“What’s it say?” said Monica, kneeling down next to him and squinting at the carved rock.

Matt was looking at the stone and hmmd to himself before speaking. “It’s a little more about the warrior brother’s descent to find Qwotoan and slay what looks like the ‘Devourer’ or ‘Deceiver.’ Why does that name Qwotoan ring a bell? Damn, I can’t make out all of these pictoglyphs without some more work. This language has some characters that could be Olmec, some Mayan, Aztec, even what looks like some Egyptian hieroglyphs; and this bit here could even be Sumerian. It’s all mixed together. This could be some form of root language. But why is it here? Why were they here?”

“And where are they now?” asked Monica. “They all seem to have disappeared.”

“This spot is probably just an outpost, but this symbol represents a reference to the ‘City’; and this here looks like the Mayan root word for water—‘Atl,’ and the Olmec word for surrounding land. No wait, that could be land surrounded by water.” He rocked back on his heels. “You know there are plenty of ancient stories with tales of a lost continent. Antarctica wasn’t always frozen under a mile of ice, you know, and many people speculate about what may lie undiscovered beneath this continent’s deep ice mantle. Like, just how did fifteenth-century cartographers manage to get hold of maps of the actual coastline of Antarctica which exists under the ice, when our modern cartographers could only achieve this a few decades ago by seismographic means? A lot of these ancient races have legends about their forefathers arriving from the sea after a great catastrophe in their homeland. Their legends talk about their homeland sinking, or ‘going below’ as it’s been interpreted; but what if that didn’t mean sinking under water, but going below ice?”

“Dr. Matthew Kerns, you are not going to tell me this is Atlantis, are you?” Monica asked incredulously.

“I didn’t say that. Atlantis was Plato’s allegorical story; however, in Mayan and Olmec and even Aztec legends, they directly refer to a place called ‘Aztlan.’ The Mayans originally believed they came to the Americas from an overseas paradise called Aztlan which sank away from sight.” Matt gathered his thoughts. “Look, hear me out, there’s a section of an ancient Mayan codex called the Troano Manuscript that to this day is still defying a full translation. However, in the 1800s a classical archaeologist by the name of Augustus le Plongeon attempted a partial interpretation. His reconstruction recounted a legend passed down for hundreds of generations about the tragedy of a ‘Great Golden City,’ which was swallowed in a terrible cataclysm that took place nearly 10,000 years before the writing of that codex.”

“Uh, and he said the Mayans knew about this place, did he? What happened to him?” Monica gave Matt a look that radiated a mixture of disbelief and mock gravitas.