Flood Legends (18 page)

The boy stood proudly in the chariot, waved good-bye to his mourning father, thanked him for the gift, and was off. The horses broke into a gallop, their hooves rumbling on the ground, their flames glazing the clouds in their path. The chariot rose ever higher, passing East Wind and ascending into the air. The horses could tell a difference in the weight of the car and took advantage of the lighter load. Just as a ship on the ocean will keel without its usual ballast, the chariot bounded along as an unstable toy in the sky. To the horses, it was as if there was no pilot at all steering the vehicle. The horses, feeling free to frolic and romp at will, broke into the unknown territories of the sky. Apollo had always kept them on the narrow course set for them, but today, there was no restraint.

The young man, panicking, dropped the reins. His resolve had fled — as he would have liked to do — but he could not escape. He knew he was about to die. Looking back, he could see the space in which he had already traveled, but looking ahead, he could see the much longer distance still left. On either side of him were the vicious creatures of the celestial realm. The scorpion prepared to strike, as all scorpions would do. This one, unlike its smaller cousins on earth, blotted out the entire sky. Phaëthon quaked in terror at the sight of the deadly creature and the poison that glistened on the tip of its tail. He gave up all hope of controlling the vehicle, and the reins — briefly regained — fell from his hands.

With this complete freedom, the horses reared up, and, with no boundaries, ran headlong into newer regions of the sky. They had always desired to explore the lands beyond their road, but Apollo had always kept them in check. Now, free, they bolted from the track. The Moon watched, aghast, as her brother's chariot burned up the warriors of rain — the clouds — and the earth caught fire. She watched in horror as mountaintops ignited, and, with mounting dismay, the rocks began to explode. Trees ignited, fields of grain were reduced to ash and dust, and entire cities were engulfed. We cannot imagine what it would look like for an entire nation to ignite, flash, and be gone. It was as if the world had become the hearth of a great fireplace. Woodlands burned, mountains were the great logs, and the springs of earth dried up. Athos, Taurus, Tmolus, Oeta, Ida, Helicon, Haemus, and Aetna: all were gone, burnt up and charred. The mountain snows of Rhodope simmered away, even as the sacred Cithaeron melted into fire. The Scythian ranges — far removed from the center of the calamity — blazed and smoldered. The Caucasus were covered with a thick black cloud. The Alps, jagged and white, were destroyed, and even mighty Olympus burned.

Phaëthon looked at this carnage, his lungs burning with the smoke and heat, in dismay. The car had become a furnace, its bottom radiating heat, charring the soles of his feet, as sparks whirled about him. Heaven had turned into hell. The boy's eyes fried in his head, and his eyelids were seared together, just as a wound is cauterized. It is said that the Ethiopians were burnt up by the intense heat. The Libyan desert, it is said, used to be a tropical paradise before this, and now her rivers and lakes were all boiled away. The nymphs of Libya's pools and springs tore out their hair in mourning. The great Corinthian spring dried up, and all of earth's mighty rivers withdrew in their beds. Poseidon himself rose up to defend his kingdom, but each time he rose to the surface, he had to turn away because of the searing heat.

Jove, hearing the complaints of the waters and the earth, ascended to his throne (it is here that he covers the earth with clouds, pours out rain, and sends lightning bolts). He grasped a bolt of lightning and, like a javelin, hurled it upon chariot and charioteer. The terrified horses scattered, even as the chariot itself tilted, its wheels and axles broken, and Phaëthon, like a burning torch, was sent flying through the air, plummeting toward earth, leaving a trail of smoke and flame behind him. As a comet falls from the heavens, so the boy fell, landing, at length, in the river Eridanus. The river graciously took the broken body and bathed the burnt face. The river nymphs performed the interment and carved an epitaph upon a stone. The epitaph reads:

In This Place Lies Phaëthon,

Who Rose in His Father's Chariot

With a Daring beyond His Strength and Wisdom

— And He Fell Far.

Apollo, weeping and grief-stricken, spent an entire day in mourning. For one single day, he never appeared. Clymene, however, wandered through this horrible landscape, seeking out her son's body. Eventually, she reached the river in Italy — the Eridanus — and wept when she found the tomb. His sisters joined her, weeping bitterly and singing dirge songs.
¹

The story continues on from here. We eventually find the sisters rooted in place, as they have transformed into trees. Their brother, Cygnus, wails so bitterly that his wailing turns him into a new creature entirely: the swan. Apollo eventually returns to his job, and his appearance restores to earth the life that was destroyed during the calamity.

Endnotes

Appendix D

Flood Geology

Recently there has been a strong current of geological study that flows toward supporting the idea of a global Deluge. Spearheaded by such organizations as Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and other similar groups, the movement attempts to explain modern geology through the lens of the global Flood. However, because the scope of this book is more focused on the literature aspect of the Deluge, and since there is already a vast amount of work on the subject of flood geology, I shall keep this section brief. The argument is as follows.

During floods — local
and
global — there is usually a large quantity of silt and sediment that gets stirred about in the churning waters. Anyone who has ever been through a severe flood can attest to this. Sediment typically sorts itself into various layers as it settles, so that the silt deposits at the bottom of a flood are, more or less, striated.
¹
Over time, these deposits harden and become what is known as
sedimentary rock
. What most flood geologists assert is that, had there been a global Flood, the earth would be composed of layer upon layer of rock, which had formed by the sediment left behind during the Flood. Since this is precisely what we find in geology, the argument put forth
in support of
a global Flood is quite logical. These institutes also believe that the Deluge would result in the various layers of fossils found throughout the world.

A fossil is formed when a creature is rapidly buried under wet mud and other dirt. We have already discussed that wet sediment turns to rock over time. So do animals. As the creature decomposes, the skeleton is replaced by minerals, leaving behind bone-shaped rocks (or, if the creature is non-skeletal, like a fern, body-shaped impressions), known as fossils. The argument these institutes put forth is that the presence of fossils all over the earth indicates that, at some point, most — if not all — of the earth was under water. The presence of fossils on mountaintops is one compelling piece of evidence for their theory.

However, since the publication of Charles Lyell's geological theories in the mid-1800s, Louis Agassiz's discovery of the Ice Age in 1836, and the introduction of
uniformitarian geology
, modern geologists prefer to think that the processes responsible for these layers of fossils were long, slow processes, taking millions upon millions of years. One thing in particular that they noticed was that the earth — as seen when exposed in canyons — is layered. Since we cannot physically see the earth layering today, they believed that it must happen slowly, perhaps hundreds of years
per layer
. Since the earth's crust is visibly made up of hundreds of layers, and if each layer takes hundreds of years to form, then the earth must be extremely old. (At the time, the general consensus was that the earth was around 100,000 years old. This has since been expanded to approximately four billion years old.) This is, in fact, the very basis for uniformitarian geology: geological processes today have always happened at the same rate. What this interpretation does ignore, however, are catastrophic events, such as the global Deluge.

While flood geologists have compelling evidence to counteract this "uniformitarian ideology," this is still a widely debated and controversial topic among the scientific community. See the "Further Reading" section for more information.

Endnotes

Further reading

Bright, Michael.
There Are Giants in the Sea: Monsters and Mysteries of the Depths Explored
. London: Robson Books, 1989.

Buck, William.
Ramayana
. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976.

Dundes, Alan, editor.
Sacred Narratives, Readings in the Theory of Myth.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.

Ellis, Richard.
Monsters of the Sea.
New York: Lyons Press, 2001.

Feldmann, Susan, editor
. African Myths and Tales.
New York: Dell, 1963.

Gaster, Theodor H.
Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament: A Comparative Study with Chapters from Sir James Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament.
New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Hancock, Graham.
Fingerprints of the Gods
. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995.

Hancock, Graham.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.

Hancock, Graham, and Robert Bauval.
The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind
. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996.

Homer.
The Iliad.

Homer.
The Odyssey
.

Maggi, María Elena.
The Great Canoe: A Kariña Legend.
Translated by Elisa Amado. Toronto, ON: Groundwood/Douglas & McIntyre, 2001.

The
Mahābhārata.

McDowell, Josh.
A Ready Defense.
Nashville, TN: T. Nelson, 1993.

Morris, Henry.
The Beginning of the World: A Scientific Study of Genesis 1–11.
Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1991.

Oard, Mike.
Flood by Design
. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2008.

Ovid.
Metamorphoses
.

Ryan, William, and Walter Pitman.
Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event That Changed History.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Stroup, Herbert.
Like a Great River: An Introduction to Hinduism.
New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

van Nooten, Barend A.
The Mahābhārata
. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.

Woodmorappe, John.
The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods.
El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1999.

Woodmorappe, John.
Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study
. Santee, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1996.

Woodmorappe, John.
Studies in Flood Geology
. El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1999.