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99 the Deluge. Contrary to the popular notion that the watery calamity resulted from an excessive rainfall, the biblical and earlier Mesopotamian texts make clear that—though rains fol- lowed as the temperatures dropped—the catastrophe began with a rush of wind from the south followed by a watery wave from the south. The source of the waters were the "fountains of the Great Deep"—a term that referred to the great and deep oceanic waters beyond Africa. The avalanche of water "submerged the dams of the dry land"—the coastal continental barriers. As the ice over Antarctica slipped into the Indian Ocean it caused an immense tidal wave. Gushing forth across the ocean northward, the wall of water over- whelmed the continental coastline of Arabia and rushed up the Persian Gulf. Then it reached the funnel of The Land Between the Rivers, engulfing all the lands (Fig. 26.) How global was the Deluge? Was every place upon our globe actually inundated? The human recollection is almost global and suggests an almost-global event. What is certain is that with the eventual melting of the slipped ice, and the rise in global temperatures following the initial cooling, the Ice Age that had held Earth in its grip for the previous 62,000 years abruptly ended. It happened about 13,000 years ago. One result of the catastrophe was that Antarctica, for the first time in so many thousands of years, was freed of its ice cover. Its true continental features—coasts, bays, even riv- ers—were available to be seen, if there had been anyone at the time to see them. Amazingly (but not to our surprise), such a "someone" was there! We know that because of the existence of maps showing an ice-free Antarctica. For the record let it be recalled that in modern times the very existence of a continent at the south pole was not known until A.D. 1820, when British and Russian sailors discovered it. It was then, as it is now, covered by a massive layer of ice; we know the continent's true shape (under the ice cap) by means of radar and other sophisticated instruments used by many teams during the 1958 International Geophysical Year. Yet Antarctica appears on mapas mundi (World Maps) from the fifteenth and even fourteenth centuries A.D—hun- dreds of years before the discovery of Antarctica—and the The Deluge