"You're very small, Cristoforo," his sister said.

"I won't always be small."

"Hush," said Mother. "This is all nonsense. The son of a weaver doesn't go on Crusade."

"Why not?" said Cristoforo. "Would Christ refuse my sword?"

"What sword?" said Mother scornfully.

"I'll have a sword one day," said Cristoforo. "I'll be a gentleman!"

"How, when you have no gold?"

"I'll get gold!"

"In Genova? As a weaver? As long as you live, you'll be the son of Domenico Colombo. No one will give you gold, and no one will call you a gentleman. Now be silent, or I'll pinch your arm."

It was a worthy threat, and all the children knew well enough to obey when Mother uttered it.

A couple of hours later, Father came home. The journeymen almost didn't let him in, just from his knocking. Not until he cried out in anguish "My lord is dead! Let me in!" did they unbar the door.

He staggered inside just as the children raced after Mother into the front room. Father was covered with blood, and Mother screamed and embraced him and then searched him for wounds.

"It's not my blood," he said in anguish. "It's the blood of my Doge! Pietro Fregoso is dead! The cowards set on him and pulled him from his horse and struck him in the head with a mace!"

"Why are you covered with his blood, Nico!"

"I carried him to the doors of the palace of the Doge. I carried him to the place where he ought to be!"

"Why would you do that, you fool!"

"Because he told me to! I came to him and he was crying out and covered with blood and I said, 'Let me take you to your physicians, let me take you to your house, let me find the ones who did this and kill them for you,' and he said to me, 'Domenico, take me to the palace! That's where the Doge should die - in the palace, like my father!' So I carried him there, in my own arms, and I didn't care if the Adornos saw us! I carried him there and he was in my arms when he died! I was his true friend!"

"If they saw you with him, they'll find you and kill you!"

"What does it matter?" said Father. "The Doge is dead!"

"It matters to me," said Mother. "Get those clothes off." She turned to the journeymen and began giving orders. "You - get the children to the back of the house. You - have the apprentices draw water and heat it for a bath. You - when I get these clothes off him, burn them."

The other children obeyed the journeyman and fled to the back of the house, but Cristoforo did not. He watched as his mother undressed his father, covering him with kisses and curses the whole time. Even after she led him into the courtyard for his bath, even as the stench of the burning b.l.o.o.d.y clothing came into the house, Cristoforo stayed there in the front room. He was on watch, guarding the door.

Or so the old accounts of that night all said. Columbus was on watch, to keep his family safe. But Diko knew that this was not all that was going through Cristoforo's mind. No, he was making his decision. He was setting before himself the terms of his future greatness. He would be a gentleman. Kings and queens would treat him with respect. He would have gold. He would conquer kingdoms in the name of Christ.

He must have known even then that to accomplish all of this, he would have to leave Genova. As his mother had said: As long as he lived in this city, he would be the son of Domenico the weaver. From the next morning he bent his life toward achieving his new goals. He began to study - languages, history - with such vigor that the monks who were teaching him commented on it. "He has caught the spirit of scholarship," they said, but Diko knew that it wasn't learning for its own sake. He had to know languages to travel abroad in the world. He had to know history to know what was in the world when he ventured into it.

And he had to know how to sail. Every chance he got, Cristoforo was down at the docks, listening to the sailors, questioning them, learning what all the crewmen did. Later he focused on the navigators, plying them with wine when he could afford it, simply demanding answers when he could not. Eventually it would get him aboard a ship, and then another; he turned down no chance to sail, and did any work that was asked of him, so that he would know all that a weaver's son could hope to learn about the sea.

Diko made her report on Cristoforo Colombo, on the moment when he made his decision. As always, her father praised it, criticizing only minor points. But she knew by now that his praise could conceal serious criticism. When she challenged him, he wouldn't tell her what his criticism was. "I say that this report is a good one," he told her. "Now leave me alone."

"There's something wrong with it," Diko said, "and you're not telling me."

"It's a well-written report. It has nothing wrong except the points I told you."

"Then you disagree with my conclusion. You don't think this was what made Cristoforo decide to be great."

"Decide to be great?" asked Father. "Yes, I think this is ahnost certainly the point in his life where he made that decision."

"Then what's wrong with it!" she shouted.

"Nothing!" he shouted back.

"I'm not a child!"

He looked at her in consternation. "You aren't?"

"You're humoring me and I'm tired of it!"

"All right," he said. "Your report is excellent and observant. He certainly decided on the night you pinpointed, and for the reasons that you laid out, that he would pursue gold and greatness and the glory of G.o.d. All that is very good. But there is not one breath of a hint in anything you reported on that would tell us why and how he decided that he would achieve those goals by sailing west into the Atlantic."

It struck as brutally as the slap that Cristoforo's mother had given him, and it brought the same tears to her eyes, even though there was no physical blow involved.

"I'm sorry," said Father. "You said you were not a child."

"I'm not," she said. "And you're wrong."

"I am?"

"My project is to find when the decision for greatness was made, and that's what I found. It's your project and Mother's project to figure out when Columbus decided to go west."

Father looked at her in surprise. "Well, yes, I suppose so. It's certainly something we need to know."

"So there's nothing wrong with my report for my project, just because it doesn't happen to answer the question that's bothering you in yours."

"You're right," said Father.

"I know!"

"Well, now I know, too. I withdraw the criticism. Your report is complete and acceptable and I accept it. Congratulations.

But she didn't go away.

"Diko, I'm working," he said.

"I'll find it for you," she said.

"Find what?"

"Whatever it was that caused Cristoforo to sail west."

"Finish your own project, Diko," said Father.

"You don't think I can, do you?"

"I've been over the recordings of Columbus's life, and so has your mother, and so have countless other scholars and scientists. You think you'll find what none of them ever found?"

"Yes," said Diko.

"Well," said Father. "I think we've just isolated your decision for greatness."

He smiled at her, a crooked little smile. She a.s.sumed that he was teasing her. But she didn't care. He might think he was joking, but she would make his joke turn real. Had he and Mother and countless others pored over all the old Tempoview recordings of Columbus's life? Very well, then, Diko would stop looking at recordings at all. She would go and look directly at his life, and not with the Tempoview, either. The TruSite II would be her tool. She didn't ask for permission, and she didn't ask for help. She simply took over a machine that wasn't used at night, and adjusted the schedule of her life to fit the hours when the machine was hers to use. Some wondered whether she really ought to be using the most up-to-date machines - after all, she wasn't actually a member of Past.w.a.tch. Her training was at best informal. She was merely the child of watchers, and yet she was using a machine that one normally got access to after years of study.

Those who had those doubts, however, seeing the set of her face, seeing how hard she worked and how quickly she learned to use the machine, soon lost any desire to question her right to do it. It occurred to some of them that this was the human way, after all. You went to school to learn to do a trade that was different from your parents' work. But if you were going into the family business, you learned it from childhood up. Diko was as much a watcher as anyone else, and by all indications a good one. And those who had at first thought of questioning her or even stopping her instead notified the authorities that here was a novice worth observing. A recording was started, watching all that Diko did. And soon she had a silver tag on her file: Let this one go where she wants.

Chapter 4 - Kemal.

The Santa Maria sank on a reef on the north sh.o.r.e of Hispaniola, due to Columbus's foolhardiness in sailing at night and the inattention of the pilot. But the Nina and the Pinta did not sink; they sailed home to report to Europe on the vast lands awaiting them to the west, triggering a westward flood of immigrants, conquerors, and explorers that wouldn't stop for five hundred years. If Columbus was to be stopped, the Nina and the Pinta could not return to Spain.

The man who sank them was Kemal Akyazi, and the path that brought him to Tagiri's project to change history was a long and strange one.

Kemal Akyazi grew up within a few miles of the ruins of Troy; from his boyhood home above k.u.mkale he could see the waters of the Dardanelles, the narrow strait that connects the waters of the Black Sea with the Aegean. Many a war had been fought on both sides of that strait, one of which had produced the great epic of Homer's Iliad.

This pressure of history had a strange influence on Kemal as a child. He learned all the tales of the place, of course, but he also knew that the tales were Greek, and the place was of the Greek Aegean world. Kemal was a Turk; his own ancestors had not come to the Dardanelles until the fifteenth century. He felt that it was a powerful place, but it did not belong to him. So the Iliad was not the story that spoke to Kemal's soul. Rather it was the story of Heinrich Schliemann, the German explorer who, in an era when Troy had been regarded as a mere legend, a myth, a fiction, had been sure not only that Troy was real but also that he could find it. Despite all scoffers, he mounted an expedition and located it and unburied it. The old stories turned out to be true.

In his teens Kemal thought it was the greatest tragedy of his life that Past.w.a.tch was using machines to look through the the millennia of human history. There would be no more Schliemanns, studying and pondering and guessing until they found some artifact, some ruin of a long-lost city, some remnant of a legend made true again. Thus Kemal had no interest in joining Past.w.a.tch, though they tried to recruit him for it as he entered college. It was not history but exploration and discovery that he hungered for; what was the glory in finding the truth through a machine?

So, after an abortive try at physics, he studied to become a meteorologist. At the age of eighteen, heavily immersed in the study of climate and weather, he touched again on the findings of Past.w.a.tch. No longer did meteorologists have to depend on only a few centuries of weather measurements and fragmentary fossil evidence to determine long-range patterns. Now they had accurate accounts of storm patterns for millions of years. Indeed, in the earliest years of Past.w.a.tch, the machinery of the TruSite I had been so coa.r.s.e that individual humans could not be seen. It was like time-lapse photography in which people don't remain in place long enough to be on more than a single frame of the film, making them invisible. So in those days Past.w.a.tch recorded the weather of the past, erosion patterns, volcanic eruptions, ice ages, climatic shifts.

All that data was the bedrock on which modern weather prediction and control rested. Meteorologists could see developing patterns and, without disrupting the overall flow, could make tiny changes that prevented any one area from going completely rainless during a time of drought, or sunless during a wet growing season. They had taken the sharp edge off the relentless scythe of climate, and now the great project was to determine how they might make a more serious change, to bring a steady pattern of light rain to the desert regions of the world, to restore the prairies and savannas that had once been there. That was the work that Kemal wanted to be a part of.

Yet he could not bring himself out from the shadow of Troy, the memory of Schliemann. Even as he studied the climatic shifts involved with the waxing and waning of the ice ages, his mind contained fleeting images of lost civilizations, legendary places that waited for a Schliemann to uncover them.

His project for his degree in meteorology was part of the effort to determine how the Red Sea might be exploited to develop dependable rains for the Sudan and central Arabia; Kemal's immediate target was to study the difference between weather patterns during the last ice age, when the Red Sea had all but disappeared, and the present, with the Red Sea at its fullest. Back and forth he went through the coa.r.s.e old Past.w.a.tch recordings, gathering data on sea level and on precipitation at selected points inland. The old TruSite I had been imprecise at best, but good enough for counting rainstorms.

Time after time Kemal would cycle through the up-and-down fluctuations of the Red Sea, watching as the average sea level actually rose toward the end of the Ice Age. He always stopped, of course, at the abrupt jump in sea level that marked the rejoining of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After that, the Red Sea was useless for his purposes, since its sea level was tied to that of the great world ocean.

The echo of Schliemann inside Kemal's mind made him think: What a flood that must have been.

What a flood. The Ice Age had locked up so much water in glaciers and ice sheets that the sea level of the whole world fell. It eventually reached a low enough point that land bridges arose out of the sea. In the north Pacific, the Bering land bridge allowed the ancestors of the Indies to cross on foot into their great empty homeland. Britain and Flanders were joined. The Dardanelles were closed and the Black Sea became a salty lake. The Persian Gulf disappeared and became a great plain cut by the Euphrates. And the Bab al Mandab, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, became a land bridge.

But a land bridge is also a dam. As the world climate warmed and the glaciers began to release their pent-up water, the rains fell heavily everywhere; rivers swelled and the seas rose. The great south-flowing rivers of Europe, which had been mostly dry during the peak of glaciation, now were ma.s.sive torrents. The Rhone, the Po, the Strimon, the Danube poured so much water into the Mediterranean and the Black Sea that their water level rose at about the same rate as that of the great world ocean.

The Red Sea had no great rivers, however. It was, in geological terms, a new sea, formed by rifting between the new Arabian plate and the ancient African, which meant it had uplift ridges on both coasts. Many rivers and streams flowed from those ridges down into the Red Sea, but none of them carried much water compared to the rivers that drained vast basins and carried the melt-off of the glaciers of the north. So, while the Red Sea gradually rose during this time, it lagged far, far behind the great world ocean. Its water level responded to the immediate local weather pattems rather than to worldwide weather. Until one day the Indian Ocean rose so high that tides began to spill over the Bab al Mandab. The water cut new channels in the gra.s.sland there. Over a period of several years, the leakage grew, creating a series of large new tidal lakes on the Hanish Plain. And then one day, some fourteen thousand years ago, the flow cut a channel so deep that it didn't dry up at low tide. The water kept running through it, cutting the channel deeper and deeper, until those tidal lakes were fall, and brimmed over. With the weight of the Indian Ocean behind it the water gashed into the basin of the Red Sea in a vast flood that in a few hours brought the Red Sea up to the level of the world ocean.

This isn't just the boundary marker between useful and useless water level data, thought Kemal. This is a cataclysm, one of the rare times when a single event changes a vast area in a period of time short enough that human beings could notice it. And, for once, this cataclysm happened in an era when human beings were there. It was not only possible but likely that someone saw this flood - indeed, that it killed many, for the southern end of the Red Sea basin was rich savanna and marshland up to the moment when the ocean broke through, and surely the humans of fourteen thousand years ago would have hunted there. Would have gathered seeds and fruits and berries there. Some hunting party must have seen, from the peaks of the Dehalak Mountains, the great walls of water that roared up the plain, breaking and parting around the slopes of the Dehalaks, making islands of them.

Such a hunting party would have known that their families had been killed by this water. What would they have thought? Surely that some G.o.d was angry with them. That the world had been done away, buried under the sea. And if they survived, if they found a way to the Eritrean sh.o.r.e after the great turbulent waves settled down to the more placid waters of the new, deeper sea, they would tell the tale to anyone who would listen. And for a few years they could take their hearers to the water's edge, show them the treetops barely rising above the surface of the sea, and tell them tales of all that had been buried under the waves.

Noah, thought Kemal. The immortal Utnapishtim, the flood survivor that Gilgamesh visited. Ziusudra of the Sumerian flood story. Atlantis. The stories were believed. The stories were remembered. In time the tellers of the tale forgot where it happened - they naturally transposed the events to locations that they knew. But they remembered the things that mattered. What did the flood story of Noah say? Not just rain, no, it wasn't a flood caused by rain alone. The "fountains of the great deep" broke open. No local flood on the Mesopotamian plain would cause that image to be part of the story. But the great wall of water from the Indian Ocean, coming on the heels of years of steadily increasing rain - that would bring those words to the storytellers' lips, generation after generation for ten thousand years until they could be written down.

As for Atlantis, everyone was so sure they had found it years ago. Santorini - Thios - the Aegean island that blew up. But the oldest stories of Atlantis said nothing of blowing up in a volcano. They spoke only of the great civilization sinking into the sea. The supposition was that later visitors came to Santorini and, seeing water where an island city used to be, a.s.sumed that it had sunk, knowing nothing of the volcanic eruption. To Kemal, however, this now seemed far-fetched indeed, compared to the way it would have looked to the people of Atlantis themselves, somewhere on the Ma.s.sawa Plain, when the Red Sea seemed to leap up in its bed, engulfing the city. That would be sinking into the sea! No explosion, just water. And if the city were in the marshes of what was now the Ma.s.sawa Channel, the water would have come not just from the southeast but from the northeast and the north as well, flowing among and around the Dehalak mountains, making islands of them and swallowing up the marshes and the city with them.

Atlantis. They were not beyond the pillars of Hercules, but Plato was right to a.s.sociate the city with a strait. He, or whoever told the tale to him, simply replaced the Bab al Mandab with the greatest strait that he had heard of. The story might well have reached Plato by way of Phoenicia, where Mediterranean sailors would have made the story fit the sea they knew. They learned it from Egyptians, perhaps, or nomad wanderers from the hinterlands of Arabia, or perhaps it was already latent within every old-world culture by then; and "within the straits of Mandab" would have become "within the pillars of Hercules," and then, because the Mediterranean itself was not strange and exotic enough, the locale was moved outside even that strait.

All these suppositions came to Kemal with the absolute certainty that they were true, or nearly true. He rejoiced at the thought of it: There was still an ancient civilization left to discover.

But if it was there, why hadn't Past.w.a.tch found it? The answer was simple enough. The past was huge, and while the TruSite I had been used to collect climatological information, the new machines that were precise enough to track individual human beings would never have been used to look at oceans where n.o.body lived. Yes, the Tempoview had explored the Bering Strait and the English Channel, but that was to track long-known-of migrations. There was no such migration in the Red Sea. Past.w.a.tch had simply never looked through their precise new machines to see what was under the water of the Red Sea in the waning centuries of the last Ice Age. And they never would look, either, unless someone gave them a compelling reason.

Kemal understood bureaucracy enough to know that he, a student meteorologist, would hardly be taken seriously if he brought an Atlantis theory to Past.w.a.tch - particularly a theory that put Atlantis in the Red Sea of all places, and fourteen thousand years ago, long before civilizations arose in Sumeria or Egypt, let alone China or the Indus Valley or among the swamps of Tehuantepec.

Yet Kemal also knew that the setting would have been right for a civilization to grow in the marshy land of the Ma.s.sawa Channel. Though there weren't enough rivers flowing into the Red Sea to fill it at the same rate as the world ocean, there were still rivers. For instance, the Zula, which still had enough water to flow even today, once watered the whole length of the Ma.s.sawa Plain and flowed down into the rump of the Red Sea near Mersa Mubarek. And, because of the different rainfall patterns of that time, there was a large and dependable river flowing out of the a.s.sahara basin. a.s.sahara was now a dry rift valley below sea level, but then it would have been a freshwater lake fed by many streams and spilling over the lowest point into the Ma.s.sawa Channel. The river meandered along the nearly level Ma.s.sawa Plain, with some branches of it joining the Zula River, and some wandering east and north to form several mouths in the Red Sea.

Thus dependable sources of fresh water fed the area, and in rainy season the Zula, at least, would have brought new silt to freshen the soil, and in all seasons the wandering flat.w.a.ter rivers would have provided a means of transportation through the marshes. The climate was also dependably warm, with plenty of sunlight and a long growing season. There was no early civilization that did not grow up in such a setting. There was no reason a civilization might not have grown up then.

Yes, it was six or seven thousand years too early. But couldn't it be that the very destruction of Atlantis convinced the survivors that the G.o.ds did not want human beings to gather together in cities? Weren't there hints of that anti-civilization bias lingering in many of the ancient religions of the Middle East? What was the story of Cain and Abel, if not a metaphorical expression of the evil of the city-dweller, the farmer, the brother-killer who is judged unworthy by the G.o.ds because he does not wander with his sheep? Couldn't such stories have circulated widely in those ancient times? That would explain why the survivors of Atlantis hadn't immediately begun to rebuild their civilization at another site: They knew that the G.o.ds forbade it, that if they built again their city would be destroyed again. So they remembered the stories of their glorious past, and at the same time condemned their ancestors and warned everyone they met against people gathering together to build a city.

It would have made people yearn for such a place and fear it, both at once.

Not until a Nimrod came, a tower-builder, a Babel-maker who defied the old religion, would the ancient proscription be overcome at last and another city rise up, in another river valley far in time and s.p.a.ce from Atlantis, but remembering the old ways that had been memorialized in the stories and, as far as possible, replicating them. We will build a tower so high that it can't be immersed. Didn't Genesis link the flood with Babel in just that way, complete with the nomads' stern disapproval of the city? This was the story that survived in Mesopotamia - the tale of the beginning of city life there, but with clear memories of a more ancient civilization that had been destroyed in a flood.

A more ancient civilization. The golden age. The giants who once walked the earth. Why couldn't all these stories be remembering the first human civilization, the place where the city was invented? Atlantis, the city of the Ma.s.sawa Plain.

But how could he prove it without using the Tempoview? And how could he get access to one of those machines without first convincing Past.w.a.tch that Atlantis was really in the Red Sea? It was circular, with no way out.

Until he thought: Why do large cities form in the first place? Because there are public works to do that require more than a few people to accomplish them. Kemal wasn't sure what form the public works might take, but surely they would have made something that would change the face of the land plainly enough that the old TruSite I recordings would show it, though it wouldn't be noticeable unless someone was looking for it.

So, putting his degree at risk, Kemal set aside the work he had been a.s.signed to do and began poring over the old TruSite I recordings. He concentrated on the last century before the Red Sea flood - there was no reason to suppose that the civilization had lasted very long before it was destroyed. And within a few months he had collected data that was irrefutable. There were no dikes and dams to prevent flooding - that kind of structure would have been large enough that no one would have missed it on the first go-round. Instead there were seemingly random heaps of mud and earth that grew between rainy seasons, especially in the drier years when the rivers were lower than usual. To people looking only for weather patterns, these unstructured, random piles would mean nothing. But to Kemal they were obvious: In the shallowing water, the Atlanteans were dredging channels so that their boats could continue to traffic from place to place. The piles of earth were simply the dumping-places for the muck they dredged from the water, None of the boats showed up on the TruSite I, but now that Kemal knew where to look, he began to catch fleeting glimpses of reed huts. Every year when the floods came, the houses disappeared, so they were only visible for a moment or two in the Trusite I: flimsy mud-and-reed structures that must have been swept away in every flood season and rebuilt again when the waters receded. But they were there, close by the hillocks that marked the channels. Plato was right again - Atlantis grew up around its ca.n.a.ls. But Atlantis was the people and their boats; the buildings were washed away and built again every year.

When Kemal presented his findings to Past.w.a.tch he was not yet twenty years old, but his evidence was impressive enough that Past.w.a.tch immediately turned, not a Tempoview, but the stillnewer TruSite II machine to look under the waters of the Red Sea in the Ma.s.sawa Channel during the hundred years before the Red Sea flood. They found that Kemal was gloriously, spectacularly right. In an era when other humans were still following game animals and gathering berries, the Atlanteans were planting amaranth and ryegra.s.s, melons and beans in the rich wet silt of the receding rivers, and carrying food in baskets and on reed boats from place to place. The only thing that Kemal had missed was that most of the buildings weren't houses at all. They were floating silos for the storage of grain. The Atlanteans slept under the open air during the dry season, and in the rainy season they lived on their tiny reed boats.

Kemal was brought into Past.w.a.tch and made head of the vast new, Atlantis project. At first he loved the work, because, like Schliemann, he could search for the originals of the great events.

Most important to Kemal was when he found Noah, though he had a different name - Yewesweder when he was a child, Naog when he became an adult. For his trial of manhood, this Yewesweder, already tall for his age, made the perilous journey to the land bridge at the Bab al Mandab to see the "Heaving Sea." He saw it, all right, but also saw that this arm of the Indian Ocean was only a few meters below the level of the bench that marked the old sh.o.r.eline of the Red Sea before the last ice age. Yewesweder knew nothing of ice ages, but he knew that the shelf of land was absolutely level - he had loped along that route during his entire journey. Yet that level shelf was hundreds of meters above the plain where the "Salty Sea" - the rump of the Red Sea - was slowly, slowly rising. Already the Heaving Sea was cutting a channel that during the storm tides of seasonal hurricanes poured salt.w.a.ter into several lakes, occasionally spilling over and sending a river of salt.w.a.ter down to the Red Sea. Sometime - the next storm, or the storm after that - the Heaving Sea would crash through and an entire ocean would be poured in on top of Atlantis.

Yewesweder decided that he had earned his man-name, Naog, the day he made this discovery, and at once he set out for home. He had married a wife from among the tribe that lived at the Bab al Mandab, and it was only with great difficulty that she followed him so far that he was given no choice but to bring her home with him. When he reached the land of the Derku, as the Atlanteans called themselves, he learned that what had seemed plain to him at the sh.o.r.es of the Heaving Sea sounded like a far-fetched lie to the elders of his clan, and of all the clans. A huge flood? They had a flood every year, and simply rode it out on their boats. If Naog's flood actually happened, they'd ride it out, too.

But Naog knew that they would not. So he began experimenting with logs lashed together, and within a few years had learned how to build a boxy, watertight house-on-a-raft that might withstand the pressures of the flood that only he believed in. Others realized after the normal seasonal floods that his tight, dry wooden box was a superior seedboat, and eventually half of his clan's stored grain and beans ended up in his ark for safekeeping. Other clans also built wooden seedboats, but not to Naog's exacting specifications for strength and watertightness. In the meantime Naog was ridiculed and threatened because of his constant warnings that the whole land would be covered in water.

When the flood came, Naog had a little advance notice: The first torrent to break through the Bab al Mandab caused the Salty Sea to rise rapidly, backing up in the ca.n.a.ls of the Derku people for several hours before the pressure of the ocean burst through in earnest, sending a wall of water dozens of meters high scouring the entire width of the Red Sea basin. By the time the flood reached Naog's boat, it was sealed tight, bearing a cargo of seed and food, along with his two wives, their small children, the three slaves that had helped him with the construction of the boat, and the slaves' families. They were tossed unmercifully in the turbulent waves, and the ark was often immersed, but it held, and eventually they came to sh.o.r.e not far frorn Gibeil on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula.

They set up farming for a brief time in the El Qa' Valley in the shadows of the mountains of Sinai, telling all comers of the flood sent by G.o.d to destroy the unworthy Derku people, and how this handful of people alone had been saved because G.o.d had shown Naog what he intended to do. Eventually, though, Naog became a wandering herdsman, spreading his story wherever he went. As Kemal had expected, Naog's story, with his anti-urban interpretation, had enormous influence in stopping people from gathering together in large communities that might become cities.

There was also a strong element of opposition to human sacrifice in his story, for Naog's own father had been sacrificed to the crocodile G.o.d of the Derku people while he was gone on his manhood journey, and Naog believed that the main reason the powerful G.o.d of storms and seas had destroyed the Derku was their practice of offering living victims to the large crocodile they penned up to represent their G.o.d every year after the flood season. In a way this linkage between human sacrifice and city-building was unfortunate, because when city-building was resumed by deliberate heretics rejecting the old wisdom of Naog many generations later, human sacrifice came along as part of the package. In the long run, though, Naog got his way, for even those societies that gave human offerings to their G.o.ds felt they were doing something dark and dangerous, and eventually human sacrifice became regarded first as barbaric, then as an unspeakable atrocity throughout the lands touched by the story of Naog.