Abysmal Sea

by Christopher Barr

I am writing this to you because the inferno of hell has been unleashed upon the earth, and I fear the events that led to this apocalyptic calamity were of my doing!!  As you know, I am a scientist, a pragmatic man that is fueled entirely by his reason.  But I regret to inform you that this past month has introduced a new chapter to my life that is not bound by reason or science but by mysticism and fantasy.  As I sit here and write this, what could very well be the last thing I write, I am inured by these revelations.

My intentions have always been noble and meticulously thoughtful as I became the scientist I am today.  What led to this…encounter, was of the most professional and honest manner, I guess what I’m trying to say is the pages that follow are not a confession.  My mind is clear of any legal or ethical wrongdoing.  What follows are lessons in the progress trap humanity has found itself in, and possibly the only direct account of the regrettable uncovered events themselves that I was there to witness. 

I can tell you with the straightest parlance that, what is done is done.  There is no undoing what has been done…… we are at war.  We are up against an enemy of monstrous power and they are profoundly driven, one could say, they have an evolutionary directive to broaden their playing ground.  I fear that life as we know it may come to a close as a result.    

Earlier this year a Lost City was found in a canyon five miles off the coast of South Africa.  You may have read about it in spite of the secrecy surrounding the site.  Sand and coral reef camouflaged their whereabouts from the evasive explorations of man for many lifetimes.  Scientists, using robotic submersibles, have confirmed that the ancient city exists at the bottom of this canyon.  The site consists of three fairly well preserved giant pyramids with truncated tops, 65 meters in height, and a length of about 92 meters.  A number of other box-like structures include a four-story Aksum-type obelisk stretching from the center of the pyramids.  As far as it is known now, who or what built these ancient pyramids isn’t clear.

The city met its disastrous demise as a result of Antarctic icecaps catastrophically melting, causing sea levels to rise quickly around the world.  This all occurred at the end of the last ice age and has dramatically affected the southern hemisphere of this planet.   Coastal lines changed; lands were lost, islands disappeared.  It’s believed that this Lost City was on one such island when the sea levels rose, engulfing the land and sinking it to the bottom of the sea.  

The Institute of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg was brought on to excavate the site and study the ruins.  They believe that the ancient ruins belonged to the Afar people, a group of indigenous from the earliest days of man.  It is believed that the Latin word ‘Africa’ comes from the tribal people Afar which means ‘dust’ in Semitic languages such as ancient Phoenician.

You know that I’ve excavated ruins many times in the past, such as the ruins of Babylon and the ancient temples of Damascus where we found the scrolls of Azif.  But these ancient ruins of the Afar people were somehow different other than the fact they were quite a ways under the sea.  I was contacted by Dr. Rainer Wallace, a professor of Anthropology at Johannesburg to come to assist in this magnificent discovery.  My residence as you know was at the University of Buenos Aires, so needless to say the trip would be long but it was certainly a trip worth taking.

Once I arrived in South Africa I was met by Wallace and his team, we traveled directly to the coast and arrived on the site headquarters of the project.  There, Wallace took me aside, debriefed me about the project and the state of the excavation.  Professor Wallace believed the ruins belonged to an ancient tribe called the Bantu and not the Afar.  A group that worshiped the ghost creatures, things that the Bantu believed lived between worlds.

Wallace felt that the Bantu were more technologically advanced than the Afar, who didn’t build monuments or cities but were protectors of the land as it was.  Wallace was a driven man, a big Ernest Hemingway of a man, a man with more of an open mind than most Scientists, who in their own right deal in facts.  Problem, reaction, solution, much in the same as the German philosopher Hegel detailed in his Dialectic, a way that a discerning person can overcome their subjective position to objective reality, once there, it is the responsibility of that person of reason to tear it down and build it back up again using the same formula.  This formula is what has kept us scientists honest, not only with our research but with ourselves, as we realize that once we are present; we are contaminating objectivity with our subjective ideology and purview.

Wallace was a scientist, but as Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man of many talents and interests.  He liked to dash a bit of poetry onto his scientific approach to things and that’s why he’s heading this project.  I believe that’s why he brought me alone, knowing the lengths I’m willing to go to get the symbolic artifact as it were.

Later that evening he and I went to a pub for drinks, a dark place that had booths thick as caves flanked by gargoyles, Wallace and I sat in one of those caves and drank-ten steps to the grave-mampoer brandy and ate Biltong and lamb Sosaties while half a dozen candles flickered amber along the walls and ceiling of the booth.  He told me of his rare book collection.  He had an almost mint condition copy of one of the Guttenberg Bibles and an odd pairing copy of the Codex Gigas, a humongous book written in the 13^th century by Herman the Recluse in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia.  He said the gnostic Christians called the Cathars stole the two other editions during the Albigensian crusades and then they disappeared.  The Vandeline Priests held them in stoned secret rooms for a few centuries but the Cathars during the Battle of Kells acquired them back.

I thought that only one Codex existed in Prague but apparently, Wallace says there was actually three written side-by-each, word for Latin word.  The only known copy had some pages removed believed to have contained the monastic rules of the Benedictines.  Wallace assured me that his copy was completely intact, the only one in existence.  

As an aperitif, Wallace got us a couple glasses of Pinotage to relax us as he told me that the Bantu that lived on that island were estranged from the land people.  They began to worship otherworldly things, creatures that even the land people wouldn’t want any part of.  The translation could be wrong but these creatures were either thought of as ghosts or shadows.  He said that they have to remove the coral reef and then vacuum the sand out to clear the area.  But tomorrow he said we go down and take a look at the site.  I’m still not sure though if he truly brought me here for my expertise or that Damascus scroll I have of the Azif.  Either or, I’m here because of my unflinching curiosity.

The next day, early, hang-overs in tow, we set out on a ship to the site.  We were off the coast of Dyer Island, where seals quilted the shores and the water was known for its rough undercurrents and its white sharks.  Some of the crewmen on the ship threw dead tuna fish, tied to a rope with a floatation device attached to it, over the side to get the sharks going.  They had fifteen sharks, or so it looked as much, all fighting each other for a few dead fish.  Just as the sharks got inches away from the dead fish, the guys would pull on the rope and yank the dead fish out of the water.  A couple of times, a shark or two would jump out of the water to bite the fish with their many razor shape teeth.  These sharks were creepily odd and wondrously beautiful simultaneously, graceful but fierce.

After we looked at the site, which was still filled with sand, Wallace, holding a GPS device in his hand, said that the northwest corner of the site will be excavated first, he said that because I suggested we start there and then move - grid by grid.  He said the logistics of controlling everything from this ship and managing diving operations will clearly be time-consuming, but he said a surveying team has calculated whether access to the site will be constrained by the tides, currents and weather conditions.  He said scuba divers have been down 160 feet charting the area around the site, carrying out three-dimensional surveying using depth gauges and tape measurements.  Sonar equipment has been used to determine the size and depth of the structures, also he said that they brought in acoustic positioning equipment to help detail the site and to determine what structures are intact and what structures could potentially be dangerous.

After a look at the area, the ship turned around and headed back inland.  Wallace wanted to go out on the town in Pearly Beach and show me the local nightlife.   Besides he knew that a lot of the crew wanted to go to Geyser Island and fish, so he thought it would be a good chance for us to escape their tourism banality and party a little.   

On our way back on the ship, we all drank Mahewu beer and listened to Kwela African music.  In mid-day, the sharks were reasonably calm so some of the crazier crewmen apparently have gone swimming with the sharks long after their regular feeding time, which is at sunrise.   Today they went in holding only a staff-spear to push the sharks away if they got too close.  Some of the most fearsome creatures to have ever lived and these guys were down there swimming with them.  I imagined the adrenaline rush that must have been brought on while they slithered their half-naked bodies alongside them.  The guys had later told me that the sharks had a mild curiosity about them but for the most part, did their own thing.

Hearing this made me think about how untapped the mysteries of the ocean are.  We really don’t know about this place, what lurks beneath it, these sharks have been around for millions of years, yet we know more about the Tyrannosaurus Rex who walked the earth 65 million years ago, then we do about sharks, and they are still here, alive.

What’s fascinating about sharks, is they exist outside of human mythology, they are unaware of our religions and that Apartheid is still a problem after all these years in South Africa, they don’t know us, they don’t care to know us.  They exist outside the trappings of our language order, they are unbiased, unsympathetic, and with that, they are unpredictable.  Those men swimming with them have my admiration and also my condemnation because they are behaving beyond my understanding, meaning why would one subject themselves to such dangers when it is simply not necessary, why would they do that?

The guys brought mirror boards down with them to offset the sharks, swimming parallel with them….unbelievable.   What fascinated me was these men were more interested in satisfying their egos than the science of understanding sharks.  These men were once organisms from the sea as we're all living things at one point in our evolutionary history.  They had told me that what they felt down there with these majestic sea predators was a feeling of complete living in the moment.  All their senses were firing at 100% and as far as they know, there isn’t anything else that can do that.  You become relaxed in the tranquil sense they said, but are also on the highest alert possible, all at the same time.

Convergent evolution is how predatory perfection is passed down through species morphology.  Sharks likely get their fierce appetite and their longevity from the gargantuan Megalodon and going even further back, the monstrous prehistoric ancestor, Dunkleosteus.  This pachyosteomorph arthrodire existed during the Late Devonian period, about 370 million years ago.  These sea monsters were clearly carnivorous and had a unique armored shelling with a razor shape primitive jaw structure with teeth bigger than axe blades, which made them likely the fiercest of any species to follow.

We got back into shore and Wallace and I left the group and drove to Cape Town where incidentally bars and restaurants remained open late after dark in certain areas.  We sat with a group of men Wallace knew from way back dure his university days.  These men all come from various respected fields such as medicine, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, and of course anthropology.   We all sat at a round table with cigar smoke and American jazz atmospherically consuming the darkroom.

I looked around at these men thinking they might very well have the key to my life, respectively, their collective knowledge was astounding.  When I sat there and thought of my past, my divorce, what my children think of me, and even further back to my own childhood.  What would my mother and father have thought of such a gathering of people?  My parents were teachers in elementary schools and the level of academics in this room right now is overwhelming to me, let alone what it would be for them.

At first, after all the proper introductions, I sat back and listened to the conversation, and what a conversation it was.  Not only were these men drunk but they were astonishing with their verbiage and understanding of the cross-professions in their company.  Not to say there weren’t any arguments, there were plenty, and that’s what conversations like these were for.

The mathematician spoke of certainty while the philosopher from Eastern Europe reminded him of Soren Kierkegaard and the dizziness of freedom.  That point where you experience the true freedom of reality on the edge of a bridge but must make the symbolic choice to forbid your freedom to lean.   This is existential fear, the fear and trembling that we are not subject to good and evil but rather are subject to choice.  Sticking with philosophy, the anthropologist reminded the group that human beings, according to Michel Foucault, are a relatively new species.  On the scale of the age of the earth, we are newborns, the mysteries of the planet are only a surface experiment, and the true reality of the life span of this planet barely considers us notable.

The psychologist said that the true undiscovered country, the greatest of ancient civilizations, is still and will always be that of the human mind.  He said that how we interpret the world through our mind - is still unchartered territory.  That cognitive map has its excavators and its anthropologists but that land is vast and ancient beyond the language we attempt to use to represent it.

The philosopher, after sipping his wine, asks why do we continue to ruin our life experiences?  Knowledge is the key to fulfillment so why don’t we all take that route?  Wallace stares at the philosopher, then says…'because we can’t stop'.  He says, 'mankind is a failed project, but we can’t stop destroying ourselves because then what?'  If we define our civilization by its misery then what can we do to reverse it?  Global warming is a real actual catastrophic problem plaguing this planet, at our cost, but what are we going to do, shut off all the machines and stop eating beef –no– because we can’t.  Our greed and desire for power are far greater than the very planet we inhabit.  So what we will do is chip away at a cure to free us of our narcissistic voracity for superiority by understanding our past.  While the rest of the world takes massive chunks out of any hope for a future for mankind and the planet at large.  The point being; we can’t give up even if the ship is sinking without any noticeable rescue.

The philosopher retorts by going into the three big blows to mankind.  Galileo proves that Jupiter had four moons that orbited it thus destroying the last strut out from under the geocentric theory of the universe.  The ceiling of the world opened up to the infinite possibilities of the random cosmos.  Charles Darwin proved that human beings evolved from a species of ape, subject to the laws of nature and not that of a central all-knowing creator.   Sigmund Freud, through his mapping of the cognitive function of the human mind, has discerned that humans, as a result of civilizing themselves, are sick animals, where much of our psychic life is out of our own ability to recall it.  Meaning we are driven by unconscious forces that are foreign to us but yet are part of us and define and control us.

I sat there and listened to these men push and pull theory and belief, wondering if there has ever been a possible middle ground for people to reside.  The fact is; we don’t know and some of us are smart enough to know that we don’t know.  Most of us are suffocated by belief and are blinded by any reasonable interpretation of the world outside the mind of the person thinking it.  We are dreamers; we dream in the world and not live in it.  The brain will construct dreams with the detailed architecture of monumental cathedrals, then tear them down and dispose of them like they were paper planes.  It can plot structures to the length and literary beauty of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and just as easily throw them in a fire pit and burn them to a crisp with the same interest as a wood chip.  This can all happen the second you leave or are pulled out of your dream state.  The brain is the ultimate artist because it doesn’t get writer’s block and it’s able to create almost anything.

Wallace, drunken, and I faced each other as the group continued drinking and talking.  Wallace assured me that this project we are embarking on is monumental in scope.  This civilization buried in the sea might be the key to saving our own civilization.  He went on to tell me about his own family and their banal, trivial way of looking at the world.  He believed our only way to survive the future is to truly understand the past.  I sat and thought about that as he was saying it, and it did make sense.  But up to this point have we done this, have we as a population reflected on the past in such detail that we changed as a species?  I’m not sure we did, what we did do is use the past as a lesson to profit from the future.

Wallace told me that we are both going down to the Lost City tomorrow; we are going to discover the meaning of what these ancient people strived for.  Because that’s what we do, we uncover the mystery of what it is to be human, and these indigenous people, whether they are the Afar or the Bantu, may reveal some insight into our history.

The remainder of the night was that of drunken exurbs, flashes and cognitive storms of Nietzsche and daytime torches, Tesla and his burning lab and Margret Mead and flowers in men’s hair, and then I woke up on a boat, a ship.  Sunlight was piercing my eyelids.  I got up and walked to the deck.  Wallace and the team were all getting suited up in scuba diving gear.  Wallace looked at me with a historic grin; he also implied that I suit up.

Because of the sharks, we suited up in chain gear along with 30 pounds of additional weight before we dove into the ocean.  I looked at the sky as I sat on the edge of the ship.  I wished that my wife and children were here,  I wished I didn’t distance my wife to the point of alienation,  I wished I was better.  I thought of the sharks swarming around like a colony of ants even though I know sharks don’t do that.  I was scared.

I fell backward into the water as it absorbed me.  A moment passed and the bubbles and trauma cleared.  What was left was a clear blue alien world, a world that felt like a dream as I floated.   The group swam down to the site, so after adjusting to this aquatic environment I joined them.  At this point, the Lost City was visible, beautiful in scope, and marvelous in wonder.

After my breathing was controllable and my diving ability was manageable, I was in awe at the sight.  I looked to my right and saw a massive tube running from the site to the surface called an airlift, pumping sand out of the excavation area.  The obelisk was more visible as I got closer to the area.  This lit place was massive; it is amazing that a whole island sank like a ship.

Wallace swam over and motioned to me to push a button on the side of my face mask.  I did so and suddenly was washed with the voices of many people.  Wallace told me over the earpiece that we are breaking ground on the northeastern side of the site.

We both swam to the dusty ruins, where we settled on the floor of the ocean.  Looking up we could see the silhouettes of white sharks swimming about.  I was nervous but I followed Wallace as we looked into a well intact structure, inside were five tombs with skeletons carved into the tops of them, forming a circle around a central piece, skulls all facing the center.  The yellowish statue was cloudy as we moved toward it.  After the cloud cleared we saw a monster, unlike anything we’ve seen before as this iron monumental centerpiece.   Wallace looked over at me wanting recognition for this overwhelming view of the site.   Clearly, the beast that is depicted is not of this world, but it did have a small eye within a larger eye on its forehead.  An unrecognizable cuneiform was written around the base of the statue.

We are alerted by the team to join them outside; we got out there to swim to the bottom of the canyon this place resides in.  One member of the team gets up to watch a school of fish swim in a newly uncovered cave as a result of the excavation.  The school of fish swim into the darkness of the cave and disappear.  Wallace insists on an explanation as to why we were told about this.  They watched another school swim into the cave and disappear.

Wallace and I moved closer to the newly revealed cave, as we approached we could see that the roof of the cave is mirror-like, oscillating.  Wallace pulled out a spear-rifle and looked at me.  The first thing I was thinking was; we are here to uncover an ancient civilization.  We are scientists, not military.  The airlift tub suddenly broke loose and swung against the cave wall, crashing rock and debris to the sea bed.  Air bubbles from the cave furiously escaped from captivity and are released into the ocean.  

My wife and I met at university where she became a child psychologist.  I become an archeologist and what we had in common was we studied human behavior.  We studied people.  I miss her face the most, she’s a great mother.......... I miss my son.  

I was laying on the ocean floor looking up at the ceiling of the sea as bubbles and creatures swarm the site, they were clearly blinded at first, adjusting to the light of the ocean reflecting down from the world above.  Whatever these things were, they were not adaptable to our ocean.  They screamed and squirmed as they ate the white sharks like they were sardines.  I was there - on the floor of the ocean and looked up at the most monstrous slaughter.  These creatures escaped the entrapment of that massive cave and now were unleashed upon the world. 

They are gigantic in size, blind, and hungry as they not only eat the sharks but the divers on their way to the ocean floor.  These things are prehistoric or alien in nature.  A blizzard of small fish expelled from the massive cavity and with it, creatures with teeth the size of wine bottles, they too had trouble seeing but soon adjusted to the light.  The skin on their backs glowed in neon colors, blues, and purples and they swam effortlessly among the other creatures.

I was looking up at the battlefield; I still had quite a bit of oxygen in my tank.  These creatures have been held captive, for whatever reason, in that cavern for millenniums and have now been released and hungry. 

A massive 150-ton creature swam over my head, eclipsing the sun’s rays high from above.   It looked to be a cross between a humpback whale and a crocodile, with four huge pectoral flippers at its sides steering its titanic weight around.  All other creatures stayed clear of it leading me to believe that it was the king of this sea.  Wallace was eaten by one of these beasts, clutched and overwhelmed.  I sat there looking up oddly admiring the beauty of the bloodbath.  It's pecular how the mind can abandon morality when faced with reality.

I could see the sun pushing its rays on this inner ocean landscape.   Fish from side to side washed around like waves along the site.  I looked around, laying flat on the bottom of the ocean, I then swam to the canyon wall and slowly rose up, watching these recovering blind creatures devour the team I trained with during this dig. 

A bottlenose Dolphin quickly swam up to me and hovered beside me, I took a hold of its pectoral fin and dorsal fin and held on as it swam to shore.  The dolphin left me hanging on to a rock face as it swam like a bullet away from danger.  I met the surface, looking around as the rough anger of the ocean held no sympathy for the people within it.  We boarded the vessel, searching for comfort and exile but also searching for answers.  The crew is dead; these monsters are here, out, and among us. 

I sat on the edge, as a monstrous arm reached over and destroyed the front of the ship, which then began to sink.  I just wanted to hit land after losing Wallace and the project.....  But what of these things?  A massive creature dove out of the water and began to fly in the air, flapping its huge wings like a mystical dragon.  I could see it reach land and attack people running and screaming.

I looked around and wondered how I arrived on land when we stopped the ship at the site there was no land for five miles.  I looked back under the water and saw a red-orange glow shining from where the cave is.  I quietly made my way down the cliff surface and back under the water, avoiding the monsters.  One of the neon-glowing creatures swam near me to the point that it rubbed its scaly skin on my stomach but then just swam away. 

My son - his birth and young life flashed before my eyes - he stared at me and told me to wake up......

I was stunned to see Wallace grabbing and facing me.  He was yelling at me to calm down and was also asking where I’ve been.  They couldn’t find me for 14 minutes.  I looked around and could see that the team was there, alive and there were no massive creatures killing anything.  The airlift tube was still working, pumping sand from the excavation site.

I told them what I saw, I told them what had happened and they all looked at me and understandably were perplexed.  Then it happened, looking at their judgmental faces I could see they didn’t believe me.  Then Wallace ran his hand along my stomach and held it up.  His hand was glowing with a blue-greenish ooze on it, so he said that he thought I picked up some kind of luminescent fungus.  

I told the group that what was beyond that portal was alive and now had a means of travel.  Wallace told me that the oxygen in my tank must be up too high.  He said that when we get back to land we are going to the nearest bar and to drink our faces off.  He laughed and swam back toward the site.  Behind me as I looked at them the cave entry began to bubble, I turned and saw a huge pectoral fin exit and re-enter the portal.  They’re coming and it might not be today but you can be damn sure it will be tomorrow.

Professor Spencer Zwick

University of Buenos Aires