The Folklore of Discworld

body of warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal of mud which the island created as it settled down. [Plato, Timaeus , transl. R. G. Bury]
    Plato does not mention any door or gate, for the large-scale destruction he describes must have involved some great natural disaster – an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a tsunami – and was the direct work of the gods. There are other, more recent traditions along the sea-coasts of western Europe telling of lands and towns submerged by the foolish or treacherous act of someone who opened a sluice gate. In Wales, for instance, they talk of the lost land of Cantre’r Gwaelod under the waters of Cardigan Bay – forty miles long by twenty wide it was, with sixteen fine towns on it. There was a great dyke protecting it from the sea, but Seithenhin, the keeper of the dyke, was a drunkard, and one night forgot to close the sluice gates. The way others tell it, Seithenhin was lord of the land, and it was his daughter who let in the sea, curses upon her! Or it was God’s doing, because Seithenhin was a proud and presumptuous ruler. Whatever, you can still see the pebble ridge which was once the protecting wall; you can still hear bells ringing underwater.
    Then there is the Breton tale of the drowning of Kêr-Is. This, they say, was a magnificent city built on land reclaimed from the sea in what is now the Bay of Douarnenez in Brittany, and ruled by a King Grallon or Gradlon. He himself was a virtuous man, but his courtiersand subjects were drunken and debauched, though a holy man warned them that there would be a reckoning:
    After happiness, grief!
    Anyone who eats the meat of the fish,
    By the fish he will be eaten.
    And anyone who swallows will be swallowed.
    And anyone who drinks wine and mead
    Will drink water like a fish;
    And anyone who doesn’t know will learn.
    [ Livaden Geris , transl. James Doan]
    Yet the king let the revellers go on feasting, while he took himself quietly to bed. Now, the king had a daughter named Dahut, and she had a lover (some say he was the Devil himself, but they always say that sort of thing) who coaxed her into stealing the golden key which her father wore on a chain round his neck as he slept. This was the key to the gate in the dykes protecting the city from the sea. They were opened, and the ocean swept in and submerged everything; only Grallon himself escaped, thanks to the saint’s warning and to his fine horse. Dahut tried to mount behind him, but the saint miraculously appeared and struck her with his crozier, so that she fell into the raging waters and drowned. As for the sunken city, its buildings can sometimes be glimpsed when the sea is calm and clear, and its bells are heard ringing. Legend loves the sound of sunken bells.
    In Cornwall, tradition tells of the lost land of Lyonesse, which once stretched all the way from Land’s End to the Scilly Isles, though no one now remembers just why it sank. The strange rocky outcrop of St Michael’s Mount overlooks Mount’s Bay, where the lost land once began and where one can still, at very low tides, find fossilized bits of wood from the trees which once grew there. In the Cornish language, four hundred years ago, the Mount was called Carrack Looz en Cooz, ‘The Grey Rock in the Wood’. The drowned forest was important, once. Maybe it was a Holy Wood.
    Such legends have always been particularly popular among fishermen. They are the ones who, peering down through unusually clear water, sometimes glimpse curious structures that look more like streets and ruined buildings than simple rocks; they are the ones whose nets sometimes snag on underwater obstacles where, according to their charts, no obstacles should be. Oddly, the fishermen of Ankh-Morpork do not have such legends. So it came as a total surprise to Solid Jackson and his son, out fishing by night in the middle of the Circle Sea, when a sound came from below the surface, the sound of a bell or gong slowly swinging … followed by a weathercock … a tower … a surge of huge, weed-encrusted buildings … a whole malevolent-looking city on an oozy, weedy island rising up out of the sea. They had discovered the Lost Island and City of Leshp.
    They did not like it. In fact, it gave them the willies. Partly, this was because of the smell of