I happened to see this new release in paper back tonight and picked it up. I have not read it yet, but I do find it curious that books seem to be born when many people are curious about the subject, although most times the books are fiction. It seems this book was first released in 1999 and did not do much, now it is #1 bestseller. I will write down the first paragraph in the 6 sections of the book. You can take it from there to see if it sparks your interest. Perhaps some of you have read it? Leslee
IMPACT
7120 BC
**What is now Hudson Bay, Canada----**sketch of Comet Impact on Hudson Bay. Pg. 1
The intruders came from beyond. A nebulous celestial body as old as the universe itself, it had been born in a vast cloud of ice, rocks, dust and gas when the outer planets of the solar system were formed 4.6 billion years ago. Soon after its scattered particles had frozen into a solid mass one mile in diameter, it began streaking silently through the emptiness of space on an orbital voyage that carried it around a distant sun and halfway to the nearest stars again, a journey lasting many thousand years.
Ghost Ship
September 30, 1858
**Stefansson Bay, Antarctica--**Sketch of a Ship--Icebound British Indiaman Pg. 11
Roxanna Mender knew that is she stopped walking she would die. She was near complete exhaustion and moving on willpower alone. The Temperature was well below zero, but it was a windchill from the frigid teeth of the ice gate that was biting through her skin. The deadly drowsiness gently slipping over her was slowly draining her will to live. She moved forward, one foot groping ahead of the other, stumbling when caught off balance by a sudden break in the ice field. Her breath came in rapid, rasping panting of a mountain climber struggling toward a peak in the Himalayas without oxygen equipment.
Her vision was nonexistent as the icy windblown particles swirled in front of her face, protected by a thick woolen scarf wrapped inside her fur-lined parka. Though she only squinted between layers of the scarf every other minute, her eyes were sore and reddened from the onslaught of the tiny granules. Frustration gripped Roxanna when she looked u and saw the dazzling blue sky and brilliant sun above the storm. Blinding ice storms under clear skies were not uncommon phenomenon in Antarctica.
Part One
**As Close To Hell As You Can Get---**Sketch of Amenes Alphabetic and Numeric Inscriptions Pg. 31
March 22, 2001
Pandora, Colorado
THE WANING STARS IN the early-morning sky blazed like a theater marquee when seen from 9000 feet above sea level. But it was the moon that had a ghostly look about it as Luis Marquex stepped from his little wooden house. It wore a curios orange halo that he had never seen before. He peered at the odd phenomenon for a few moments before walking across the yard to his 1973 Chevy Cheyenne 4x4 pickup truck.
Part Two
**In The Footprints of the Ancients---**Sketch of South Polar Region pg. 109
March 27, 2001
Okuma Bay, Antarctica
CAPTAIN DANIEL GILLESPIE STOOD on the huge glass-enclosed bridge of the Polar Storm and stared through the tinted-lens binoculars at the ice that was building around the eight-thousand-ton research icebreakers hull. Lean as an aspen tree plotting a course in his mind for the easiest passage to take the Polar Storm. The autumn ice had formed early in the Ross Sea. In some places, it was already two feet thick, with ridges rising to three.
The ship trembles under his feet as its great bulbous bow rammed the ice and them heaved up and over the white surface. Then the weight of the forward part of the ship crushed the pack into piano-sized portions that tore at the paint in the hull as they groaned and scraped against the steel plates until they were chopped to small chunks by the ships huge twelve-foot propellers and were left bobbing in the ships wake. The process was repeated until they reached a part of the sea a few miles off the continent where the ice pack had been slow to thicken.
Part Three
**Twenty-First-Century-Ark---**Sketch of Flight Path of Pitts Skycar (Wolfs Shipyard in Chili>>>Santa Cruz, Argentina) pg. 230
April 4, 2001
Buenos Aires, Argentina
PREMIER OPERA HOUSES THROUGHOUT the world are judged by singers and musicians for their acoustics, the quality f sound that carries from the stage to the box seats and then o the gallery far up in the stratosphere. To the opera lovers who buy the tickets they are ranked and admired more for their elegance and flamboyance. Some are noted for the baroqueness. But none can hold a candle to the unmatched grandiloquence of the Teatro Colon on the Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires.
Part Four
**City Under The Ice---**Sketch of Route of the Snowcruiser (Okuma Bay>>>Little America located on edges of Ross Ice Shelf & Ross Sea) Pg. 364
April 10, 2001
Buenos Aires, Argentina
LIMOUSINES FORMED A LONG arc on the circular drive of the British Embassy in Buenos Aires. Ladies in ball gowns and men in tuxedos exited in long black cars and entered through high bronze doors into the foyer, where they were met by the British ambassador to Argentina, a tall, severe woman with white hair cut in a pageboy. The social event of the year was a celebration in the honor of Prince Charles's elevation to the throne, finally abdicated by his mother, Queen Elizabeth.
Part Five
**Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down---**pg. 512
April 15, 2001
Washington, D. C,
When the military passenger aircraft sent to bring Pitt, Giordino, and the relics from Okuma Bay to Washington landed at the airport in Veracruz, Mexico, Pitt questioned the pilot and was told that Admiral Sandecker had sent a NUMA executive jet to carry them the rest of the way. Sweating in the heat and humidity, they hauled the bronze box to the turquoise aircraft with the big NUMA letters on the fuselage that was parked a good hundred yards away.
Part Six
**Final Blessing---**526
September 10, 2002
Washington, D. C.
THE DAY WAS TYPICAL for the nation's capitol, the climate hot and sultry. The leaves hung green no their branches and the cool breeze of coming fall was nowhere to be felt. Crowds of people were standing in long lines to view the recently opened wing of the Natural History Museum, which housed more then 3000 Amenes treasures and articles that had been recovered from St. Paul island, the Ulrich Wolf, and the opening excavation of the lost city in the Antarctic.
POSTSCRIPT: Pg. 531
In 1960, archaeologists discovered the ancient bones of a woman on Santa Rosa, one of the channel islands off California. After she lay in the basement of the Santa Barbara Museum for 40 years, a team of scientists conducted sophisticated DNA and radiocarbon tests on the skeletal remains. Results revealed the bones to be as old as thirteen thousand years, making the lady the oldest known human skeleton found in North America.
During the era in which she lived, the lady would have seen glaciers the size of Australia, wooly mammoths, and saber-tooth-tigers, and she could have walked from island to island since the sea level was 360 feet lower than it is today. Her discovery challenged traditional theories that the first people to live in the Americas came across the land bridge over what is now the Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska.
The Spirit Caveman, as another human relic is called, lived more than 9,400 years ago n Western Nevada and has a cranial profile that suggests his origins are Japanese or East Asian. The Wizard's Beach Man, whose skull was also found in Nevada, closely resembles both the Norse and the Polynesians. Other skulls found in Nebraska and Minnesota, all at least eight-thousand years old, resemble both European and South Asia.
It is known that people traveled by boats from southern Asia to Australia more than forty thousand years ago, so sea travel is hardly an invention of civilizations around the Mediterranean. The seas beckoned ancient mariners, who explored and discovered far more of the world that they were given credit for, and whose history is only now being written.
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