which people don't remain in place long enough to be on more than a
single frame of the film, making them invisible. So in those days
Pastwatch recorded the weather of the past, erosion patterns,
volcanic eruptions, ice ages, climatic shifts.
All that data was the bedrock on which modern weather prediction and
control rested. Meteorologists could see developing patterns and,
without disrupting the overall pattern, could make tiny changes that
prevented any one area from going completely rainless during a time
of drought, or sunless during a wet growing season. They had taken
the sharp edge off the relentless scythe of climate, and now the
great project was to determine how they might make a more serious
change, to bring a steady pattern of light rain to the desert
regions of the world, to restore the prairies and savannahs that
they once had been. That was the work that Kemal wanted to be a part
of.
Yet he could not bring himself out from the shadow of Troy, the
memory of Schliemann. Even as he studied the climatic shifts
involved with the waxing and waning of the ice ages, his mind
contained fleeting images of lost civilizations, legendary places
that waited for a Schliemann to uncover them.
His project for his degree in meteorology was part of the effort to
determine how the Red Sea might be exploited to develop dependable
rains for either the Sudan or central Arabia; Kemal's immediate
target was to study thedifference between weather patterns during
the last ice age, when the Red Sea had all but disappeared, and the
present, with the Red Sea at its fullest. Back and forth he went
through the coarse old Pastwatch recordings, gathering data on sea
level and on precipitation at selected points inland. The old
TruSite I had been imprecise at best, but good enough for counting
rainstorms.
Time after time Kemal would cycle through the up-and-down
fluctuations of the Red Sea, watching as the average sea level
gradually rose toward the end of the Ice Age. He always stopped, of
course, at the abrupt jump in sea level that marked the rejoining of
the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After that, the Red Sea was
useless for his purposes, since its sea level was tied to that of
the great world ocean.
But the echo of Schliemann inside Kemal's mind made him think: What
a flood that must have been.
What a flood. The Ice Age had locked up so much water in glaciers
and ice sheets that the sea level of the whole world fell. It
eventually reached a low enough point that land bridges arose out of
the sea. In the north Pacific, the Bering land bridge allowed the
ancestors of the Indies to cross on foot into their great empty
homeland. Britain and Flanders were joined. The Dardanelles were
closed and the Black Sea became a salty lake. The Persian Gulf
disappeared and became a great plain cut by the Euphrates. And the
Bab al Mandab, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, became a land
bridge.
But a land bridge is also a dam. As the world climate warmed and the
