A solitary speck of a shadow emerged from the mists that kissed the infinite still waters reflecting the crimson sky. Starlight travelling a distance of more than a hundred million kilometres across the cold expanse of space peeped from behind the horizon, gently bending to the spin of Earth to bestow on this water world its radiance of life. Gradually the shadow took the shape of a golden wood and metal behemoth gliding across the simmering waters and its glassy surface. A tall and stony greybeard of red and golden complexion stood on the deck, reflecting that perhaps he was the last of his kind.

After drifting through an unfathomable oceanic storm, it was a miracle that the colossal vessel had survived. Though the old being had lost all his mates, there was hope as long as a part of his cargo survived. Apart from any miracle, technology had played a vital role in the watercraft’s survival. The floating gargantua was designed and built by the finest craftsmen of the time.

The archaic fellow and his ship were a part of a flotilla of ten identical vessels with similar cargo, which left the harbours of their prosperous city nearly a year back. The ships headed towards different directions to increase the success of their mission. A few months down the voyage one night, the entire ocean shook, violent waves rose, and a colossal storm raged for a month and ten days. Now the treacherous tempest had finally subsided, and the old boy searched for land. He sent out birds, and all of them returned.

He, however, exactly knew what had happened. He and some others in his land had perceived this a long time back. This fear had motivated them to build and take the ten intriguing vessels to the seas. What the old-timer did not know was what had happened to the other vessels, his beloved city, his nation, and his kind. Now he could not return; the craft simply did not have the resources to make the long journey back home. His only chances of survival were to find land in the direction he was heading as soon as possible, unload his cargo, and perhaps find other souls.

Just at the brink of losing all hope, one day, the old flotilla spotted dark streaks on the distant horizon, which could be none other than land. After manoeuvring through the choppy coastal waters for hours, the craft finally kissed the golden sands of a new world.

It was fascinating to see the mighty vessel convert into a colossal castle as it gently slipped onto the beach from the bowels of the battered seacraft, like an old golden snake shedding its tattered skin. A simple marvel of engineering, the likes of which perhaps the world would never see again, but would be mentioned in the annals of history, by some culture as the God who arrived on a snake and by another as a God who came out of a golden egg. It took a few days for the greybeard to settle in till he decided to introduce his cargo slowly into the wild at the place he felt best for the particular species to survive.

At the moment the mighty vessel was ejecting the castle onto the beach from its wooden bowels, from on top of a hill far away a group of hunters watched the spectacle. Later that evening, they would draw the landing on the beach with burnt wood on the stone walls of their caves in the jungle. Few generations later, their decendants would carve the scene out of the rocks on the walls of their stone temples.

As time passed, the old man became more familiar with the place. He found the tall coconut trees and the lush green field soothing. On venturing further, he became spellbound by the beauty of the backwaters, the flora and fauna, the animals, birds and reptiles. He thanked the celestial Gods for bringing him to this paradise.

Then after two months, the encounter finally happened. The old man met the natives by chance on the riverbank where each collected drinking water. The old timer had never seen such short or small people. He was at least twice their size. They were scared initially but the old man managed to calm them down.

With time the natives accepted the old man among them. The hunter-gatherers were primitive compared to the greybeard and his people. They had very basic technology such as crude stone and wooden tools. The old man stayed in his castle on the beach and regularly visited the native settlement. Gradually he picked up the native language and started teaching the natives all that he knew – farming, forging metal, building permanent homes with wood, stone and mortar, and so much more. Literary education delved into the realms of arithmetic, geography, history, biology, medicine, and beyond. It was a sudden barrage of knowledge that came with the old man and fast-forwarded the native’s learning curve over a very short period of time.

As the years passed, the old man observed that he aged differently from the natives. He lived with these people for more than three and a half centuries after the great flood. He shared his knowledge with more than six generations of natives. During this time he transformed the indigenous people from a bunch of hunter-gatherers to a steady and settled civilisation that had started sending explorers to the unknown corners of the world through land and sea and even some experiments in the air. At nine hundred and fifty years of age, after imparting many lifetimes of knowledge and skill to the natives, the old man finally took his last breath leaving this earthly realm. It was exactly three hundred and fifty years after the flood.

The sudden emergence of new and dazzling stars in the night sky first caught the eye of the ancient race of skywatchers decades before Braahma, his brother Noo, and the eight others started their sea voyage. Soon, it was observed that the stars grew larger and brighter in a trajectory straight for Earth. While the majority of the scientific minds of the time concluded that the stars would not make it to Earth, Braahma and a few others started preparing, fearing the worse.

They built 10 of the greatest ships of the time and loaded each vessel with books, technology, and a few of every possible animal they could get their hands on. Their goal was to navigate to waters where the wrath and destruction of the falling star would not scorch the Earth.

At the end of the last ice age in the year 11,700 BP (Before the Present) gigantic asteroids collided with Earth. The asteroids impacted the earth in today’s Central and South Americas region. The old man’s advanced civilisation was destroyed in this natural calamity. Braahma, his borther Noo, and some of the other ten sea vessels that had left with animal species, technology, and knowledge survived this global cataclysm.

It is historically believed that human civilisation started on Earth, sometime around 10,000 years before the birth of Christ in the Neolithic age when the Agricultural Revolution began in the Middle East. During this era, humans began the systematic husbandry of plants and animals. As agriculture progressed, most of the nomadic human communities transitioned into permanent settlements.

The earliest accepted signs of a process leading to a sedentary culture can be seen in the Levant, a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia, as early as 12,000 BC, when the Natufian Culture became sedentary. It is believed to have evolved into an agricultural society by 10,000 BC.

The four cradles of civilisation in the Old World, which are in the Bronze Age from 3,300 BC to 1,200 BC, are believed to be Mesopotamian, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Indian, and Ancient Chinese. The two cradles of civilisation of the New World, Amerigo Vespucci’s Americas of the Western Hemisphere are Caral-Supe of coastal Peru and Olmec of Mexico.

The importance of water to safeguard an abundant and stable food supply, due to favourable conditions for hunting, fishing, and gathering resources including cereals, provided an initial wide spectrum economy that triggered the creation of permanent villages. This is what history tells us and most of it is true.

What many of us do not know is that a few individuals of an advanced ice-age civilisation, that was destroyed in the cataclysm of Younger Dryas, in the year 11,700 BP (Before the Present), had survived on specially designed sea vessels carrying cargos of technology, knowledge, and animal species. The ships that survived landed on the ancient beaches of a few coastal countries to share their technology and knowledge with the hunter-gatherer human natives of the regions.

Many of the religions and mythologies of the world mention or depict this event. The Bible speaks of “Noo” or Noah and his ark. Hinduism speaks of Brahma, a gigantic bearded God of red and golden complexion who arrived from the eternal ocean in a golden egg and created everything. Turkic mythology speaks of the God Talai or Dalai, who was the personification of the World Ocean, an enormous river encircling the world. Ruins and archaeological finds of ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Mesoamerican civilisations all have references relating to this event.

Who can vouch for this, for no matter what history man documents, time devours everything and every memory and mention eventually. The civilisations that we build today will someday be forgotten. The echoes of one generation pass onto the next and then to another and then to another till it completely fades away. After all that has been the way of human history, but as long as a man tells a story to another, fragments of the fables of our forefathers will reverberate through time.

Copyright © 2023 TRISHIKH DASGUPTA

This work of fiction, written by Trishikh Dasgupta is the author’s sole intellectual property. Some characters, incidents, places, and facts may be real while some fictitious. All rights are reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including printing, photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, send an email to the author at trishikh@gmail.com or get in touch with Trishikh on the CONTACT page of this website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trishikh Dasgupta

Adventurer, philosopher, writer, painter, photographer, craftsman, innovator, or just a momentary speck in the universe flickering to leave behind a footprint on the sands of time... READ MORE