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under huge alluvial deposits, and the debris would have been sucked out to sea. Any rare survivors in the mountains would have gotten the hell out, terrified that they might be engulfed again. The Algarve’s coastline could well have once extended much farther out into the Atlantic but could also have progressively sunk in successive violent tremors, as well as being engulfed by rising sea levels.
    I sensed there was something tantalizingly hidden here; my antennae were twitching. An urgent visit to the local harbormaster’s office was called for; I wanted to find out what the seabed in front of the Algarve was like.

CHAPTER FIVE
    A Forgotten World
    “A re you serious?” I stammered. A local historian and friend, Jonathan Wilson, could not have stunned me more if he had suddenly heaved me in the river. We were sitting outside a café on the long estuary promenade in Portimão, a port town at the mouth of the Arade River in the Algarve. He had agreed to let me tap into his considerable knowledge of the area’s history over the past twelve hundred years. Jonathan, a former London barrister, now lives in Silves, the old Arab capital, a few kilometers up the Arade. Soon after arriving in the Algarve, he developed a passion for the town’s tumultuous history and the conflicts that took place there between the Arabs and the Crusaders. The latter helped to free it from the Moors on their way to the Holy Land.
    We were verbally rummaging around the earthquake phenomena when he casually asked whether I’d heard of the submerged city. While translating a centuries-old Portuguese book about the Crusaders’ assault on the Algarve—and on Silves in particular—he’d come across a throw-away comment indicating that in 1755, as the sea had receded from the coast before the impending tsunami, a settlement standing on the seabed was clearly visible. Jonathan knew of no other reference to these remains, and my own subsequent research also drew a blank.It appeared that there had been no local legends about anything being swallowed by the sea.
    I was elated: this supported my fledgling hypothesis that the area must at some stage have developed and supported an earlier civilization.
    Having mulled it over for a few days and made further inquiries, it became obvious that this submerged settlement must have been of considerable age. If it had suddenly sunk, with the possible exception of a few grander stone edifices, the building style of ordinary dwellings in the Algarve over the past two thousand years would not have survived under the sea for long. Walls were made from clay, mud and bits of pottery debris, and small stones mixed with lime and left to dry, compressed tightly between planks of wood. This dried to a hard consistency and, if the outside was regularly coated and the roof maintained, withstood the elements well. Permanently submerged under the sea and washed twice a day by the strong Atlantic tides, however, it would have deteriorated quickly.
    If, on the other hand, the settlement had been engulfed over time by slowly rising sea levels, the pounding of the tides would have wreaked havoc. My inquiries, however, produced no local records, legends, or folk memory of a sunken settlement. It all indicated that the buildings must have been of a great age, disappearing below the water before living or recorded memory, and probably built from large blocks of hewn stone in a similar manner to that used by ancient civilizations. For it also to have withstood the effects of the 1755 quake, and perhaps others before it, indicated that the structure was quite possibly in the very ancient polygonal cyclopean style, with large, irregular, different-sized blocks carefully cut and fitted snugly together. This is recognized to be a highly effective way to absorb serious tremors. The buildings of the Maya people in South America are just some of the ancient examples. Others can be found in Egypt, Malta, Iraq, even Morocco.
    The only other