writing. 'As near as I can decipher and translate into English, they referred to their league of seafaring city-states as Amenes, pronounced 'Ameenees.' '
'Amenes,' Pitt repeated slowly. 'It sounds Greek.'
'I unraveled a number of words that could well be the origins for later Greek and Egyptian-language terms.'
Sandecker gestured the end of his cigar at the historian. 'Dr. Stevens, I assume you've examined the obsidian skulls?'
'I have.' Stevens leaned down, opened the ice chest, lifted out one of the black skulls, and set it upright on a large silk pillow laid on the conference table. The glossy obsidian gleamed under the overhead spotlights. 'A truly remarkable piece of work,' he said reverently. 'Amenes artisans began with a solid block of obsidian- one that was incredibly pure of imperfections- a rarity in itself. Over a period of at least ninety to a hundred years, and perhaps more, the head was shaped by hand, using what I believe was obsidian dust as a smoothing agent.'
'Why not some type of hardened metal chisels tapped by a mallet?' asked Giordino.
Stevens shook his head. 'No tools were wielded. There are no signs of scratches or nicks. Obsidian, though extremely hard, is very prone to fracture. One slip, one misplaced angle of a chisel, and the whole skull would have shattered. No, the shaping and polishing had to be accomplished as if a marble bust had been delicately smoothed by car polish.'
'How long would it take to reproduce with modern tools?'
Stevens gave a faint grin. 'Technically, it would be next to impossible to create an exact replica. The more I study it, the more I become convinced it shouldn't exist.'
'Are there any markings on the base to suggest a source?' asked Sandecker.
'No markings,' answered Stevens. 'But let me show you something that's truly astonishing.' With extreme care he slowly made a twisting motion, as he lifted the upper half of the skull until it came free. Next he removed a perfectly contoured globe from the skull cavity. Holding it devoutly in both hands, he lowered it onto a specially prepared cushioned base. 'I can't begin to imagine the degree of artistic craftsmanship it took to produce such an astonishing object,' he said admiringly. 'Only while studying the skull under strong magnification did I see a line around the skull plate that was invisible to the naked eye.'
'It's absolutely fabulous,' murmured Pat in awe.
'Are there carvings on the globe?' Pitt asked Stevens.
'Yes, it's an engraved illustration of the world. If you care to view it more closely, I have a magnifying glass.'
He handed the thick glass to Pitt, who peered at the lines inscribed on the globe that was about the size of a baseball. After a minute, he carefully slid the globe across the table in front of Sandecker and passed him the magnifying glass.
While the admiral was examining the globe, Stevens said, 'By comparing the photographs taken inside the chamber in Colorado with those from St. Paul Island, I found that the continents perfectly match those of the obsidian globe.'
'Meaning?' asked Sandecker.
'If you study the alignment of the continents, and large islands such as Greenland and Mozambique, you'll find they don't match the geography of the world today.'
'I observed the differences, too,' said Pitt.
'What does that prove?' asked Giordino, playing the role of skeptic. 'Except that it's a primitive, inaccurate map?'
'Primitive? Yes. Inaccurate? Perhaps by modern standards. But I strongly support the theory that these ancient peoples sailed every sea on earth and charted thousands of miles of coastlines. If you look closely at the obsidian globe, you can see they even defined Australia, Japan, and the Great Lakes of North America. All this by people who lived more than nine thousand years ago.'
'Unlike the Atlantis that was described by Plato as having existed on a single island or continent,' Pat spoke up, 'the Amenes engaged in worldwide commerce. They went far beyond the bounds of much later civilizations. They were not restricted by tradition or fear of the unknown seas. The inscriptions detail their sea routes and vast trading network that took them across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence River to Michigan, where they mined copper; and to Bolivia and the British Isles, where they mined tin, using advanced developments in metallurgy to create and produce bronze, thereby lifting mankind from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age.'
Sandecker leaned across the table. 'Surely they mined and traded in gold and silver.'
'Strangely, they did not consider gold or silver useful metals, and preferred copper for their ornaments and art works. But they did journey around the world in search of turquoise and black opal, which they fashioned into jewelry. And, of course, obsidian, which was almost sacred to them. Obsidian, by the way, is still used in open- heart surgery, because it has a sharper edge that causes less tissue damage than steel.'
'Both turquoise and black opal were represented on the mummies we found in the burial chamber,' added Giordino.
'Which demonstrates the extent of their reach,' said Pat. 'The rich robin's-egg blue I saw in the chamber could only have come from the American Southwest deserts.'
'And the black opal?' asked Sandecker.
'Australia.'
'If nothing else,' said Pitt thoughtfully, 'it confirms that the Amenes had knowledge of nautical science and learned to build ships capable of sailing across the seas thousands of years ago.'
'It also explains why their communities were built as port cities,' Pat summed up. 'And according to what was revealed by the photographs in the burial chamber, few societies in the history of man were so farthing. I've located over twenty of their port cities in such diverse parts of the world as Mexico, Peru, India, China, Japan, and Egypt. Several of them are in the Indian Ocean and a few on islands of the Pacific.'
'I can back up Dr. O'Connell's findings with my own on the globes from the skull,' said Stevens.
'So their world was not based around the Mediterranean, as later civilizations were?' said the admiral.
Stevens gave a negative shake of his head. 'The Mediterranean was not open to the sea during the Amenes' era. Nine thousand years ago, the Med, as we know it, was made up of fertile valleys and lakes fed by European rivers to the north and the Nile to the south, which merged and then flowed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. You might also be interested in knowing that the North Sea was a dry plain and the British Isles were part of Europe. The Baltic Sea was also a broad valley above sea level. The Gobi and Sahara deserts were lush tropical lands that supported huge herds of animals. The ancient ones lived on a planet very different from the one we live on.'
'What happened to the Amenes?' asked Sandecker. 'Why hasn't evidence of their existence come down to us before now?'
'Their civilization was utterly destroyed when a comet struck the earth around 7000 B.C. and caused a worldwide cataclysmic disaster. That's when the land bridge from Gibraltar to Morocco was breached and the Mediterranean became a sea. Shorelines were inundated and changed forever. Within the time it takes for a raindrop to fall from a cloud, the sea people, their cities, and their entire culture were erased from the earth and lost until now.'
'You deciphered all that from the inscriptions?'
'That and more,' Yaeger answered earnestly. 'They describe the horror and suffering in vivid detail. The impact of the comet was gigantic, sudden, appalling, and deadly. The inscriptions go on to tell of mountains shaking like willows in a gale. Earthquakes shook with a magnitude that would be inconceivable today. Volcanoes exploded with the combined force of thousands of nuclear bombs, filling the sky with layers of ash a hundred miles thick. Pumice blanketed the seas as dense as ten feet. Rivers of lava buried most of what we call the Pacific Northwest. Fires spread under hurricanelike winds, creating towering clouds of smoke that blanketed the sky. Tidal waves, perhaps as much as three miles high, swept over the land. Islands vanished, buried under water for all time. Most of the people and all but a handful of animals and sea life disappeared in a time span of twenty-four hours.'
Giordino put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling, trying to picture in his mind the terrible devastation. 'So that explains it- the sudden extinction in the Americas of the saber-toothed tiger, the humped- back camel, the musk oxen, that giant bison with a horn spread of six feet, the woolly mammoth, the small shaggy
