THREE: MALTA
Plato depicted Atlantis as a well-guarded island city, rich in temples. Which is also an excellent description of Malta. Valletta, its capital, built in the 16th century out of local yellow limestone that resembles unbaked pastry crust, was designed as a fortress by the Knights of St John, a stillextant military order loyal to the Vatican and often cited by conspiracy theorists as geopolitical puppet masters.
While their secret society is more akin to the Shriners than the Bilderberg Group these days, Malta is perhaps the most devoutly Catholic country in the world, the sort of place where no one raises an eyebrow at the huge Caravaggio masterpieces hanging in the oratory at St John’s Co-Cathedral and parents complain about the skyrocketing costs of made-tomeasure first communion attire.
Malta is not well known to Americans, which is a shame, because its waters are crystal clear and the food, heavily influenced by proximity to Italy, is excellent. Over a plate of fenkata, the country’s ubiquitous rabbit stew, my local guide, Anton Mifsud (a paediatrician, amateur historian and all-around Malta booster), explained his theory that Plato’s Pillars of Hercules were actually in the centre of the Mediterranean. “If there was an Atlantis, then Malta has to be it,” he told me excitedly.
Mr Mifsud had extraordinary energy for someone who spends 12-hour days battling Malta’s horrendous traffic to make house calls to screaming toddlers. On his day off, he drove me to the ancient temples of Mnajdra and Hagar Qim, the oldest free-standing structures in the Mediterranean — they predate the Great Pyramids of Egypt by a thousand years, and Plato’s Timaeus by almost three millenniums — and the likeliest (or perhaps least improbable) candidates for Plato’s Atlantean temples. The temples were stunning, clusters of oval rooms built from giant slabs of cut yellow limestone and set on a desolate bluff overlooking the water. Each looked as if Stonehenge had undergone cell division and then developed jaundice. At sunrise on the solstice, Mr Mifsud told me as we stood in a doorway at Mnajdra, “the sunlight shoots down here onto the altar!”
Later, studying the exhibits at the excellent National Museum of Archaeology, housed in a former Knights of St John auberge in Valletta, I learned that whatever culture constructed these monoliths had vanished suddenly around 2500BC. Mr Mifsud believed that accounts of this collapse, probably the result of a natural disaster, had been passed down through the generations until Plato recorded them in the story of Atlantis.
On my last afternoon in Malta, Mr Mifsud drove me to Clapham Junction, also known as Misrah Ghar il-Kbir, a limestone field crosshatched with the island’s most famous unexplained phenomenon, its stone cart ruts. The explanation I’d seen at the archaeological museum, that the ruts had been worn into the soft rock by hauling sleds, was more banal than other theories: They were the large grid of irrigation canals that Plato wrote about. Or they are the work of extraterrestrials, as Erich von Däniken suggests in his crypto-archaeology classic Chariots of the Gods.
I did see one sign of intelligent life while bending down to examine the grooves, however. A family of clever rabbits, avoiding a certain fate as fenkata, was making its burrow beneath the limestone maze.