gratitude. Naog pushed the door upward and then maneuvered it to lie 
across the opening at an angle, so that the heavy rain outside 
wouldn't inundate them. He stood there holding the door in place, 
even though the wind wanted to pick it up and blow it away--a slab 
of wood as heavy as that one was!--while in twos and threes they 
came to the opening and breathed, or lifted children to catch a 
breath of air. There was enough light to bind up some bleeding 
injuries, and to realize that no bones were broken after all. 
The rain went on forever, or so it seemed, the rain and the wind. 
And then it stopped, and they were able to come out onto the roof of 
the seedboat and look at the sunlight and stare at the distant 
horizon. There was no land at all, just water. "The whole earth is 
gone," said Kormo. "Just as you said. 
"The Heaving Sea has taken over this place," said Naog. "But we'll 
come to try land. The current will take us there." 
There was much debris floating on the water--torn-up trees and 
bushes, for the flood had scraped the whole face of the land. A few 
rotting bodies of animals. If anyone saw a human body floating by, 
they said nothing about it. 
After days, a week, perhaps longer of floating without sight of 
land, they finally began skirting a shoreline. Once they saw the 
smoke of someone's fire--people who lived high above the great 
valley of the Salty Sea had been untouched by the flood. But there 
was no way to steer the boat toward shore. Like a true seedboat, it 
drifted unless something drew it another way. Naog cursed himself 
for his foolishness in not including dragonboats in the cargo of the 
boat. He and the other men and women might have tied lines to the 
seedboat and to themselves and paddled the boat to shore. As it was, 
they would last only as long as their water lasted. 
It was long enough. The boat fetched up against a grassy shore. Naog 
sent several of the servants ashore and they used a rope to tie the 
boat to a tree. But it was useless--the current was still too 
strong, and the boat tore free. They almost lost the servants, 
stranding them on the shore, forever separated from their families, 
but they had the presence of mind to swim for the end of the rope. 
The next day they did better--more lines, all the men on shore, 
drawing the boat further into a cove that protected it from the 
current. They lost no time in unloading the precious cargo of seeds, 
and searching for a source of fresh water. Then they began the 
unaccustomed task of hauling all the baskets of grain by hand. There 
were no canals to ease the labor. 
"Perhaps we can find a place to dig canals again," said Kormo. 
"No!" said Zawada vehemently. "We will never build such a place 
again. Do you want the god to send another flood?" 
"There will be no other flood," said Naog. "The Heaving Sea has had 
its victory. But we will also build no canals. We will keep no 
crocodile, or any other animal as our god. We will never sacrifice 
forbidden fruit to any god, because the true god hates those who do 
that. And we will tell our story to anyone who will listen to it, so 
that others will learn how to avoid the wrath of the true god, the 
god of power." 
Kemal watched as Naog and his people came to shore not far from 
Gibeil and set up farming in the El Qa' Valley in the shadows of the 
mountains of Sinai. The fact of the flood was well known, and many 
travelers came to see this vast new sea where once there had been 
dry land. More and more of them also came to the new village that 
Naog and his people built, and word of his story also spead. 
Kemal's work was done. He had found Atlantis. He had found Noah, and 
Gilgamesh. Many of the stories that had collected around those names 
came from other cultures and other times, but the core was true, and 
Kemal had found them and brought them back to the knowledge of 
humankind. 
But what did it mean? Naog gave warning, but no one listened. His 
story remained in people's minds, but what difference did it make? 
As far as Kemal was concerned, all old-world civilizations after 
Atlantis were dependent on that first civilization. The IDEA of the 
city was already with the Egyptians and the Sumerians and the people 
of the Indus and even the Chinese, because the story of the Derku 
people, under one name or another, had spread far and wide--the 
Golden Age. People remembered well that once there was a great land 
that was blessed by the gods until the sea rose up and swallowed 
their land. People who lived in different landscapes tried to make 
sense of the story. To the island-hopping Greeks Atlantis became an 
island that sank into the sea. To the plains-dwelling Sumerians the 
flood was caused by rain, not by the sea leaping out of its bed to 
swallow the earth. Someone wondered how, if all the land was 
covered, the animals survived, and thus the account of animals two 
by two was added to the story of Naog. At some point, when people 
still remembered that the name meant "naked," a story was added 
about his sons covering his nakedness as he lay in a drunken stupor. 
All of this was decoration, however. People remembered both the 
Derku people and the one man who led his family through the flood. 
But they would have remembered Atlantis with or without Naog, Kemal 
knew that. What difference did his saga make, to anyone but himself 
and his household? As others studied the culture of the Derku, Kemal 
remained focused on Naog himself. If anything, Naog's life was proof 
that one person makes no difference at all in history. He saw the 
flood coming, he warned his people about it when there was plenty of 
time, he showed them how to save themselves, and yet nothing changed 
outside his own immediate family group. That was the way history 
worked. Great forces sweep people along, and now and then somebody 
floats to the surface and becomes famous but it means nothing, it 
amounts to nothing. 
Yet Kemal could not believe it. Naog may not have accomplished what 
he THOUGHT his goal was--to save his people--but he did accomplish 
something. He never lived to see the result of it, but because of 
his survival the Atlantis stories were tinged with something else. 
It was not just a golden age, not just a time of greatness and 
wealth and leisure and city life, a land of giants and gods. Naog's 
version of the story also penetrated the public consciousness and 
remained. The people were destroyed because the greatest of gods was 
offended by their sins. The list of sins shifted and changed over 
time, but certain ideas remained: That it was wrong to live in a 
city, where people get lifted up in the pride of their hearts and 
think that they are too powerful for the gods to destroy. That the 
one who seems to be crazy may in fact be the only one who sees the 
truth. That the greatest of gods is the one you can't see, the one 
who has power over the earth and the sea and the sky, all at once. 
And, above all, this: That it was wrong to sacrifice human beings to 
the gods. 
It took thousands of years, and there were places where Naog's 
passionate doctrine did not penetrate until modern times, but the 
root of it was there in the day he came home and found that his 
father had been fed to the Dragon. Those who thought that it was 
right to offer human beings to the Dragon were all dead, and the one 
who had long proclaimed that it was wrong was still alive. The god 
had preserved him and killed all of them. Wherever the idea of 
Atlantis spread, some version of this story came with it, and in the 
end all the great civilizations that were descended from Atlantis 
learned not to offer the forbidden fruit to the gods. 
In the Americas, though, no society grew up that owed a debt to 
Atlantis, for the same rising of the world ocean that closed the 
land bridge between Yemen and Djibouti also broke the land bridge 
between America and the old world. The story of Naog did not touch 
there, and it seemed to Kemal absolutely clear what the cost of that 
was. Because they had no memory of Atlantis, it took the people of 
the Americas thousands of years longer to develop civilization--the 
city. Egypt was already ancient when the Olmecs first built amid the 
swampy land of the bay of Campeche. And because they had no story of 
Naog, warning that the most powerful of gods rejected killing human 
beings, the old ethos of human sacrifice remained in full force, 
virtually unquestioned. The carnage of the Mexica--the Aztecs--took 
it to the extreme, but it was there already, throughout the 
Caribbean basin, a tradition of human blood being shed to feed the 
hunger of the gods. 
Kemal could hardly say that the bloody warfare of the old world was 
much of an improvement over this. But it was different, and in his 
mind, at least, it was different specifically because of Naog. If he 
had not ridden out the flood to tell his story of the true God who 
forbade sacrifice, the old world would not have been the same. New 
civilizations might have risen more quickly, with no stories warning 
of the danger of city life. And those new civilizations might all 
have worshiped the same Dragon, or some other, as hungry for human 
flesh as the gods of the new world were hungry for human blood. 
On the day that Kemal became sure that his Noah had actually changed 
the world, he was satisfied. He said little and wrote nothing about 
his conclusion. This surprised even him, for in all the months and 
years that he had searched hungrily for Atlantis, and then for Noah, 
and then for the meaning of Noah's saga, Kemal had assumed that, 
like Schliemann, he would publish everything, he would tell the 
world the great truth that he had found. But to his surprise he 
discovered that he must not have searched so far for the sake of 
science, or for fame, or for any other motive than simply to know, 
for himself, that one person's life amounted to something. Naog 
changed the world, but then so did Zawada, and so did Kormo, and so 
did the servant who skinned his elbows running down the hill, and so 
did Naog's father and mother, and ... and in the end, so did they 
all. The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But 
when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down 
to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices 
they made were real. They mattered. 
Apparently that was all that Kemal had needed to know. The next day 
he could think of no reason to go to work. He resigned from his 
position at the head of the Atlantis project. Let others do the 
detail work. Kemal was well over thirty now, and he had found the 
answer to his great question, and it was time to get down to the 
business of living. 

Copyright © 1998 Hatrack River Enterprises Inc.