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331 and he of the evil wind [Erra/Nergal] together performed their evil. The two made the gods flee, made them flee the scorching. The target, from which they made the gods guarding it flee, was the Place of Launching: they caused to wither; Its face they made fade away, its place they made desolate. Thus was the Spaceport, the prize over which so many Wars of the Gods had been fought, obliterated: the Mount within which the controlling equipment was placed was smashed; the launch _plat- forms were made to fade off the face of the Earth; and the plain whose hard soil the shuttlecraft had used as runways was obliter- ated, with not even a tree left standing. The great place was never to be seen again ... but the scar made in the face of the Earth that awesome day can still be seen—to this very day! It is a vast scar, so vast that its features can be seen only from the skies—revealed only in recent years as satel- lites began to photograph the Earth (Fig. 105). It is a scar for which no scientist has hitherto offered an explanation. Stretching north of this enigmatic feature in the face of the Sinai peninsula is the flat central plain of the Sinai—a remnant of a lake from an earlier geological era; its flat, hard soil is ideal for the landing of shuttlecraft—the very same reason which made the Mo- jave Desert in California and the Edwards Air Force Base there ideal for the landing of America's space shuttles. As one stands in this great plain in the Sinai peninsula—its hard, flat soil having served for tank battles in recent history as it did the shuttlecraft in antiquity—one can see in the distance the mountains that surround the plain and give it its oval shape. The limestone mountains loom white on the horizon; but where the great central plain adjoins the immense scar in the Sinai, the hue of the plain—black—stands out in sharp contrast to the surrounding whiteness (Fig. 106). Black is not a natural hue in the Sinai peninsula, where the whiteness of the limestone and the redness of the sandstone com- bine to dazzle the eye with hues ranging from bright yellow to light The Nuclear Holocaust That which was raised towards Anu to launch