Christian hypocrisy:

Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Jesus on resistance, Matthew 5:39

The Case of S T Nikos

S Tino Nikos

One autumn a few years ago I had cause to take a short holiday in Greece. Most of the summer I had been in the reading rooms of various London museums and, though it had been a fine summer, I emerged in October white and exhausted. Friends recommended I take a break so I booked eight days on the Greek mainland, touring the antiquities of that splendid ancient civilisation.

Admiring the lion gate at Mycenae, a strange looking gaunt and angular man, tall but with a pronounced stoop or protrusion of the head forward on his shoulders, who had been standing nearby looking intently at the lions, turned to me and said:

"Peace is in the grave."

I smiled, but looked puzzled, and he continued in a friendly manner, somewhat countered by his failure to smile.

"Sorry", said he. "It made me think of Shelley, Prometheus Unbound."

"Peace is in the grave.
The grave hides all things beautiful and good:
I am a God and cannot find it there."

It was a strange introduction, especially for anyone as prosaic as I am, but I remember saying something on the lines of: "The Greeks had gods indeed but no doubt the human builders of these ancient edifices have found their peace."

"I expect so, he rejoined, "but it is to gods that I refer."

Intrigued by this I asked him what he meant and he explained that he had murmured the quotation from Shelley because he had reason to believe that gods had existed on earth and in truth had failed to find peace in their graves.

I have the failing of making quick and not always considered judgements, and on this occasion, regrettably, I immediately pooh-poohed him, saying the ideas of von Daniken�which I took him to mean�were thoroughly discredited. He scowled and gave me a piercing sidelong look, but did not pursue my disbelief, simply contenting himself with some musings on the remarkable things that ancient people had discovered.

This was my introduction to S T ("Please. Call me Tino") Nikos, a man who proved to be a dour but agreeable and certainly erudite companion, and who introduced me to the remarkable ideas in this notebook.

Nikos was doing much the same as I was, looking around the ancient monuments, but he seemed to have an expert�s knowledge of them all. I rather got the impression that he was a professional historian or archaeologist but he claimed he was a palaeontologist.

He was, he said, born a Greek, although not in Greece, and his parents had returned to Greece after the War so that their son could be brought up as a Greek. Unfortunately, although Nikos had proved an outstanding pupil, the family had to leave Greece under the junta and moved to the United States. There Nikos completed his education, taking a first degree and a higher degree and settling to an academic life based in California, but with frequent field trips abroad. So it was that I met him on a working holiday visit to his homeland.

Curiously there was a minor UFO flap in Greece at the time. Several glowing lights had been reported mainly of a red colour. A glowing, pulsating object had apparently landed in a lightly wooded dell on a mountainside and some dead sheep had been found. Subsequently several peasants claimed they had met the Great God Pan at crossroads and bridges, at or near the lonely site of the UFO landing, but the journalists put it all down to retsina.

I was surprised to find that the dour academic Nikos took a keen interest in these reports which he, of course, could read and understand in the newspapers, but I could not. He would translate them for me and ask my views. I replied that there were bound to be aerial phenomena which were rare and of which we knew little. Some of them might be associated with faulting or stresses in the rocks of the earth. Greece was at the boundary of the European plate and the African plate moving north, and was therefore subject to intense geoplogical stress as the two huge landmasses ground together. Like the piezo-electric effect in crystals the energy of the collision could emerge as electrical or even light energy causing the aerial lights. Though Nikos did not refute the idea, he seemed less than impressed.

Nikos was certainly odd in many ways. A remarkable thing no one could fail to notice about him were his hands. Even in the heat of Greece at the end of the summer his handshake was cold and deathly. Another of our group, who happened to shake him by the hand, unkindly commented to me afterwards that he thought he must be a vampire. His bony angularity and sallow olive coloured cheeks added to the impression, it must be said, but through his unsmiling demeanour he always seemed well disposed towards people he considered intelligent.

I discovered later, in a letter, that Nikos suffered from the rare disease poikilothermism�he was cold blooded! Not fully so, of course, but his body temperature was only partially regulated internally. In the hottest weather, when everyone else wilted, Nikos was at his best, bouncing with energy. But even at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) he was beginning to lose his zest and in the cold he could hardly move from his room. When he did venture forth in cold weather he sometimes passed out.

One night we had a long evening together in the bar of the hotel. Nikos drank very little but would slowly sip a couple of glasses of wine whilst eating two or three plates of olives. I began to realise what his interests were and how passionately he held them. I had begun by asking him a few basic questions about palaeontology, and I had mused about the mystery of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

"That, Miss Griffiths, is no mystery. Or, I should say it is no mystery to me. But the late Cretaceous extinction pales before the mass extinction we are in the midst of today. The processes of evolution are being altered more drastically now than since the time of the dinosaurs�possibly more even than since the emergence of life’s diversity. In the future, our descendants or another intelligent species will wonder about the mass extinctions at the end of the Tertiary. Would they realize that the extinctions had been caused by just one species, either deliberately or through carelessness? Our record proves that we are mass killers. Perhaps the dinosaurs were also.

"Mankind began killing other species a long time ago�and not just for food. About two million years ago mammalian evolution went into overdrive and the number of genera of mammals trebled in the next million years. The diversity of mammals peaked about one million years ago. Since then it has continuously declined. At the same time mankind became increasingly dominant. Mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses had survived several periods of intense cold in previous cold phases of the present ice age, but only at the end of the last one did they go extinct. The simple explanation that they were hunted down by man. Most mammals other than domestic animals will be extinct within decades.

"Compare it with the Cretaceous. It took no more than two million years�maybe much less�to exterminate all the dinosaurs.

"The Miocene period of about 20 million years ago was the age of the apes. There might have been more apes than monkeys. Today only five species, including man, remain. Only man is populous. He is responsible for the disasters that have overtaken the other modern apes. He has exterminated any other primates to display signs of intelligence. In suppressing the intellectual competition, we have confined the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gibbon to narrow areas, and, within our lifetime, they could be extinct. We will have murdered our intellectual rivals.

"The prehistory of mankind has many examples of apparently unnecessary killing. Were men even in those early days as insensitive to other species as they appear to be today? At the foot of a limestone cliff at Solutre, France, was a 50 feet deep mound of horse bones, killed by prehistoric man. Elsewhere, only seven of 3000 bones, mainly reindeer, had cut marks on them caused by butchery. Evidently these prehistoric men had not killed the animals primarily for meat. Maybe they just killed for fun! Maybe they got pleasure from the smell of death. The slaughter continued for 25,000 years. The same happened in North America. Mass carnage was widespread and effective.

"Civilisation does not seem to alter us. Quite the opposite! Humans have savagely hunted down the animals with which they share the globe since they discovered technical ways of compensating for their puny bodies. In historic times humans have exterminated many varieties of animals and birds, though some of them, like the bison, existed in vast numbers. The rate of destruction increased as technology improved. From the year 1600 AD he became able, through advancing technology, to hunt animals to extinction in just a few years. The rate of extinction of species of mammals and birds (not counting lesser creatures and plants) increased from one every four years from 1600 to 1900 AD to one every year in most of the present century. By 1974 Science Magazine considered that 1000 species of all kinds were becoming extinct every year. If the tropical forests are substantially cleared we shall have lost one million species, possibly many more. Except for the barest handful, they will have been eliminated by the hand of man.

"This compares with estimates of one species every 1000 years during the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, though the latter must be a serious underestimation because very many species existed�and died�without leaving any remains. Millions of bugs must have died without trace�and plants. And, for those we do know about, there must also be some degree of averaging over a long time period of much more sudden extinction events because of the generally poor resolution of time in old rocks. When the time resolution is better because deposition was copious, we find that extinction in the Cretaceous could occur extraordinarily rapidly�for some species at least. For millions of years there were no significant changes in the deposits of foraminifera species up to the Cretaceous boundary layer, but they disappeared in about 200 years. Mankind’s ability to kill off marine and aquatic species in bulk has developed since the start of the industrial revolution about 200 years ago.

"A large predator will not hunt mice. The reward is not worth the effort. Nor would men be expected to bother with small prey. The pattern of extinctions of mammals in the last million years shows that so far 50 per cent of large mammals have gone but only two per cent of small mammals have. This too is similar to the extinctions at the time of the dinosaurs. But if mankind did not hunt them, why have some small mammals died out? The answer is the knock-on effect. Over hunting, which caused the extinction of the larger herbivores, led also to the loss of open ground. The lack of the herds allowed the bush to grow in to the grasslands again. Since the smaller herbivores, which lacked the size to keep the forests at bay, were also disadvantaged by the spreading bush, they also lost ground and became extinct. Thus although mankind did not hunt the smaller animals his over hunting of the larger ones indirectly caused the downfall of some of the others.

"But some opportunistic small species like the sparrow and the rat make a virtue of the environment created by man. The same thing happened in the Cretaceous when birds and some inconspicuous rat-like creatures thrived in the disruption of the environment created by the Anthroposaurs, and then survived their demise to colonise the world�the birds and our ancestors, the primitive mammals."

Nikos was clearly incensed that mankind seemed to be antagonistic to the rest of the earth. He was also eager to show the parallels which existed between the Cretaceous extinctions and the ones which have occurred latterly at the hand of man. What I did not know at that time was that Nikos was getting involved in campaigns that would cross from the academic into the political.

Before my eight days were over Nikos had to depart, having come to the end of his stay. We separated on good terms and he promised to write, indeed seemed eager to do it, and we began a period of mutual correspondence. Curiously though, he first placed a condition. I had to set up a poste restante. He said he would occasionally be despatching important documents and did not want them to go astray. He therefore refused to send anything of significance to my home address or to work.

Even more mysterious is that in February 1992 I had a postcard from Nikos sent from New England�it was the last I ever received from him! Nikos has apparently disappeared!

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
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