Dateline: Atlantis Read Online Free

sucking in the air—she’s free. She thrusts the crystal, about the size of a paperweight, in her bathing suit top and swims for shore with a strength she doesn’t know she has.
    #
    Tall. Maybe seven or eight feet tall, they walk the earth, their feet barely bruising the dirt as they pass. They are russet red with golden eyes. “There were giants in those days.” A temple sits in the middle of moat-like, round canals of water. Endless energy blazing from the apex of the temple. Speech is unnecessary. Writing is an ornament. The real news is here, in your mind. No need to translate; it’s all here.
    We will not survive. The earth is changing. The climate shifting from tropical splendor to sodden bog. Ice melts in the north and floods challenge the land. Boats set forth, some to the west, some east. One ship to the land of the Olmec. The children of the pyramids seek new land. As they leave, the hand becomes so old it nearly shrivels to ashes. The crystal continues to shine, stronger now, pulsing a message to the entire world. Save yourselves.
    #
    â€œAmaryllis, please talk to me.”
    Gabriel is staring into her eyes, his alarm clear and unmistakable. She sits up slowly, trying to determine what earth she is on. She sees the large gemstone, clear and dazzling, lying on the beach near her side. She reaches for it, but Gabriel takes her hand.
    â€œI know,” he says and closes his eyes with force.
    She reaches a finger to his forehead and is filled with sorrow for things she never knew about this man. He has held the crystal, too. What she knows, he knows. He opens his eyes, and Amaryllis looks inside. He is a lost wolf, filled with an urge to seize something, wandering, ravenous, yet unable to locate the prey. She strokes the hairs just beginning to gray near his ears.
    â€œIt’s a recording,” she says. She doesn’t know how she realizes that. She only knows the crystal holds the knowledge of an entire civilization that has been totally obscured from modern humanity. The touch of a human mind opens the enchanted sphere. “Like a CD-ROM. A hard drive.”
    Gabriel nods with a sharp jab of his chin. In his apparent anxiety, he seems to breathe with labor, but he speaks anyway, punching out his words.
    â€œThey are the ancestors, Amaryllis. They are the ones I’ve been trying to find. Just out there beneath the waves. As the water recedes, we see a new history.”
    â€œThe genesis race. The one before the flood.”
    She thought this moment would fill her with pride. It would be the time when she’d see herself in headlines, on talk shows, in rewritten history books. But now she senses nothing but confusion. She wanted the truth, and now the picture is more complicated than ever. She shakes her head in an attempt to get her bearings.
    She begins to reach for the crystal again, but Gabriel snatches her in a furious grip. He holds her so tightly she can hear his breath rasping in and out of his pinched, hawk-like nose. She sees the moisture on his eyelids, she watches his brown eyes darken to a hollow black. For one second, she thinks he is about to kiss her, press his hard shoulders down on her, force her to admit the way blood pounds in her temples when she breathes his scent.
    But she has it all wrong. The passion is for the rock. He plucks the crystal from the sand and leaps to his feet.
    â€œIt’s got to go back,” he says. “It belongs to them. It’s their truth, not ours.” He runs to the shore and jumps into the surf, heading out to the sunken pyramid.
    â€œGabriel! Stop! You’ll lose it.”
    Amaryllis screams for Garret, bellowing his name in the torrid mid-morning air, knowing she is too exhausted to stop Gabriel. Garret staggers over the rocks from the tent they pitched high in the hills. She points to the surf, where Gabriel is making little progress against a huge, sudden swell of waves.
    She sloshes back into the water.