What follows on tactile paper and in print, and through words and pictures, if even perhaps accessed digitally, is a survey of landscape and locations transformed by circumstances, some much disputed, or improbable and entirely unexpected; others, depressingly, almost grimly predictable. As such it ideally serves as a reminder of the mutability of existence but also a clarion call for the urgency of preserving what we hold dear for generations to come.
I read a digital ARC of the upcoming re-release of Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today, and while it was maybe not as consistently fascinating as I had hoped, I must note that this format didn’t include the “beautiful maps” and “stunning colour photography” promised in the publisher’s blurb (there are some black and white photos, but, alas, I read an atlas without maps; perhaps unfair to rate). As for the writing: Recounting the stories of some three dozen or so “vanished and vanishing places”, author Travis Elborough’s approach and tone throughout is rather inconsistent — sometimes professorial, sometimes colloquial — and as each story only lasts a few pages, there’s not a lot of depth here. Again: it feels unfair to rate this without the maps (the original release won Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards), but this book feels more like a jumping off point than the final word; coffee table book, not text book. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Spanning from Xanadu to Timbuctu, Atlas of Vanishing Places is divided into four sections: Ancient Cities (familiar ones like Petra and Alexandria; new to me: the lost cities of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan and Leptos-Magna in Libya); Forgotten Lands (like Chan Chan in Peru and the River Fleet in London); Shrinking Places (the River Danube and the Florida Everglades); and Threatened Worlds (Venice and the Great Barrier Reef). And initially, I thought this was exactly what I hoped it would be: An early entry is about the Hittites — mentioned in the Old Testament and said to have been as powerful as the Assyrians and Babylonians, archeologists wondered how they could have disappeared without leaving behind so much as a shard of pottery — but eventually, ruins were uncovered in the Anatolian region of Turkey that would be identified as Hattusa: the epicentre of the Hittite Empire, which had been settled as far back as the sixth millennium BC. That was a wow to me: the actual rediscovery of a vanished, but once powerful, empire. But some entries are like the “vanished'' city of Shi Cheng in China: founded in the Tang dynasty around 1,300 years ago, the city was intentionally flooded in 1959 in order to create the Xin’anjiang Reservoir and Xin’an river hydroelectric station. Shi Cheng disappeared beneath the newly manmade Qiandao Lake and “for nearly fifty years Shi Cheng was almost entirely forgotten”. It was “rediscovered” by divers in 2001, and now known as “The Atlantis of the East”, Shi Cheng has become a popular scuba diving tourist attraction. Huh. Lost for nearly fifty years. Not a mind-blowing wow to me.
As for the oddly colloquial writing style: In telling the history of Bodie, California — a gold mining ghost town that the state of California curiously maintains in the “state of arrested decay” it had when they took it over in 1962 (instead of preserving it to its “1880s heyday”) — Elborough writes:
Something like 90 per cent of gold rush prospectors are calculated to have been male. Who then can really blame them for wanting to kick back with a Scotch or a beer, play some cards, and seek the embrace of another, or the oblivion of the poppy pipe, after a day of breaking rocks. But almost inevitably in a town inhabited by armed, and not infrequently inebriated transients, some ‘madder and badder’ to tangle with than others, violent crime was a fact of life.
Or when describing the pressures currently experienced by the Chihuahuan Desert on the American-Mexican border — which is in a state of ecological decline due to the diversion of water from the bordering Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo — Elborough writes:
With a name believed to derive from the Nahuatl for ‘dry, sandy place’ (and subsequently bestowed on a local breed of small, hairless pet dogs) you’d expect the Chihuahuan Desert to be quite deserted. This, after all, is North America’s largest desert, and deserts, by and large, are typically arid places where a lack of living things (water, trees, people) tends to be fairly front and centre. But deserts, even the driest and least inviting to animals and plants, contain subtle multitudes. And rather like silences (outside of vacuums) and as John Cage demonstrated with his famous 4'33" piece, they are often noisy with life.
The latter sections — which primarily deal with places that are under threat of vanishing due to current human activity — are mostly depressing. We read about threats to the Great Wall of China (a study completed in 2014 found that three quarters of it was “poorly preserved”; in 2018 a section of the wall in Ningxia was even bulldozed for farmland without consequence); the Yamuna in India is ‘“one of the dirtiest rivers on the planet” (more than twenty drains dispense toxic chemicals and raw sewage directly into the Yamuna in Delhi alone), and at Agra, the filthiness of the Yamuna is causing the Taj Mahal to yellow as the river is failing to absorb air pollutants and other matter; there’s not much new to be learned about glacier loss in Glacier National Park, or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, or increasing flooding in Venice, but Elborough includes them and we are forced to acknowledge the looming consequences of our lifestyles.
On the other hand, I was intrigued (to the point of putting them on my fantasy travel bucket list) by the stories of two at-risk-of-vanishing locations: The first is Skara Brae (or Skerrabra to the Orcadians) in the Orkney Islands (I had no idea that the Orkneys were only 80 km south of Greenland and experience some of the most extreme winds and waves in the world). The site of Skara Brae (which was uncovered by extreme weather in 1850) consists of four circular dry-stone wall dwellings dating from between 3200 and 2000 BC and were, apparently, abandoned quite suddenly; leaving behind an incredible collection of Stone Age artefacts. As the weather becomes ever more extreme, this coastal site could be washed away at any time.
On the other end of the world, I was also intrigued by Tuvalu: “The fourth smallest nation on earth and comprised of six coral atolls and three reef islands flung across several thousand square miles of the South Pacific between Hawaii and Australia”, as far back as 1989 the United Nations declared them one of the “most likely groups to disappear beneath the ocean in the 21st century because of global warming”. Despite its tropical island setting, Tuvalu is the least visited place on Earth (drawing about two thousand tourists a year) and their chief source of income comes from licensing its highly desirable internet domain, .tv, to an American company. Yet, despite many of its residents relocating to New Zealand for fear of the islands disappearing due to rising sea levels, a study by the University of Auckland in 2018 “maintained that the atolls far from shrinking have, overall, gained ground, with rising waves actually depositing more sediment onto their shores”. Like Skara Brae, Tuvalu feels like a visit now or never fantasy destination, and I wanna go!
I do appreciate that Elborough chose sites from all around the world — there are many locales included in this book that I had never heard of before, and that’s what I was hoping for — and I’ll say again that, without the maps included, my experience is incomplete. I will also say: I was never bored (even if I didn’t always appreciate the weirdly joking bits) but I guess I wanted more.
