I resettled myself in the hard, straight-backed, armless chair and said, “So they were taken for granted at the time, and later passed off as a myth when they weren’t there any more.”
“Precisely. There were even a few tourists back then, going both ways. King Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, was born not two miles from here, and despite what your history books will tell you, St. Patrick was born here a mile in the other direction. It was our church that baptized Ireland and parts of Scotland, not the Church of Rome. In fact, the Irish did not join the Romans until the time of Henry the Eighth. When he made the Church of England split from Rome, the Irish joined the Roman Catholic Church, mostly as a political protest. But I’m digressing again.
“So a vast mass of bubbly glass was stuck to the French continental shelf, and I’ll leave it to you to think about the stresses involved. Glass, of course, is slightly soluble in water, and glass under stress is degraded faster than unstressed glass. In the winter of 1099, when everyone else in Europe was looking eastward at the First Crusade, a storm of monumental proportions swept in off the Atlantic Ocean, and broke the Western Islands free of the ocean bottom. The earthquakes were devastating, and there was hardly a building left standing. The entire city of Ys was completely lost. Some four thousand of our people died in a single night, most of our winter’s stores of food were destroyed, and our standing crops were ruined. If the duke’s library hadn’t been kept in a mountain cave, our records would have been lost as well, but we thank God for small favors.
“As soon as the storm had blown itself out, our duke ordered every ship to be launched, to go to the mainland and beg for aid. This in itself turned out to be no easy feat, for to the wonderment of all, the very level of the sea had gone down six yards, and this was no mere freak tide. Indeed, as far as anyone could tell, there were no longer any tides at all! Our land area had increased considerably. But despite all the strangeness, some eighty ships were launched. Of these, only two returned, after great hardship and long voyaging, for when our ships got back to where the islands should have been, our islands were gone entirely! The Western Islands had floated off with the Gulf Stream, and we stayed on that great merry-go-round for seven hundred and fifty years.”
I said, “I’m amazed that in all that time you didn’t snag yourself on some seashore or seamount.”
“Well, we did, and fairly often at first, until we had the ocean currents thoroughly mapped. Once, we were hung up on the west coast of Ireland for three years. But the action of sea and tide eventually broke us free, which made us glad. You see, there were some very nice advantages to being adrift in the Gulf Stream, and the biggest of these was the weather. With a bit of coaxing, it was possible to spend the winters in the warm, southern latitudes, and the summers in the cool north. We found that we could easily get two and three crops a year from our fields.
“Excuse me,” I said, “But how do you go about `coaxing’ something as massive as these islands are, without any machines to speak of?”
“There are ways. You can drop an anchor at one end of them and cause the rest to spin around. You can put down cloth sea anchors—rather like parachutes—into a lower ocean current, and pull yourself a bit in that direction. The currents below are not always the same as those above, you see. We’ve even used huge kites, on occasion. But no more of these digressions, or the tale will never come to an end.
“Another advantage to floating free was that our travels took us as far south as South America, along what would one day be known as the Spanish Main, and past Central America as well. There were still forests on our islands then, and we could still build fair-sized ships. With them, we could bring back still more timber. We still had a fair stock of metal tools to work with then, as well. We traded with the natives as much as we could, and picked up from them many interesting plants and animals, but no tobacco, more’s the pity. Most of our dyes and medicines were acquired during this period, and of course, we’ve been improving on them ever since. We’d developed the rules of simple genetics in the third century, you see. Oh, nothing like the recombinant DNA work that has been going on in the last few years outside, but a few thousand years of careful selection and breeding can work wonders.
“Also, we found that by restricting our contacts with the outside world, being at sea was healthier for our people. You see, by 1250, we had worked out the germ theory of disease, and it was obvious to us that if deadly germs couldn’t get to us, they couldn’t kill us. Bacteria and such must have hosts to live on, and our population was small enough that, eventually, most diseases died out. It wasn’t until much later that we discovered what a horrible trap this was that we had fallen into! But more about that later.”
I said, “But how did you keep yourselves hidden?”
“Why, we didn’t even try to! Lots of people saw us. The legends of Ireland are full of sightings of our islands, and many a mariner and fisherman has gone home with tales to tell about us. The simple truth was that nobody believed them. There was no way for any of those people to substantiate what they saw. We were moving around, you see, and anytime anyone went out to find us again, we simply weren’t there any more! People even went so far as to invent an optical illusion to explain what people who saw us thought they saw, the Fata Morgana.”
“But the Atlantic Ocean is one of the most heavily traveled bodies of water in the world! Eventually, enough consistent sightings would convince people that you really existed,” I said.
“So what? It is not as though we were actually trying to hide, after all. As long as no one sent an invasion fleet out after us, we really didn’t care what the world thought about us. We merely wanted the world to leave us alone. Until around 1850, that is. Then it was that we realized the biological trap that we’d fallen into. You see, we’d picked up some shipwrecked sailors, and one of them had smallpox. It cost us a third of our population, even though we learned the accepted methods of treating it from one of the other castaways, who had been a ship’s doctor. We simply had no immunity against the disease, nor, as it turned out, for any of the thousand other ills that mankind is heir to.
“Do you realize that from the time I first came here, in 1943, until a month ago, I was not sick a single day? Oh, it’s been very nice, I suppose, though one generally doesn’t notice being healthy. Also, look at me carefully. How old do I seem to be?”
“Well, sir, when I first came in, I pegged you at about sixty, but I guess you must be a bit older than that, from what you say,” I said.
“I’m much older than that. I was thirty-six when I crash-landed here. I wasn’t regular aircrew at all, you see. I was in charge of aircraft electronics at my base, and when a radio operator got sick, and I got a chance to see something of the actual war, I jumped at it. Treet, you are looking at a ninety-two-year-old man. Clean, healthy living and the lack of disease can do wonders for you. The immune system takes a lot of one’s vital energy to run, but mine hasn’t had much work to do at all. But if I were to go back to Australia now, I likely wouldn’t last the month out. Every disease that I hadn’t gotten before would jump on me all at once, and that would be the end of me.
“So, as I was saying, in 1852, the wise men of the islands realized that we could no longer risk being discovered by the outside world. They held a major public debate about what to do about the situation, and the grand council decided to leave for a less populated part of the world’s oceans. Together, we managed to steer the islands from the Gulf Stream south to the similar current in the South Atlantic. From there, it was south of the Cape of Good Hope, through the Roaring Forties, which by all accounts deserve their name, south of Australia and then north into the fairer climes of the South Pacific. It was a rough trip, but we made it, and it served us well for almost a hundred and fifty years.