Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read Online Free PDF Page B

existed.
    Tony lived about a mile outside of a village that consisted of two pubs, the ruins of two medieval abbeys, a grade school, and a visitors center that never seemed to be open when I passed by. He and Paul (who had moved in for a while with his own ailing mother) lived in a house that had until the 1950s been the station for a narrow-gauge railway line. Their home was cozy, with two bedrooms upstairs and a small office on the ground floor that held Tony’s impressive Atlantis library. The kitchen smelled of spices and cigarettes, since Paul was a passionate cook and smoker. Tony did most of his Atlantis-related work in the front room, tapping away on a laptop perched atop a coffee table as the BBC News played on the television, muted. He was round and bald and walked with a limp from gout. A mischievous gleam in his eye hinted that he might be pulling someone’s leg and made you hope that it wasn’t yours. He raised his eyebrows above his wire-framed eyeglasses whenever emphasizing his doubts about something. When he laughed, which happened often, his whole body shook. He reminded me of an off-duty department store Santa Claus.
    Like most men of a certain age, Tony had a daily routine that varied only slightly. Tony and Paul kept almost opposite hours. Tony got up early. Paul, who was a couple of decades younger, was a night owl and usually woke in the afternoon, when Tony brought him breakfast in bed. After dinner, Tony usually dropped Paul at one ofthe two local pubs; Paul carried a reflective vest and penlight for his 2:00 A.M. walk home. His mortal enemy, a nasty Doberman, lived a few doors down. “If you decide you’d like to go for a walk, you’d best go in the other direction,” Paul warned me, lighting another cigarette to steady his nerves.
    Tony usually conducted his online Atlantis business in the mornings while drinking a mug of tea and wearing his bathrobe, which gave the impression that he was puttering about on the web. Later, I’d log on to the Atlantipedia site and find that he’d written three new entries while I was in the kitchen eating my morning muesli. The Atlantipedia served as a sort of clearinghouse for amateur, and occasionally professional, Atlantologists. “Some person has identified Mesopotamia as an island surrounded by two rivers,” he called out one morning from the living room. “Not the Mesopotamia where Iraq is, which might make some sort of sense. It’s the one located in Argentina.”
    •   •   •
    Late each morning, Tony and I drove over to the small city of Carrick-on-Shannon to do a little shopping and run some errands, like placing horse racing wagers for Paul at the off-track betting office. One day we stopped by the local registry so that Tony could pick up the paperwork for a civil partnership. After twenty-odd years as a couple, Tony and Paul were making things official. Once our tasks were completed, we’d stop for a coffee and slice of cake.
    When I had initially asked Tony why he thought the Atlantis story was true, he had pointed me to a fascinating scholarly essay by a former NASA scientist, the late A. N. Kontaratos, which cites twenty-two instances in which Plato attests to the veracity of the Atlantis story.
    “Solon was a very important lawmaker, a very just man, and highlyregarded,” he told me at the coffee shop, whose jazzy decor made it seem as though we were discussing lost cities on the set of
Friends
. “Plato using him would be like you writing a book and invoking Benjamin Franklin as your source. You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t true. I think the most powerful argument is when he expresses reservations—like he does about the ditch around the plain.” Critias pauses his description of the enormous channel carved by generations of Atlanteans to explain that while he knows that its incredible proportions seem unrealistic, he’s only passing along what he was told. “No one’s ever going to express reservation about his own