A hush fell over the room.
“Good goddess!” Griffin exclaimed.
“I don’t believe it,” Erik added.
Cassie looked around at her companions in alarm. “What. What’d I say?”
They all burst out laughing at her confusion.
“You said precisely the right thing, dear girl.” Griffin beamed at her. “Well done!” He turned to the security coordinator. “Erik, I forbid you to make any disparaging remarks in future about Cassie’s intellect.”
Erik rolled his eyes. “Like I’m the only one who thought it.” Then he smiled ruefully at the pythia. “She can be taught after all.”
“I can catch on pretty quickly when I want to,” Cassie countered. “Remember how fast I learned that roundhouse kick? Wanna see it again?”
Maddie intervened. “Do I have to separate you two?”
“Nope,” Erik replied. “I’m done mocking. After her precession comment, she’s shut me up for good.”
“If only that were true,” Cassie murmured under her breath.
“Let’s return to the interesting topic we were discussing, shall we?” Griffin flipped to another image which showed the interior of the Mnajdra temple. “As Cassie so astutely pointed out, the earth’s wobble would have slightly changed the position at which the sun’s rays would have struck the inside of the temple. If one calculates backwards for the past 17,000 years, there are only two dates which would allow the sun’s light to illuminate the spot intended. The first date would have occurred in 3700 BCE and the other in 10205 BCE.”
Maddie shrugged. “I don’t see the big deal. If the current theory is that the temples were built around 3500 BCE, whoever made that guesstimate was only off by a couple of centuries.”
“On the contrary,” Griffin replied. “I would argue that the correct date of construction is the earlier of the two—the eleventh millennium BCE.”
“But that’s just crazy,” the operations director countered. “Nobody was building anything this big way back then.”
“What about that other place in Turkey,” Cassie piped up. “The one you mentioned when we were at Catal Huyuk. I can’t remember the name—but it was a lot older, wasn’t it?”
Griffin’s mouth hung open in surprise for several seconds before he could speak. “This is indeed a day of wonders!”
“Well I’ll be...,” Erik whispered in amazement.
“Our pythia is quite correct,” the scrivener averred. “The temple at Gobekli Tepe which was recently unearthed on the Turkish-Syrian border is assumed to have been built around 9000 BCE. Its ancient origin is by no means unique. The Sphinx which guards the great pyramid at Giza is another example. Even as we speak, a controversy is raging as to its actual construction date, but evidence suggests a timeframe of 10000 BCE.”
“But there’s nothing here to prove that the Maltese temples are that old,” Maddie objected.
“Ah, but there is,” Griffin replied. He switched to a new image. It displayed a paved path and a stone archway overgrown with greenery. The image was hazy and suffused with a bluish tint.
“Is that fog?” Maddie asked uncertainly.
“It’s ocean water,” the scrivener replied. “The structure you’re seeing is a Maltese temple known as Gebel Gol-Bahar. It was discovered three miles off the coast of the island.”
“You mean it sank?” Cassie gasped.
“No, the structure is perfectly intact and rests on a plateau. The more likely explanation is that it was flooded.”
“Flooded!” his audience said in unison.
“Quite. The temple shows exactly the same design characteristics as the other structures on the island—the same eastern astronomical orientation as well. The only problem is that it lies twenty-six feet below sea level.”
“Wait a minute!” Cassie exclaimed. “It must have been submerged when the Black Sea flooded. All that water rushing through the Bosporus had to come from somewhere to the west, didn’t it?” She spun around in her chair to look questioningly at Griffin.
Even in the dimly-lit room, his approving smile was apparent. “You’re doing splendidly. Why don’t you finish explaining it to them?”
She turned back to face her colleagues, both of whom were frowning skeptically. “It’s a domino effect. At the end of the last ice age, there was a meltdown of a gigantic sheet of ice that covered almost half of the northern hemisphere. It stands to reason that if an ice cube that big was dumping water into the Atlantic and raising the world’s ocean levels then the overflow had to go somewhere. First, it would have spilled into the Mediterranean. After that, it would have run over into the Black Sea. Before 5600 BCE, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake—after that, not so much.”
Addressing Griffin, Maddie asked, “So you mean to say that sea level in the Mediterranean could have been fifty to a hundred feet lower than it is now?”
“Not a mere hundred feet lower,” the scrivener replied. “About five million years ago the sea dried out entirely. The salt beds on the sea floor confirm it. Water levels in the Mediterranean have fluctuated dramatically in the time since. The western Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic when sea levels fell lower than the straits of Gibraltar. Similarly, the eastern Mediterranean may also have been cut off from the western portion of the sea when the strait of Sicily was above sea level.”
“You’re talking about land bridges, man.” Erik sounded intrigued. “If the water level sank low enough, then Malta and the rest of the islands in the chain might have created a land bridge connecting Africa with Europe. From Tunisia through Malta and Sicily to Italy.”
“We have ample evidence to support that theory in the fossil record,” Griffin replied. “The skeletons of animals which shouldn’t have existed in that part of the world have been found on Malta. Another land bridge existed at the Straits of Gibraltar, and at one time Great Britain was connected to Europe through a land bridge spanning the English Channel. While I’m
