Naog didn’t bother to answer her.

  His mother burst into tears. “Was this what I bore you for? I named you very well, Glogmeriss, my son of trouble and anguish!”

  “Listen to me, Mother. The flood is coming. We may have very little warning when it actually comes, very little time to get into my seedboat. Stay near, and when you hear us calling—”

  “I’m glad your father is dead rather than to see his firstborn son so gone in madness.”

  “Tell all the others, too, Mother. I’ll take as many into my seedboat as will fit. But once the door in the roof is closed, I can’t open it again. Anyone who isn’t inside when we close it will never get inside, and they will die.”

  She burst into tears and left.

  Not far from the seedboat was a high hill. As the rainy season neared, Naog took to sending one of his servants to the top of the hill several times a day, to watch toward the southeast. “What should we look for?” they asked. “I don’t know,” he answered. “A new river. A wall of water. A dark streak in the distance. It will be something that you’ve never seen before.”

  The sky filled with clouds, dark and threatening. The heart of the storm was to the south and east. Naog made sure that his wives and children and the wives and children of his servants didn’t stray far from the seedboat. They freshened the water in the waterbags, to stay busy. A few raindrops fell, and then the rain stopped, and then a few more raindrops. But far to the south and east it was raining heavily. And the wind—the wind kept rising higher and higher, and it was out of the east. Naog could imagine it whipping the waves higher and farther into the deep channel that the last storm had opened. He imagined the water spilling over into the salty riverbed. He imagined it tearing deeper and deeper into the sand, more and more of it tearing away under the force of the torrent. Until finally it was no longer the force of the storm driving the water through the channel, but the weight of the whole sea, because at last it had been cut down below the level of low tide. And then the sea tearing deeper and deeper.

  “Naog.” It was the head of the Engu clan, and a dozen men with him. “The god is ready for you.”

  Naog looked at them as if they were foolish children. “This is the storm,” he said. “Go home and bring your families to my seedboat, so they can come through the flood alive.”

  “This is no storm,” said the head of the clan. “Hardly any rain has fallen.”

  The servant who was on watch came running, out of breath, his arms bleeding where he had skidded on the ground as he fell more than once in his haste. “Naog, master!” he cried. “It’s plain to see—the Salty Shore is nearer. The Salty Sea is rising, and fast.”

  What a torrent of water it would take, to make the Salty Sea rise in its bed. Naog covered his face with his hands. “You’re right,” said Naog. “The god is ready for me. The true god. It was for this hour that I was born. As for your god—the true god will drown him as surely as he will drown anyone who doesn’t come to my seedboat.”

  “Come with us now,” said the head of the clan. But his voice was not so certain now.

  To his servants and his wives, Naog said, “Inside the seedboat. When all are in, smear on the pitch, leaving only one side where I can slide down.”

  “You come too, husband,” said Zawada.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have to give warning one last time.”

  “Too late!” cried the servant with the bleeding arms. “Come now.”

  “You go now,” said Naog. “I’ll be back soon. But if I’m not back, seal the door and open it for no man, not even me.”

  “When will I know to do that?” he asked in anguish.

  “Zawada will tell you,” said Naog. “She’ll know.” Then he turned to the head of the clan. “Come with me,” he said. “Let’s give the warning.” Then Naog strode off toward the bank of the canal where his mother and brothers and sisters kept their dragonboats. The men who had come to capture him followed him, unsure who had captured whom.

  It was raining again, a steady rainfall whipped by an ever-stronger wind. Naog stood on the bank of the canal and shouted against the wind, crying out for his family to join him. “There’s not much time!” he cried. “Hurry, come to my seedboat!”

  “Don’t listen to the enemy of the god!” cried the head of the clan.

  Naog looked down into the water of the canal. “Look, you fools! Can’t you see that the canal is rising?”

  “The canal always rises in a storm.”

  Naog knelt down and dipped his hand into the canal and tasted the water. “Salt,” he said. “Salt!” he shouted. “This isn’t rising because of rain in the mountains! The water is rising because the Salty Sea is filling with the water of the Heaving Sea. It’s rising to cover us! Come with me now, or not at all! When the door of my seedboat closes, we’ll open it for no one.” Then he turned and loped off toward the seedboat.

  By the time he got there, the water was spilling over the banks of the canals, and he had to splash through several shallow streams where there had been no streams before. Zawada was standing on top of the roof, and screamed at him to hurry as he clambered onto the top of it. He looked in the direction she had been watching, and saw what she had seen. In the distance, but not so very far away, a dark wall rushing toward them. A plug of earth must have broken loose, and a fist of the sea hundreds of feet high was slamming through the gap. It spread at once, of course, and as it spread the wave dropped until it was only fifteen or twenty feet high. But that was high enough. It would do.

  “You fool!” cried Zawada. “Do you want to watch it or be saved from it?”

  Naog followed Zawada down into the boat. Two of the servants smeared on a thick swatch of tar on the fourth side of the doorway. Then Naog, who was the only one tall enough to reach outside the hole, drew the door into place, snugging it down tight. At once it became perfectly dark inside the seedboat, and silent, too, except for the breathing. “This time for real,” said Naog softly. He could hear the other men working at the lashings. They could feel the floor moving under them—the canals had spilled over so far now that the raft was rising and floating.

  Suddenly they heard a noise. Someone was pounding on the wall of the seedboat. And there was shouting. They couldn’t hear the words, the walls were too thick. But they knew what was being said all the same. Save us. Let us in. Save us.

  Kormo’s voice was filled with anguish. “Naog, can’t we—”

  “If we open it now we’ll never close it again in time. We’d all die. They had every chance and every warning. My lashing is done.”

  “Mine, too,” answered one of the servants.

  The silence of the others said they were still working hard.

  “Everyone hold on to the side posts,” said Naog. “There’s so much room here. We could have taken on so many more.”

  The pounding outside was in earnest now. They were using axes to hack at the wood. Or at the lashings. And someone was on top of the seedboat now, many someones, trying to pry at the door.

  “Now, O God, if you mean to save us at all, send the water now.”

  “Done,” said another of the servants. So three of the four corners were fully lashed.

  Suddenly the boat lurched and rocked upward, then spun crazily in every direction at once. Everyone screamed, and few were able to keep their handhold, such was the force of the flood. They plunged to one side of the seedboat, a jumble of humans and spilling baskets and water bottles. Then they struck something—a tree? the side of a mountain?—and lurched in another direction entirely, and in the darkness it was impossible to tell anymore whether they were on the floor or the roof or one of the walls.

  Did it go on for days, or merely hours? Finally the awful turbulence gave way to a spinning all in one plane. The flood was still rising; they were still caught in the twisting currents; but they were no longer caught in that wall of water, in the great wave that the god had sent. They were on top of the flood.

  Gradually they sorted themselves out. Mothers found their children, husbands found their wives. Many were crying, but as the fear subsided they were able to find the ones who were genuinely in pain. But what could they do in the darkness to deal with bleeding injuries, or possible broken bones? They could only plead with the god to be merciful and let them know when it was safe to open the door.

  After a while, though, it became plain that it wasn’t safe not to open it. The air was musty and hot and they were beginning to pant. “I can’t breathe,” said Zawada. “Open the door,” said Kormo.

  Naog spoke aloud to the god. “We have no air in here,” he said. “I have to open the door. Make it safe. Let no other wave wash over us with the door open.”

  But when he went to open the door, he couldn’t find it in the darkness. For a sickening moment he thought: What if we turned completely upside down, and the door is now under us? I never thought of that. We’ll die in here.

  Then he found it, and began fussing with the lashings. But it was hard in the darkness. They had tied so hurriedly, and he wasn’t thinking all that well. But soon he heard the servants also at work, muttering softly, and one by one they got their lashings loose and Naog shoved upward on the door.

  It took forever before the door budged, or so it seemed, but when at last it rocked upward, a bit of faint light and a rush of air came into the boat and everyone cried out at once in relief and gratitude. Naog pushed the door upward and then maneuvered it to lie across the opening at an angle, so that the heavy rain outside wouldn’t inundate them. He stood there holding the door in place, even though the wind wanted to pick it up and blow it away—a slab of wood as heavy as that one was!—while in twos and threes they came to the opening and breathed, or lifted children to catch a breath of air. There was enough light to bind up some bleeding injuries, and to realize that no bones were broken after all.

  The rain went on forever, or so it seemed, the rain and the wind. And then it stopped, and they were able to come out onto the roof of the seed-boat and look at the sunlight and stare at the distant horizon. There was no land at all, just water. “The whole earth is gone,” said Kormo. “Just as you said.”

  “The Heaving Sea has taken over this place,” said Naog. “But we’ll come to dry land. The current will take us there.”

  There was much debris floating on the water—torn-up trees and bushes, for the flood had scraped the whole face of the land. A few rotting bodies of animals. If anyone saw a human body floating by, they said nothing about it.

  After days, a week, perhaps longer of floating without sight of land, they finally began skirting a shoreline. Once they saw the smoke of someone’s fire—people who lived high above the great valley of the Salty Sea had been untouched by the flood. But there was no way to steer the boat toward shore. Like a true seedboat, it drifted unless something drew it another way. Naog cursed himself for his foolishness in not including dragonboats in the cargo of the boat. He and the other men and women might have tied lines to the seedboat and to themselves and paddled the boat to shore. As it was, they would last only as long as their water lasted.

  It was long enough. The boat fetched up against a grassy shore. Naog sent several of the servants ashore and they used a rope to tie the boat to a tree. But it was useless—the current was still too strong, and the boat tore free. They almost lost the servants, stranding them on the shore, forever separated from their families, but they had the presence of mind to swim for the end of the rope.

  The next day they did better—more lines, all the men on shore, drawing the boat further into a cove that protected it from the current. They lost no time in unloading the precious cargo of seeds, and searching for a source of fresh water. Then they began the unaccustomed task of hauling all the baskets of grain by hand. There were no canals to ease the labor.

  “Perhaps we can find a place to dig canals again,” said Kormo.

  “No!” said Zawada vehemently. “We will never build such a place again. Do you want the god to send another flood?”

  “There will be no other flood,” said Naog. “The Heaving Sea has had its victory. But we will also build no canals. We will keep no crocodile, or any other animal as our god. We will never sacrifice forbidden fruit to any god, because the true god hates those who do that. And we will tell our story to anyone who will listen to it, so that others will learn how to avoid the wrath of the true god, the god of power.”

  Kemal watched as Naog and his people came to shore not far from Gibeil and set up farming in the El Qa’ Valley in the shadows of the mountains of Sinai. The fact of the flood was well known, and many travelers came to see this vast new sea where once there had been dry land. More and more of them also came to the new village that Naog and his people built, and word of his story also spread.

  Kemal’s work was done. He had found Atlantis. He had found Noah, and Gilgamesh. Many of the stories that had collected around those names came from other cultures and other times, but the core was true, and Kemal had found them and brought them back to the knowledge of humankind.

  But what did it mean? Naog gave warning, but no one listened. His story remained in people’s minds, but what difference did it make?

  As far as Kemal was concerned, all old-world civilizations after Atlantis were dependent on that first civilization. The idea of the city was already with the Egyptians and the Sumerians and the people of the Indus and even the Chinese, because the story of the Derku people, under one name or another, had spread far and wide—the Golden Age. People remembered well that once there was a great land that was blessed by the gods until the sea rose up and swallowed their land. People who lived in different landscapes tried to make sense of the story. To the island-hopping Greeks Atlantis became an island that sank into the sea. To the plains-dwelling Sumerians the flood was caused by rain, not by the sea leaping out of its bed to swallow the earth. Someone wondered how, if all the land was covered, the animals survived, and thus the account of animals two by two was added to the story of Naog. At some point, when people still remembered that the name meant “naked,” a story was added about his sons covering his nakedness as he lay in a drunken stupor. All of this was decoration, however. People remembered both the Derku people and the one man who led his family through the flood.

  But they would have remembered Atlantis with or without Naog, Kemal knew that. What difference did his saga make, to anyone but himself and his household? As others studied the culture of the Derku, Kemal remained focused on Naog himself. If anything, Naog’s life was proof that one person makes no difference at all in history. He saw the flood coming, he warned his people about it when there was plenty of time, he showed them how to save themselves, and yet nothing changed outside his own immediate family group. That was the way history worked. Great forces sweep people along, and now and then somebody floats to the surface and becomes famous but it means nothing, it amounts to nothing.

  Yet Kemal could not believe it. Naog may not have accomplished what he thought his goal was—to save his people—but he did accomplish something. He never lived to see the result of it, but because of his survival the Atlantis stories were tinged with something else. It was not just a golden age, not just a time of greatness and wealth and leisure and city life, a land of giants and gods. Naog’s version of the story also penetrated the public consciousness and remained. The people were destroyed because the greatest of gods was offended by their sins. The list of sins shifted and changed over time, but certain ideas remained: That it was wrong to live in a city, where people get lifted up in the pride of their hearts and think that they are too powerful for the gods to destroy. That the one who seems to be crazy may in fact be the only one who sees the truth. That the greatest of gods is the one you can’t see, the one who has power over the earth and the sea and the sky, all at once. And, above all, this: That it was wrong to sacrifice human beings to the gods.

  It took thousands of years, and there were places where Naog’s passionate doctrine did not penetrate until modern times, but the root of it was there in the day he came home and found that his father had been fed to the Dragon. Those who thought that it was right to offer human beings to the Dragon were all dead, and the one who had long proclaimed that it was wrong was still alive. The god had preserved him and killed all of them. Wherever the idea of Atlantis spread, some version of this story came with it, and in the end all the great civilizations that were descended from Atlantis learned not to offer the forbidden fruit to the gods.

  In the Americas, though, no society grew up that owed a debt to Atlantis, for the same rising of the world ocean that closed the land bridge between Yemen and Djibouti also broke the land bridge between America and the old world. The story of Naog did not touch there, and it seemed to Kemal absolutely clear what the cost of that was. Because they had no memory of Atlantis, it took the people of the Americas thousands of years longer to develop civilization—the city. Egypt was already ancient when the Olmecs first built amid the swampy land of the Bay of Campeche. And because they had no story of Naog, warning that the most powerful of gods rejected killing human beings, the old ethos of human sacrifice remained in full force, virtually unquestioned. The carnage of the Mexica—the Aztecs—took it to the extreme, but it was there already, throughout the Caribbean basin, a tradition of human blood being shed to feed the hunger of the gods.

  Kemal could hardly say that the bloody warfare of the old world was much of an improvement over this. But it was different, and in his mind, at least, it was different specifically because of Naog. If he had not ridden out the flood to tell his story of the true God who forbade sacrifice, the old world would not have been the same. New civilizations might have risen more quickly, with no stories warning of the danger of city life. And those new civilizations might all have worshipped the same Dragon, or some other, as hungry for human flesh as the gods of the new world were hungry for human blood.