National Geographic: Born of Fire Page #5

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without precedent in American history

Thirty-five hundred years ago

on the Aegean island of Santorini

these ruins too held a civilization

Here, long before the Parthenon

the maritime community of Akrotiri

created a culture

that rivaled the splendors of

nearby Minoan Crete

In frescoes artists painted

the sunlit landscapes of man

in his springtime

the years in Eden when the Earth

was filled with wonders

Upon the walls were mirrored

the ordinary tasks

and pleasures of a small world

in which the simplest acts of

everyday life held meaning

and even the gods often behaved

like noisy neighbors

Over the wide sea, returning seamen

brought strange gifts

and creatures from the shadowy lands beyond

told of odysseys across

a world still new

Now they are gone

abruptly vanished in

a great catastrophe

All that remain are a half-excavated

civilization under glass

a few amphoras in orderly array

life and death filed on

an index card

One of the scientists trying to

decipher the puzzle of the past

Dr. Christos Doumas of the University

of Athens leads Dr. Ballard

through the remains of a city

that died thirty-five centuries ago

"This is an ancient street leading

to the Triangle Square

flanked on the left by

the Building Delta

and on the right by the West House."

"Now here's where you

found the frescoes."

"Yes, we found frescoes

and other things which show

that we are discovering here a very

highly civilized society

of the Bronze Age."

"The houses are individual

surrounded by streets

There are several stories

as you see

and we have indoor plumbing

connected directly

with the drainage system

of the street."

"So you had a society of individual

families living together..."

"Yes. And every house was

an entity by itself."

"And here we can see how

sophisticated these houses were

The basement, as in

many of the houses

was used for storing

goods a variety of crops like barley

flour of barley

lentils, various nuts like almonds."

"So they had a pretty good diet

I mean it was varied."

"Yes. And they were consuming

also seafood

because we found shells of

sea urchins

and remains of dried fish

"The city was captured by

the earthquakes and

this staircase shows

that it was broken before the

eruption of the volcano

"So this probably caused

them to evacuate."

"Yes. It was a warning

for the people."

"And then after the earthquake

the major eruption occurred."

"Yes. It destroyed almost everything

as you sea and then the site was

covered with volcanic ash."

Before the great warning tremors

Akrotiri lay on the flank of a

steeply sloping island

unaware that miles below

the Earth's crust was in movement

Soon after the quake

the island exploded in one of historical

prodigious volcanic eruptions

Suddenly a mountain had disappeared

its walls collapsed into a volcanic

caldera now filled

by the inrushing sea

A vast searing cloud of pumice and

ash buried Akrotiri

and surged over the Mediterranean

with an impact on history that

still is being assessed

"We're inside the caldera

Behind me are the layered walls

of the volcano

which record its long history

The black layers are basaltic

lava flows;

the red ones a tephra ejected

from the volcanic vent."

"These prehistoric layers once

formed a great volcano over

About 3,500 years ago

the entire volcano erupted destroying

over two-thirds of the island

At the top today you can see a

white layer of pumic

and ash which records

that great event

That layer is over 100 feet thick."

Human beings still cling to the

narrow rim of cliffs

that now surrounds emptiness

Today several thousand islanders

live on the heights

and fish or search for sponges

in the depths of the caldera

Steep paths link them with the ports

through which supplies

much of their fresh water

and occasional visitors arrive

by sea

Today the centers of Western

civilization

have moved far beyond Santorini

Insulated from the rumors and

alarms of a wider world

it has settled into the ways of

village life

Upon the cliffs workmen build

and repair structures using

the very ash

and pumice of the explosion

that once destroyed their island

In the fields around them

farmers tend vineyards

and reap grain planted

in the volcano soil

The pumice is even sold for profit

was once exported for the

building of the Suez Canal

more than a century ago

Intermittently strong tremors still

shake the island

but the widows of Santorini remain

solitary symbols of the tenacity

by which life endures

Beneath them one plate slides

under another in endless movement

even the gods may change

but prayer remains a step

in the search

for reassurance and certainty

On Good Friday

worshippers are surrounded by frescoes

that describe not the joys of life

but its tragic burdens

Yet for the devout islanders

faith holds a triumphant hope

Out of death's darkness life returns

a flame passed from candle to candle

In the ritual of twenty centuries

the villagers

again find a ancient recognition

In the Easter story of resurrection

they tell their own

After the resurrection joy

the breaking of eggs to release

the symbolic life within

Across the island

after forty days of fasting

the villagers feast and dance

The world has changed many time

since this woman lived in Santorini

Her gods have vanished

The streets on which she walked now

end in walls of ash

Yet in these dancing rhythms of life

she might hear echoes of another time

the refrains of home

Imperceptible to living generations

the change goes on

toward a future

that science's computers

already have begun to outline

By its present drift

Africa, in its clockwise movement

will close the Mediterranean

and collide with southern Europe

raising great new mountain ranges

like a rumpled rug

In Africa itself the sea at last will

flood the desert thorn trees

isolate eastern Africa

invade a domain once held by

elephants and lions

In the Americas, as elsewhere

life will be radically altered

Mecca for millions of fugitives

from the wintry East

Los Angeles may have to doctor its

swimming pools with antifreeze

Set at the edge of the Pacific Plate

it is moving relentlessly

toward Alaska

at the rapid of two or three

inches a year

Ten million years from now

San Francisco will find

that for a time its scorned southern

rival has become a suburb

New York may become part of a

vast volcanic range

as the expanding Atlantic floor

passes under the eastern coast

Compared to Earth's history

man's tenure has be dazzling

and brief

In ten thousand years he has

created language

built cathedrals, invented the means

to destroy life one Earth

His computers can project

the destination

of continents 200 million years

from now

But where man will be none can predict

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