Just consider, he continued, more calmly, "the mistake made by those believers in Atlantis in explaining the cataclysm in which they thought the wonderful island had sunk completely beneath the waves. They all believed it had been engulfed. As a matter of fact there was no immersion, there was an emersion. New lands have emerged from the waves of the Atlantic. The desert has replaced the sea. The sebkhas, the salt-marshes, the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the solitary vestiges of moving waves over which the fleets once sailed to conquer Attica. Sand swallows up civilisation better than water.