Putting Back the Clock
Atlantis and the Giants. By Denis Saurat. (Faber, 12s. 6d.) THIS is a depressing and disturbing book, not just because of what it says, but because of who says it. It is the usual Atlantomaniac claptrap we have had so many times from the fertile pen and even more fertile imagination of H. S. Bellamy : cap- tured moons and girdle tides, and a great civilisa- tion at Tiahuanaco. But this time it is a dis- tinguished scholar and man of letters who says it.
When Professor Denis Saurat published L'Atlantide et la regne des geants in 1954 it was only too embarrassingly clear that here was a scholar and critic, hitherto impartial and bal- anced, who had suddenly been swept quickly through the lunatic fringes of archaeology and geology and was now well through on the other side where reason, fact and argument mean noth- ing. Now in this English text for all to read are these horrid revelations of conversion to legen- dary history, mythical archaeology, miasmical geology. My advice to readers is to turn quickly away from these soft words for here is the devil of unreason tempting you away from the facts so hardly won by 150 years of geological and archwological research.
Before a scholarly discipline of prehistory and history came into existence in the nineteenth cen- tury we had to invent our prehistory; and the legendary prehistories of Europe were legion. Phoenicians, Trojans, Greeks,- Egyptians,, Druids, the lost tribes of Israel all vied with each other as suitors for the role of master-civilisers of the world.. Saurat and Bellamy are only additions to a long list of inventors of the past that began in Britain with Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Saurat has swallowed the Bellamy legendary prehistory hook, line and Hoerbiger's Glazial- cosmogonie. Here it all is : the great Andean civilisation (that was really Atlantis) 30,000 years ago, and a race of men twelve to fifteen feet high who had ships that circled the world on the ocean bulge. The Bible, Near Eastern Archaeology, the Greeks, Mexico and Malekula all seem to prove it, .and, surprisingly, even Fred Hoyle, Harold Jeffreys and le Gros Clark have some of• their ideas snatched out of context to give apparent support to these strange writings.
Is it all a joke, to see whether people will be taken in? Or is it a new kind of science fiction? I am afraid Saurat is serious. 'Nothing is sure,' he' says, 'anything is possible . . . what is heterodox today may easily be the purest ortho- doxy tomorrow. It has happened before.' Exactly, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries our inventions could have currency because there was no competition and no facts. In Stuart times it might have seemed plausible to argue that Stone- henge was the work of giants wafted on girdle tides from Chile to Chesil Beach. Today it is not only implausible but ridiculous. In a world full of people who read archwological books, watch arclneological telecasts, visit excavations and support museums and learned societies, it is not possible to put the clock back to the time of Aylett Sammes and William Stukeley.
GLYN DANIEL
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