Page 447 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

right moment.
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At exactly the right moment, one of those lucky breaks came my way.
The moment was the summer of 1993. I was at a low ebb physically and
spiritually after months of hard travel, and the geophysical impossibility
of actually losing a continent-sized landmass was beginning to undermine
my confidence in the strength of my findings. It was then that I received a
letter from the town of Nanaimo in British Columbia, Canada. The letter
referred to my previous book The Sign and the Seal, in which I had made
passing mention of the Atlantis theory and of traditions of civilizing
heroes who had been ‘saved from water’:

19 July 1993
Dear Mr. Hancock,
After 17 years of research into the fate of Atlantis, my wife and I have finished a
manuscript entitled When the Sky Fell. Our frustration is that despite positive feedback
about the book’s approach from the few publishers who have seen it, the mere mention
of Atlantis closes minds. In The Sign and the Seal you write of ‘a tradition of secret
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wisdom started by the survivors of a flood ...’ Our work explores sites where some
survivors might have relocated. High altitude, fresh-water lakes made ideal post-deluge
bases for the survivors of Atlantis. Lake Titicaca and Lake Tana [in Ethiopia, where much
of The Sign and the Seal was set] fit the climatic criteria. Their stable environment
provided the raw materials for restarting agriculture.
We have taken the liberty of enclosing an outline of When the Sky Fell. If you are
interested we will be pleased to send you a copy of the manuscript.
Sincerely,
Rand Flem-Ath

I turned to the enclosure and there, in the first few paragraphs, found the
missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle I had been looking for. It meshed
perfectly with the ancient global maps I had studied—maps which
accurately depicted the subglacial topography of the continent of
Antarctica (see Part I). It made perfect sense of all the great worldwide
myths of cataclysm and planetary disaster, with their differing climatic
effects. It explained the enigma of the huge numbers of apparently ‘flash-
frozen’ mammoths in northern Siberia and Alaska, and the 90-foot tall
fruit trees locked in the permafrost deep inside the Arctic Circle at a
latitude where nothing now grows. It provided a solution to the problem
of the extreme suddenness with which the last Ice Age in the northern
hemisphere melted down after 15,000 BC. It also solved the mystery of
the exceptional worldwide volcanic activity that accompanied the
meltdown. It answered the question, ‘How do you lose a continent?’ And
it was solidly based in Charles Hapgood’s theory of ‘earth-crust
displacement’—a radical geological hypothesis with which I was already
familiar:

See, for example, Brian Inglis, Coincidence, Hutchinson, London, 1990, p. 48ff.
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3 When the Sky Fell, with an Introduction by Colin Wilson and Afterword by John Anthony
West, is published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995.

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