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This is a postscript from The Living Dead series. It may have gone out in some versions but was pulled in a subsequent edit.
T he following tale was gleaned from a collection of curious stories discovered in Greece by Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803. It is not, of course, as famous as the pieces of the priceless, marble Parthenon frieze he also “collected” during the same time frame and which still reside (somewhat controversially) in the British Museum. Nevertheless, it is a peek into the myths of a lost world that pre-dated and perhaps foreshadowed our own beloved Western Civilization.
The Greek historian Herodotus wrote of an antediluvian, scientifically-advanced people known for their healing abilities. Originally dismissed as another Atlantis type myth, recent textual and archaeological evidence has come to light in Russia that seems to confirm at least some version of the story. Recounted below is a compilation of various fragmented accounts of the tale.
“Now it came to pass that in the days before the Great Deluge a wise and learned people built a city of great renown, fairer than any city we know today, upon an island in the Mavri-Thalassa*. The people of this city, skilled healers, explored all of the known world for plants and minerals for their miraculous elixirs and poultices. They captured the venom of poisonous snakes for use in various curative decoctions. The ill journeyed hundreds of miles for treatment and the returned travelers spoke of withered limbs made whole, lepers made clean, and an elixir that alleviated all pain.
Snow-capped mountains ringed the city, leaving only a narrow passage through which ships were admitted by sentries at guard stations. Buildings with walls and roofs made of clear stone enclosed gardens where many strange and wonderful plants thrived, carefully tended by linen-clad acolytes.
But the learned people delved too deeply into arcane matters and in their pride and arrogance tried to make themselves immortal. They fell prey to an illness that destroyed their minds whilst leaving their once mortal bodies deathless. Travelers seeking treatment in the city at that time were never seen again or else returned with accounts of besieged townspeople hunted by deranged cannibals from whom they themselves barely escaped.
Tales of the city soon faded into myth and legend. Herodotus tells us that, years later, explorers searching for the fabled city found an island in the midst of Mavir-Thalassa. Upon landing they found brutish creatures roaming a vast and once-beautiful city. Greatly outnumbered, the explorers fled and never returned.
Soon after, the gods grew weary of the wickedness of humanity and sent a Great Flood to cleanse the earth of man and his folly. The roaring, engulfing waters that covered the world swallowed the island and it never re-emerged.
The people of the region avoid swimming in the waters even now and parents frighten children with tales of monsters that emerge on moonless nights, searching for living prey.
*believed to be the Black Sea
